I spotted a suspicious, but attributed, statistic in this article, so I clicked through and found, indeed, this assertion:
CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.
Huh. if something happens to 1/6 of the U.S. population per year, you'd figure that, statistically speaking, it's happen to me every several years, right?
I never seem to come down with foodborne diseases. Like, at all. (The report doesn't seem to be including ill effects from, e.g., sugar overdoses.)
Am I particularly resistant, or is a substantial portion of the population doing something horribly wrong? Eating raw chicken, say, or salad? Not washing their hands like their mothers taught them?
(I also question the meaning of "48 million people" getting sick; is it actually 48 million people, or 48 million incidents, with some people being counted repeatedly because they get sick multiple times per year? Since it appears to be a statistical extrapolation, I rather suspect the latter. There's a big difference between "48 million people got sick last year" and "half a million people got sick 96 times each last year".)
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