World Health Day 2015: Facts and figures to highlight the importance of food safety

Food safety is the focus of this year's World Health Day, to draw attention to the global threat of foodborne illness and disease - a problem largely under-reported and often overlooked. With the food supply chain stretching around the world, the need to strengthen food safety systems within and among countries is essential.

As well as supporting health, food safety has a knock-on effect on a number of industries: it fosters trade and tourism and supports food security and sustainable development. Food safety is also important for education, as sick children miss school. Teaching food safety is essential within the education system, to help the next generation learn basic food safety practices.

Under the slogan "From farm to plate, make food safe", World Health Day – observed on 7 April - highlights the challenges associated with food safety.

"Food production has been industrialised and its trade and distribution have been globalised," says WHO director-general Dr Margaret Chan. "These changes introduce multiple new opportunities for food to become contaminated with harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemicals."

"A local food safety problem can rapidly become an international emergency. Investigation of an outbreak of foodborne disease is vastly more complicated when a single plate or package of food contains ingredients from multiple countries."

Facts about food safety

Unsafe food can contain harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemical substances that can cause more than 200 diseases, from cancers to diarrhoea.

Africa had the highest disease burden for enteric foodborne disease, followed by South-East Asia.

Children under the age of five made up over 40% of those suffering from enteric diseases caused by contaminated food.

Common examples of unsafe food include undercooked foods of animal origin, fruit and vegetables contaminated with faeces and shellfish containing marine biotoxins.

Unsafe food poses major economic risks in a globalised world. The 2011 E.colie outbreak in Germany caused $1.3 billion in losses for farmers and industries and $236 million in emergency aid payments to 22 European Union Member States.

There were an estimated 582 million cases of 22 different foodborne enteric diseases and 351 000 associated deaths, according to research by WHO's Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG.

The enteric disease agents responsible for most deaths were Salmonella Typhi(52,000 deaths), enteropathogenic E. coli (37,000) and norovirus (35,000).

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