Food Safety — Fact Sheet
Cited in 2 Likelier entries (2 risks, 0 decisions).
Used in 2 entries
For each citing entry, the verbatim excerpt and Likelier's calculation notes (how the source's number was converted to the lifetime-probability framing) are shown below. Click through to read the full claim ledger.
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- Statistic
Globally, an estimated 600 million foodborne illnesses and 420,000 deaths annually; children under 5 account for 125,000 deaths
“"An estimated 600 million — almost 1 in 10 people in the world — fall ill after eating contaminated food and 420 000 die every year [...] Children under 5 years of age carry 40% of the foodborne disease burden, with 125 000 deaths every year."”
Calculation notes
WHO's 420,000 global deaths / ~8 billion population ≈ 5.3 per 100,000 per year, roughly 6x the US per-capita rate. The gap reflects the concentration of foodborne mortality in low- and middle-income countries with less developed cold chains, sanitation, and clinical care. Used as an order-of-magnitude cross-check and to frame that the US number is an optimistic baseline relative to the global picture.
Independence note: WHO's Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG) estimates are methodologically adjacent to the Scallan approach and share some input data — treat as related-but-not-identical rather than fully independent.
Source date: 2024-05-30 · Accessed: 2026-04-11
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- Statistic
~600 million foodborne illnesses and 420,000 deaths globally per year; children under 5 account for 40% of the burden and 125,000 of those deaths
“"An estimated 600 million – almost 1 in 10 people in the world – fall ill after eating contaminated food and 420 000 die every year [...] Children under 5 years of age carry 40% of the foodborne disease burden, with 125 000 deaths every year."”
Calculation notes
420,000 global deaths / 8,000,000,000 people ≈ 5.25e-5 per year. Compounded over 60 adult years: 1 − (1 − 5.25e-5)^60 ≈ 3.15e-3, or ~1 in 320 global adult lifetime. The 125,000 under-5 deaths out of 420,000 (~30%) is the single most load-bearing heterogeneity in the whole estimate — children 0-4 are less than 10% of the global population but carry nearly a third of the mortality.
Independence note: WHO's public fact sheet is a restatement of the FERG 2015 report's headline numbers; treat as derivative of the Havelaar et al. PLOS Medicine paper, not as an independent estimate.
Source date: 2024-05-30 · Accessed: 2026-04-11
