U.S. makes little progress on foodborne illness goals, federal study finds

Federal food-safety researchers have concluded that the United States has made little to no progress over the past decade toward reducing illnesses from the four pathogens responsible for most of the country's foodborne disease burden, according to a new analysis reported by Food Safety News. The study, conducted by scientists at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service, reviewed nearly four decades of national health targets and found that infection rates for Campylobacter, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Listeria monocytogenes have all risen since the government set its current goals, while Salmonella infections have barely moved.

The findings update a trend first flagged by the Government Accountability Office last year and add specific, pathogen-by-pathogen data to a debate that has simmered for years among food-safety advocates, industry groups and regulators over why illness rates have proven so resistant to intervention despite decades of federal attention.

What the numbers show

The researchers compared current surveillance data against the baseline period of 2016 to 2018 that the government uses to set its Healthy People 2030 foodborne illness targets, a set of national public health goals updated each decade. According to the figures cited in the study, Campylobacter infections climbed from a baseline rate of 16.2 cases per 100,000 people to 20.6 in 2023, well above the target of 10.9. Infections from Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, often called STEC, rose from 4.6 to 5.7 cases per 100,000 in 2024, versus a target of 3.7. Listeria monocytogenes infections increased from 0.27 to 0.36 per 100,000, against a target of 0.22. Salmonella held roughly steady, moving from 15.3 to 15.2 cases per 100,000, still well short of the 11.5 target.

The government's own Healthy People 2030 tracker reaches a similar conclusion through its official objective ratings: it currently lists the Campylobacter, STEC and Listeria goals as "getting worse" and the Salmonella goal as showing "little or no detectable change." None of the four objectives is rated as improving or already met.

The CDC's most recent FoodNet preliminary data report, which tracks lab-confirmed infections across surveillance sites covering roughly 15 percent of the U.S. population, shows a comparable pattern for 2024: STEC infections increased compared with the 2016-2018 baseline, while Salmonella and Listeria incidence stayed similar. A change in how some states report Campylobacter cases kept the agency from calculating a direct comparison for that pathogen last year.

Decades of targets, limited progress

The Healthy People initiative, which the federal government has run in roughly ten-year cycles since 1980, sets numeric infection-reduction goals for major foodborne pathogens and uses CDC's FoodNet surveillance network to measure progress against them. The new study found that the country met all four of its foodborne pathogen targets under the Healthy People 2000 cycle, but met none of them by the end of Healthy People 2020. The authors cautioned that comparing results across decades has grown more difficult because of changes in diagnostic testing, including the spread of culture-independent tests that can detect infections without confirming them through traditional lab cultures, as well as revisions to surveillance methods and how baselines and targets are calculated.

That caveat echoes a wider concern raised in a Government Accountability Office report released in February 2025, which found that six pathogens, including Salmonella, Listeria, Campylobacter, Clostridium perfringens, STEC and norovirus, cause an estimated 10 million foodborne illnesses, about 53,300 hospitalizations and more than 900 deaths in the U.S. each year. The GAO report also found that most of the joint goals set by FDA, CDC and USDA's FSIS had not been met, and pointed to one target in particular: FSIS had aimed to cut the share of poultry samples testing positive for certain high-risk Salmonella serotypes by 4 percent, but that share instead rose by 22 percent.

A persistent cost for consumers

The economic toll underscores why the plateau matters beyond public health statistics. The GAO cited research estimating that foodborne illness costs the country about $75 billion annually in 2023 dollars, a figure that accounts for medical treatment, lost productivity and premature deaths, including deaths linked to chronic conditions that can follow a severe infection, such as kidney failure after certain E. coli infections. Older adults, young children, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems face the highest risk of severe outcomes from Listeria and STEC infections in particular, a vulnerability that has shaped FDA and USDA guidance on which foods those groups are advised to avoid or prepare more carefully.

A write-up of the same study in Food Safety Magazine, published in late October, noted that the research team also tied the stalled progress to broader structural issues in how food safety responsibilities are divided among agencies, with the Healthy People goals meant to help coordinate priorities across FDA, CDC and FSIS even though each agency regulates different parts of the food supply.

The study found "none to only very slight" progress toward the current decade's targets for the four pathogens.

Where oversight goes from here

The GAO has recommended that federal agencies develop a unified national food safety strategy to reduce fragmentation in oversight, but as of its most recent public update, the Office of Management and Budget had not committed to creating one. The study's authors said the federal Healthy People Food Safety Workgroup, which includes representatives from FDA, CDC and FSIS, plans to take the surveillance and target-setting challenges identified in the new analysis into account as it begins developing objectives for the next cycle, Healthy People 2040.

For now, the agencies' own surveillance systems remain the primary tool for tracking whether the pattern changes. CDC's FoodNet network, which has operated since 1996, continues to publish preliminary infection data each year, typically followed months later by a final, peer-reviewed annual summary. Food safety researchers and advocacy groups are likely to scrutinize that 2025 data closely once it is released, looking for any sign that recent outbreaks and heightened media attention to cases involving contaminated produce and packaged foods have begun to shift the long-term trend, or whether the pattern described in the new study persists into a fifth decade of federal targets.