The Burden of Foodborne Disease in the UK 2018

Over the last five years an extensive programme of work has been undertaken by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) economists, in collaboration with external experts and academics, to estimate the societal burden of foodborne illness in the UK.

Working with academics from leading UK universities, the FSA economists have built a Cost of Illness (COI) model, whose objective is to identify and measure all the costs of a particular disease, including the direct, indirect, and intangible dimensions.

The output, expressed in monetary terms, is an estimate of the total burden of foodborne illness to society.

This analysis represents a significant improvement from the previous, much simpler model, which has been used internally within FSA to estimate the burden of foodborne illness.

The Burden of Foodborne Disease in the UK 2018