Power Law for Estimating Underdetection of Foodborne Disease Outbreaks, United States

Abstract

We fit a power law distribution to US foodborne disease outbreaks to assess underdetection and underreporting. We predicted that 788 fewer than expected small outbreaks were identified annually during 1998–2017 and 365 fewer during 2018–2019, after whole-genome sequencing was implemented. Power law can help assess effectiveness of public health interventions.

Keywords

• foodborne outbreaks
• disease outbreaks
• foodborne diseases
• food safety
• statistical distributions
• public health surveillance