At present, 11,000 cases every year are going unrecorded.
The figures, from the Jersey Annual Social Survey, show that 14% of Islanders have suffered illness or diarrhoea in the last 12 months, and in 25% of cases the sickness lasted for more than 72 hours. But Health Protection today said that only 350 cases were reported to a GP in the same period.
Val Cameron, the team leader for public protection at Health Protection, said: ‘The survey shows that there are about 12,000 cases of food poisoning each year, which is quite high. We always suspected that there would be this level of food poisoning, but now we have the evidence to back this up. Part of our job is to investigate the cause of the sickness and put measures in place to try to stop it happening again, but it is difficult to do this if 11,000 of the cases are not being reported to a doctor. It seems that the cases currently being reported to a GP are just the tip of the iceberg.’
