Michael Batz (right, pretty much as shown) writes:
A friend of mine who played guitar in a punk band once told me to “always leave them wanting more.” He was talking about how some bands played for too long, leaving the 
audience bored by the end. Their approach, by contrast, was to play about 15 songs in 12 minutes.
Sometimes it made people a little angry.
I guess I learned a lesson from him, since it took my colleagues and I 10 years to publish the results of our foodborne illness risk ranking work in a pair of journal articles in 2012. Or maybe I’m just lazy. In any case, as much as we tried to get it all in there, we definitely left folks wanting more. Which is to say, we got a lot of questions about the details. And I guess that’s half the point of these things, right? So we decided to go further into the weeds.Three papers in 12 years? Pretty punk rock. Or lazy. Whatever.
US: Disease-outcome trees, EQ-5d scores, and estimated annual losses of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) for 14 foodborne pathogens in the United States
3.Mar.14
Foodborne Pathogens and Disease doi:10.1089/fpd.2013.1658
Michael Batz, Sandra Hoffmann, and J. Glenn Morris Jr
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/fpd.2013.1658
Measures of disease burden such as quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are increasingly important to risk-based food safety policy. They provide a means of comparing relative risk from diverse health outcomes. We present detailed disease-outcome trees and EQ-5D scoring for 14 major foodborne pathogens representing over 95% of foodborne illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths due to specified agents in the United States (Campylobacter spp., Clostridium perfringens, Cryptosporidium parvum, Cyclospora cayetanensis, 
Escherichia coli O157:H7, Shiga toxin–producing E. coli non-O157, Listeria monocytogenes, nontyphoidal Salmonella enterica, Shigella, Toxoplasma gondii, Vibrio vulnificus, Vibrio parahaemolyticus and other noncholera Vibrio, and Yersinia enterocolitica). We estimate over 5800 QALYs lost per 1000 cases of L. monocytogenes and V. vulnificus, compared to 125 QALYs lost per 1000 cases of T. gondii, 26 for E. coli O157:H7, 16 for Salmonella and Campylobacter, and 14 for Y. enterocolitica. The remaining 7 pathogens are estimated to cause less than 5 QALYs lost per 1000 cases. In total, these 14 pathogens cause over 61,000 in QALY loss annually, with more than 90% due solely to acute infection being responsible for 65% of total QALY loss, with premature mortality and morbidity due to chronic and congenital illness responsible for another 28%. These estimates of the burden of chronic sequelae are likely conservative; additional epidemiological research is needed to support more accurate burden estimates. This study shows the value of using integrated metrics for comparing disease burden, and the need to consider chronic and congenital illness when prioritizing foodborne pathogens.