Sorry, I misquoted: it's 75 million cases of food borne illness in general, and 5,000 deaths, using older statistics from smaller population sizes.
Using your stats, this outbreak was responsible for 0.1% of e.coli illnesses and 1/6th the deaths. But it's also 1/300,000 of the overall food poisoning illnesses, and 0.1% of the deaths.
So it hit the lettuce industry significantly harder than normal, even though the actual effect on health was minimal compared to the norm.
It’s pretty hard to compare the value lost to the lettuce industry vs the illnesses and deaths.
The EPA values a life at $7.4M for policy purposes [0]. So 1351x7.4M is about $10B. In 2015, the value of all US farm output was $136B. [1] So you could argue that you’d want to save more value from lives than from market impact, if you wanted to be purely utilitarian (that I hope no one in thread does).
But there’s a big impact from illness. I think many people underestimate the impact of food borne disease because they are young and healthy. I’m glad you pulled up the impact because it’s a big deal.
Hopefully as people better understand the danger, we’ll be able to avoid reductive math where we only worry about things when they are big, and way harder to fix.
"CDC estimates that each year STEC [Shiga toxin-producing E. coli] causes 265,000 illness, 3,600 hospitalizations and 30 deaths in the United States."
https://www.cdc.gov/features/ecoliinfection/index.html