While participating in a group, I recently completed a data analysis in the area of foodborne illnesses in an attempt to see what causes them and where they come from. I used a variety of publicly available data and R programming concepts in RStudio in order to complete this analysis which produced some stunning results.
The group I was apart of was extremely motivated to research foodborne illnesses because of their prevalence in today's society, due to their wide reach and detrimental effects on victims. We eventually narrowed down our topic to look at, in part, where these foodborne illnesses are coming from.
Our results showed that the most foodborne illnesses originated from land animal food. This isn't surprising because most large foodborne illnesses, such as Salmonella, come from land animals. What was more surprising was the fact that most foodborne illnesses were caused by restaurants. We were somewhat surprised by this because we expected more foodborne illnesses to be caused by home cooks, due to their inexperience than professional chefs in a restaurant. However, our data also showed the lack of care restaurants take when preparing and storing food, helping to justify our claim that many foodborne illnesses originate in restaurants.
This project will soon be available to the open source community on GitHub. This page will be updated to include a link to this project when it is publicly available.
Header Image: CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons
