Outbreak detection and investigation in the United States is primarily handled by local health jurisdictions and is inconsistent from district to district. It is estimated that 1–2% of outbreaks are detected. Society and culture
United Kingdom
In postwar Aberdeen (1964) a large-scale (>400 cases) outbreak of typhoid occurred, caused by contaminated corned beef which had been imported from Argentina. The corned beef was placed in cans and because the cooling plant had failed, cold river water from the Plate estuary was used to cool the cans. One of the cans had a defect and the meat inside was contaminated. This meat was then sliced using a meat slicer in a shop in Aberdeen, and a lack of cleaning the machinery led to spreading the contamination to other meats cut in the slicer. These meats were then eaten by the people of Aberdeen who then became ill.Serious outbreaks of foodborne illness since the 1970s prompted key changes in UK food safety law. These included the death of 19 patients in the Stanley Royd Hospital outbreak and the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, mad cow disease) outbreak identified in the 1980s.
Alkaloids
Ciguatera poisoning
Grayanotoxin (honey intoxication)
Hormones from the thyroid glands of slaughtered animals (especially Triiodothyronine in cases of hamburger thyrotoxicosis or alimentary thyrotoxicosis)
Mushroom toxins
Phytohaemagglutinin (red kidney bean poisoning; destroyed by boiling)
Pyrrolizidine alkaloids
Shellfish toxin, including paralytic shellfish poisoning, diarrhetic shellfish poisoning, neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, amnesic shellfish poisoning and ciguatera fish poisoning
Scombrotoxin
Tetrodotoxin (fugu fish poisoning)Some plants contain substances which are toxic in large doses, but have therapeutic properties in appropriate dosages. Foxglove contains cardiac glycosides. Poisonous hemlock (conium) has medicinal uses. Other pathogenic agents
Prions, resulting in Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) and its variant (vCJD)

"Ptomaine poisoning"
Ptomaine poisoning was a myth that persisted in the public consciousness, in newspaper headlines, and legal cases as an official diagnosis, decades after it had been disproven scientifically in the 1910s.In the 19th century, the Italian chemist Francesco Selmi, of Bologna, introduced the generic name ptomaine (from Greek ptōma,  "fall, fallen body, corpse") for alkaloids found in decaying animal and vegetable matter, especially (as reflected in their names) putrescine and cadaverine. The 1892 Mercks Bulletin stated, "We name such products of bacterial origin ptomaines; and the special alkaloid produced by the comma bacillus is variously named Cadaverine, Putrescine, etc." While The Lancet stated, "The chemical ferments produced in the system, the... ptomaines which may exercise so disastrous an influence." It is now known that the "disastrous... influence" is due to the direct action of bacteria and only slightly due to the alkaloids. Thus, the use of the phrase "ptomaine poisoning" is now obsolete.