I was looking at numbers from the US Centers for Disease Control and the European Union’s Food Safety Authority. Using assumptions that are very generous to the US public health outcomes, here is what I found: Compared to the EU, in the US your chance of dying from a food borne illness (fbi) is 100 times greater, your chance of being hospitalized for fbi is about 600 times greater, and your chances of getting sick from fbi is about 1,250 times greater. The numbers are, with less skewed assumptions, probably more than twice as bad.
