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Food Safety in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of food-safety news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about food safety: foodborne illness, contamination, recalls, adulteration, food hygiene and food regulation. Each row carries its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, food safety took a 40.89% smaller share of news coverage in 2020 than in 2019 (4.38 against 7.41 articles per 10,000 news articles), the lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025.
Basis: Annual food-safety articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year; 94,346 matched articles in all.
Food safety's share of global news rose 1.37-fold between 2023 and 2024, from 5.37 to 7.36 articles per 10,000 news articles, close to its 2019 level of 7.41 after four years between 4.38 and 5.37.
Basis: Annual food-safety articles per 10,000 articles in the index, 2019–2024.
October 2024, the month of the E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounder hamburgers in the United States, had the largest monthly share of food-safety news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 11.33 articles per 10,000 news articles, once a data-loading artefact in February 2025 and the thin final month of July 2026 are set aside.
Basis: Monthly food-safety articles per 10,000 news articles; February 2025 (22.45) is a bulk load of archived articles dated on one day, and July 2026 rests on a thin base of 48,500 articles.
Of food-safety articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 55.6% were negative in tone, 1.65 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive.
A machine-assigned priority rating placed 73.7% of food-safety articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.73 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority 7 or higher.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 14,285 | 51.52% | 1.06 |
| India | 5,147 | 18.56% | 1.41 |
| United Kingdom | 1,446 | 5.21% | 0.89 |
| Canada | 865 | 3.12% | 1.45 |
| China | 385 | 1.39% | 0.53 |
| Australia | 363 | 1.31% | 0.61 |
| Singapore | 349 | 1.26% | 1.41 |
| New Zealand | 343 | 1.24% | 1.91 |
| France | 303 | 1.09% | 0.55 |
| Turkey | 292 | 1.05% | 3.32 |
| United Arab Emirates | 250 | 0.9% | 1.38 |
| Italy | 223 | 0.8% | 0.83 |
| Indonesia | 187 | 0.67% | 2.43 |
| Germany | 177 | 0.64% | 0.54 |
| Ireland | 168 | 0.61% | 0.84 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "food safety" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Food Safety in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/food-safety/