REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, GENEVA -- The World Health Organization (WHO) celebrated World Health Day on Tuesday with an event dedicated to food safety -- this year's global health theme.

An estimated 2 million people die each year because of food and waterborne diarrhea diseases, putting considerable strain on health care systems, especially in developing countries.

WHO Assistant Director-General Dr. Keiji Fukuda said that "over 200 diseases were known to have been caused by contaminated foods."

With changes in production, distribution and consumption habits becoming endemic to the food industry, new transnational risks for populations at large have emerged.

Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, said addressing this issue was crucial "as a local safety problem can rapidly become an international emergency."

To address some of the key challenges, WHO launched an initiative in 2006, conducted by the Foodborne Diseases Burden Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG), to explore the risks and global disease burden associated with food production, transportation and consumption.

The final report, to be released in October this year, will provide data to help country-level policy-makers make decisions and set priorities related to food safety.

Initial 2010 FERG figures show that there were approximately 582 million cases of 22 different food borne enteric diseases, and 351,000 associated deaths. The disease agents responsible for the most deaths were salmonella typhi, enteropathogenic E.coli and norovirus.

Africa was the most affected by enteric food borne diseases, followed by southeast Asia. Some 40 percent of the people afflicted by such diseases were children under the age of five.

World Health Day celebrates WHO's formation on April 7, 1948 and adopts a different theme each year to address global public health issues.

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