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“The 2015 WHO report found the health burden of food safety was equivalent to that of HIV, tuberculosis or AIDS so that made food safety come to the top of the list that people in developing countries were worried about. It’s always been a priority in high income countries partly because we’ve more or less got rid of most infectious diseases,” she said.

Grace, a contributing scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), said there can be many hazards in the informal sector such as aflatoxins in milk from Nairobi, Bacillus cereus in boiled milk in Abidjan, Staphylococcus Aureus in farmed fish in Egypt, Trichinella in pork in Uganda and Listeria in milk and fish in Ghana.

“This is a saying we have in food safety, what you worry about and what kills you are not the same. I bet maybe half of the participants are more worried about GMOs, pesticides, antibiotic residues and they are not so worried about germs as they feel they can deal with germs,” she said.

“When we did this in Vietnam we asked people what their concern was and they were very concerned about chemicals and not very concerned about germs. We knew this was wrong as we are food safety specialists but they didn’t believe us so we had to do the tests. We found only 1 percent of 366 kidney, liver and pork samples were over the regulatory levels and they had minor implications as they were so low but when we looked at germs 13 percent of people were getting sick every year from salmonellosis.”

Experts can also be wrong, said Grace citing an upcoming World Bank study looking at what specialists said compared to the burden estimated by WHO.

“Experts where very worried about anthrax and Brucella but when you look at the burden it was much more likely to be E. coli and Salmonella,” she said.