Report: About 17% in U.S. get sick from food each year

One in six Americans gets ill from food each year, and about 3,000 die from those illnesses, according to record released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"These are preventable diseases," said Chris Braden, acting director of the division of food-borne, water-borne and environmental diseases at the CDC. "We need to do more to lower the impact of these sickness in the U.S."

The numbers mark the first time since 1999 that the federal government has updated the estimates for food-borne illnesses. The latest figures are lower than those in the 1999 report, which estimated that one in four Americans got sick from food each year and that 5,000 died.