Today marks World Health Day - which aims to highlighting the challenges and opportunities associated with food safety.

But the new data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) show 582 million cases of 22 different foodborne diseases were reported in 2010.

WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, said "Food production has been industrialized and its trade and distribution have been globalised...These changes introduce multiple new opportunities for food to become contaminated with harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites, or chemicals."

The WHO findings are part of a broader ongoing analysis of the global burden of foodborne diseases, the full results of which will be released in October.

They show 351,000 deaths were reported in 2010 from diseases including Salmonella, E.Coli and norovirus.

Most cases were recorded Africa and South-East Asia, and 40% of those suffering from food-borne diseases from contaminated food were children under five years-old.

Dr Chan stressed the need for coordinated, cross-border action across the entire food supply chain to ensure food safety as she launched World Health Day.

"A local food safety problem can rapidly become an international emergency," she said. "Investigation of an outbreak of foodborne disease is vastly more complicated when a single plate or package of food contains ingredients from multiple countries."

The global impact posed by unsafe food was not just found in the health impacts, with the economic impacts also high. Germany's 2011 E.coli outbreak, for example, reportedly caused US$1.3bn (€1.19bn) in losses for farmers and industries - and US$236mn (€217mn) in emergency aid payments to 22 European Union member states.

To counter such emergencies, the WHO says robust food safety systems are needed that drive government and public action to safeguard against chemical or microbial contamination.