These numbers do not come from the CDC:

“https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html”

Don't put urls in quotes!!

https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html

True, however death is not the primary worry of anyone who thinks they have have eaten undercooked meat. People are generally more worried about just getting sick.

if you're worried about just getting sick, the odds are more like 2/100000 per 20 years from ground beef, although I trust these numbers less, despite being from the CDC.

You might still be right, but safety for many isn't about merely not dying.

Alright, there are ~5000 cases of foodborne illness since 1998 in this report, ~600 resulting in hospitalizations. ~1 in a million over 20 years

“CDC estimates 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States”

I was only talking about ground beef, but perhaps I am using this tool incorrectly?

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/foodborneoutbreaks/

The tool seems to be dealing with reported outbreaks only. The total illnesses in the outbreak tool over that time period is at 370K, but the cdc reports 48M foodborne illness cases per year, so totally different scale

Ok, clearly I am drawing the wrong inference from this tool, but I think the point still remains valid. insofar as it matters whether your beef was ground, the statistics you should care about are outbreak statistics. The reason that ground beef is less safe than steak is that pathogens from thousands of cows are evenly distributed among the entire slurry. This would absolutely be captured in outbreak statistics.

After the relevant processing, the argument for cooking burgers to 160 is no different from the argument to cook your lettuce to 160.