Thank you. This is a major problem with how media portrays data in news stories. Most people would see 50k over 9 years as a huge number, but if it were instead presented as an individual having a %0.002 chance of getting ill from these foods, or as about %0.0022 of the population is affected per year, the story takes on new meaning. Understanding how to present data like this should be required learning for journalists.

Of course there is always the chance that this is deliberate, and done to make the story more sensationalistic, but I prefer to follow Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."