This is a CBS News video of the Arrowsight handwashing video monitoring system that has been used to dramatically increase handwashing compliance rates at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y.

The same system is now being widely used by meat companies in an effort to reduce E. coli and other contamination inside processing plants.

According to a Wall Street Journal article earlier this month, the new technique allows remote auditors to watch whether plant workers follow safety protocols aimed at reducing the spread of deadly bacteria.

JBS SA, the world's largest beef processor, saw a 60% drop in the level of E. coli found by company inspectors after it installed monitoring cameras, said John Ruby, head of technical services for the company's beef division. The Brazilian meat processor started with a pilot program after it recalled 380,000 pounds of beef that sickened 23 people in nine states in 2009.

A trial run at its Souderton, Pa., plant showed an immediate improvement in results, so the company placed cameras in all eight of its U.S. plants.

"We are seeing increased interest among meat companies in remote video auditing as part of their food safety and animal welfare programs," said J. Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute, which represents most beef and pork packing companies. "Those who have implemented these programs have reported very good results."

Cargill Inc., another major U.S. beef producer, uses video cameras to make sure its cattle are treated humanely before they are slaughtered. The Minneapolis-based company is now considering an expansion to monitor for food safety in its pork and turkey operations, according to Mike Siemens, head of the company's animal welfare division.

Aurora, Ill.-based OSI Group LLC., a meat processor, for several years has used video cameras to monitor employees in three of its five U.S. plants for general food-safety practices. The company, which supplies McDonald's and other companies with bacon, sausage and chicken, decided in June to expand the monitoring to its other two plants.

After the JBS results, the Agriculture Department—the government agency responsible for overseeing the safety of the U.S. meat supply—in August released voluntary guidelines for video monitoring at meat companies.

In some cases, companies are watching to see if sloppy work is allowing meat contamination. They are also using the cameras to make sure employees aren't mistakenly sending the expensive cuts into hamburger grinders.

Arrowsight has two facilities—one in Huntsville, Ala., and one in Visakhapatnam, India—employing 50 people to monitor meat-cutting operations. The company was wary about using workers in India, where parts of the country outlaw cattle slaughter, to monitor beef production.

But it hasn't had problems with that, Mr. Aronson said. Arrowsight routes the most graphic slaughter video to its staff in Huntsville, he said.

I cringe when someone says, ‘food safety is simple.’

A review of existing studies by the U.K. Food Standards Agency found that, although people “are often aware of good food hygiene practices, many people are failing to chill foods properly, aren’t following advice on food labels and aren’t sticking to simple hygiene practices that would help them avoid spreading harmful bacteria around their kitchens.”

Yes, individuals are impervious to risk; been known for decades.

And there’s that word, ‘simple’ again.

I especially cringe when someone says, ‘cooking a hamburger is easy with these simple food safety steps.’

Ho Phang and Christine Bruhn report in the current Journal of Food Protection that in video observation of 199 California consumers making hamburgers and salad in their own kitchens, handwashing was poor, only 4% used a thermometer to check if the burger was safely cooked, and there were an average of 43 cross-contamination events per household.

There’s some good data in the paper about what consumers do in their own kitchens, and the results are an additional nail in the self-reported-food-safety-survey coffin: people know what they are supposed to do but don’t do it.

But what the paper doesn’t address is how to influence food safety behaviors. Instead, the University of California at Davis authors fall back on the people-need-to-be-educated model, without out providing data on how that education – I prefer compelling information – should be provided.

The authors state:

• educational materials need to emphasize the important role of the consumer in
preventing foodborne illness and that foodborne illnesses can result from foods prepared in the home.;

• the gap between the awareness of the importance of hand washing and the actual practice of adequate hand washing should be addressed by food safety educators.

• food safety educators should address the lack of reliability of visual cues during cooking (stick it in -- dp);

• food safety educators should emphasize faucet cleaning with soap and water as a way of preventing cross-contamination; and,

• ignorance about food irradiation point to a further need for education.

The authors do correctly note that program to promote the use of thermometers when cooking burgers, initiated by the introduction of Thermy in 2000, has not been successful. So why do more education?

And the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in Jack-in-the-Box hamburgers happened in Jan. 1993, not 1994 as stated in the paper; someone should have caught that.

Burger preparation: what consumers say and do in the home
01.oct.11
Journal of Food Protection®, Volume 74, Number 10, October 2011 , pp. 1708-1716(9)
Phang, Ho S.; Bruhn, Christine M.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/iafp/jfp/2011/00000074/00000010/art00017
Abstract:
Ground beef has been linked to outbreaks of pathogenic bacteria like Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Salmonella. Consumers may be exposed to foodborne illness through unsafe preparation of ground beef. Video footage of 199 volunteers in Northern California preparing hamburgers and salad was analyzed for compliance with U.S. Department of Agriculture recommendations and for violations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Food Code 2009. A questionnaire about consumer attitudes and knowledge about food safety was administered after each filming session. The majority of volunteers, 78%, cooked their ground beef patties to the Food Code 2009 recommended internal temperature of 155°F (ca. 68°C) or above, and 70% cooked to the U.S. Department of Agriculture consumer end-point guideline of 160°F (ca. 71°C), with 22% declaring the burger done when the temperature was below 155°F. Volunteers checked burger doneness with a meat thermometer in 4% of households. Only 13% knew the recommended internal temperature for ground beef. The average hand washing time observed was 8 s; only 7% of the hand washing events met the recommended guideline of 20 s. Potential cross-contamination was common, with an average of 43 events noted per household. Hands were the most commonly observed vehicle of potential cross-contamination. Analysis of food handling behaviors indicates that consumers with and without food safety training exposed themselves to potential foodborne illness even while under video observation. Behaviors that should be targeted by food safety educators are identified.
 

OK hockey player and erstwhile blogger about all things zoonotic, Scott Weese, published a pretty cool paper about handwashing at a petting zoo on Friday.

Weese and doctoral candidate Maureen Anderson used a variation of our video observation system to watch and code the hand hygiene behaviors of visitors to a petting zoo at the University of Guelph’s annual open house, known as College Royal (that’s in Canada).

Video observation with discrete cameras has a couple of advantages: actions can be repeatedly viewed to make sure they are coded correctly, and video reduces the weirdness when people notice someone stalking watching whether they wash hands, in a bathroom, kitchen, or petting zoo.

As Weese writes in his Worms and Germs blog, “overall hand hygiene compliance was 58%. That means 58% of people that came into the petting zoo washed their hands or used a hand sanitizer on the way out. (It doesn't mean they all did it well, but they at least did something). In some ways, that number's good, when you compare to our earlier petting zoo observation study, (or even to results of hand hygiene rates of physicians in some hospitals). However, for such a short-term activity where there is easy access to facilities to wash hands or use a hand sanitizer, there's much room for improvement.

“During the petting zoo, a few thing were changed at defined times to see if they could improve hand hygiene rates. Two things resulted in increased hand hygiene compliance; a combination of people offering hand sanitizer and improving signs, and having people at the exit reminder people to wash their hands. This suggests that people need a reminder to wash their hands. Whether they don't think about it, or can't be bothered unless someone points it out, is unclear, but having people encourage hand hygiene is a good think to consider. It's practical for short-term events like petting zoos at fairs and similar exhibits, but not as practical for permanent exhibits.”

And not so practical for food service, hospitals and elsewhere. However a combination of rapid, relevant, reliable and repeated information, coupled with handwashing hall monitors, may increase rates of hand hygiene compliance. But more about that later. Some of the handwashing signs used in the Anderson and Weese experiment are shown, above right.

The abstract for the paper is below.

Video observation of hand hygiene practices at a petting zoo and the impact of hand hygiene interventions
04.mar.11
Epidemiology and Infection
M. E. C. Anderson and J. S. Weese
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8196679
Petting zoos are popular attractions, but can also be associated with zoonotic disease outbreaks. Hand hygiene is critical to reducing disease risks; however, compliance can be poor. Video observation of petting zoo visitors was used to assess animal and environmental contact and hand hygiene compliance. Compliance was also compared over five hand hygiene intervention periods. Descriptive statistics and multivariable logistic regression were used for analysis. Overall hand hygiene compliance was 58% (340/583). Two interventions had a significant positive association with hand hygiene compliance [improved signage with offering hand sanitizer, odds ratio (OR) 3·38, P<0·001; verbal hand hygiene reminders, OR 1·73, P=0·037]. There is clearly a need to improve hand hygiene compliance at this and other animal exhibits. This preliminary study was the first to demonstrate a positive impact of a hand hygiene intervention at a petting zoo. The findings suggest that active, rather than passive, interventions are more effective for increasing compliance.

In early 2008, the Humane Society of the United States released video documenting animal abuse at Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. of Chino, Calif., secretly shot by an undercover employee.

That $100-million-a-year company does not exist anymore – brought down by someone using an over-the-counter video recording device.
In April 2009, Cargill Beef announced it had implemented a third-party video-auditing system that would operate 24 hours a day at its U.S. beef plants to enhance the company’s animal welfare protection systems. All of Cargill’s U.S. plants were expected to have the program in place by the end of 2009.

In Feb. 2010, Cargill announced it would expand its remote video auditing program to monitor food-safety procedures within processing plants.

Last week, a new undercover video investigation by a national animal welfare group claimed to show disturbing conditions at a Texas farm operated by the country's largest egg producer and distributor.


The Humane Society of the United States said that one of their investigators documented a range of filthy, unsanitary conditions while working at a Cal-Maine Foods operation in Texas over a five-week period this fall. A five-minute video produced by the group shows hens confined in overcrowded cages with rotting corpses, dead and injured birds trapped in cages, eggs covered in feces, and escaped hens floating in manure pits.


The images are a stark contrast to the clean white birds and eggs featured in the video on the Cal-Maine corporate website.

On Nov, 19, 2010, The Independent reported that Morrisons became the first U.K. supermarket to promise to install CCTV at its abattoirs to reassure the public. The RSPCA called for other chains to follow suit. The supermarket said CCTV images from its Colne and Turriff abattoirs would be stored for 30 days and made available to the Food Standards Agency (FSA). Spokesman Martyn Fletcher said: "Our customers want to know that animals are treated well through the slaughtering process and we believe installing CCTV cameras is the best way to demonstrate we have the highest possible standards."

Slaughterhouse cruelty has been under the spotlight after Animal Aid captured breaches of welfare laws at six out of seven randomly selected abattoirs – including one supplying organic meat, where pigs were kicked in the face.

September's footage from F Drury & Sons reinforces the suspicion many, if not most, of the 370 abattoirs in England and Wales break the rules.

Speaking on behalf of F Drury & Sons, the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers said the 20-second rule had been designed for religious slaughter when animals are not stunned. "The likelihood of a stunned animal being conscious is extremely small," said its veterinary officer Stephen Lomax. "This is not an animal welfare issue."

He blamed government vets for not alerting owners to the "deplorable" abuse found elsewhere. He said: "There's no excuse for all the self-serving arguments the FSA gives about these vets [monitoring abattoirs] not having enough time. They spend a great deal of time phoning their boyfriends, reading the newspaper or filling in useless forms. The system has failed."

The FSA initially denied illegality at F Drury & Sons, but changed its mind when challenged.

Companies would protect their brand and build trust with the buying public by having their own video to supplement claims of humane handling and food safety.