No one told me that there would be snakes here
While investigating our move to North Carolina last year, no one told me that there would be snakes involved. I'm sort of a city person, my wildlife and camping experiences are limited and I'm not a huge fan of rodents. I didn't think much about snakes in Ontario.
I'm starting to think about snakes a lot more now -- I saw a story on Fark.com today about a snake in Brunswick County (N.C.). A serious snake:.jpg)
"Two brothers were just driving along N.C. 133, near Orton Plantation, on Wednesday morning when they noticed a large snake - different from those native to the area - in the roadway. “We thought it was a rattlesnake,” said Billy Ballard, of Oak Island. But a closer look and, later, an expert opinion revealed it was actually a boa constrictor that stretched at least 7 feet long."
"The brothers, on their way to Wilmington for an appointment, brought the snake to the StarNews, where about a dozen people - the ones who apparently did not have a phobia of snakes - came outside to hear the brothers' story."
"“He's wounded. We just have to care for him,” Billy Ballard said. “He's got a family. You can't tell me he's just a stray.”"
Who grabs a snake from the highway, thinking that it might be a rattle snake, throws it in the back of a truck and takes it to the newspaper?
I had my own snake sighting last week. While visiting a farm in Chatham County with a bunch of food safety folks, we saw a snake (left, exactly as shown), known to my tour companions a "big black snake" (creative taxonomist).
I'm feeling a bit like Indiana Jones.
Summer fun at Plum
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There aren't too many jobs out there where employees are required to go through a decontamination shower each day before going home, along with a 30 minute ferry ride. Yet that is just what I got to do during my summer at Plum Island Animal Disease Center. The K-State College of Veterinary Medicine published a short write-up about it in their Sept issue of Lifelines.
Michelle Mazur and Stephan Gibson, both class of 2012, spent the summer working at Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC). The opportunity was made available through a cooperative effort between the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, United States Department of Agriculture and Department of Homeland Security. Each student spent 12 weeks working in the facility in Plum Island, N.Y., on an assigned project.
Michelle worked in veterinary pathology on a study investigating the pathogenesis of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in persistently infected animals, while Stephan assessed the usefulness of a lymphocyte blastogenesis assay for measuring the T-cell response of cattle to FMD vaccine trials.
Both students gained valuable laboratory experience as well as experience in working in a biocontainment laboratory. PIADC is classified as a biolevel 3 facility, and it is the only place in the U.S. where scientists can conduct research and diagnostic work on FMD.
In addition to working on their respective projects, Stephan and Michelle also had the opportunity to attend a two-week intensive Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostician course. They heard a series of lectures describing the pathogenesis and characteristics of 20 different foreign animal diseases, and observed clinical cases and necropsies of each disease.
The FMD project opened my eyes to all the possibilities for vets in foreign animal diseases. Here's hoping the NBAF will break ground soon to open the job market a bit more.
Hendra virus claims fourth Australian
The Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) may see an increase in demand for research on the bat-borne Hendra virus (HeV). On Sept. 1, 2009, Hendra claimed Australian veterinarian Alister Rodgers (pictured right). Dr. Rodgers is the second vet to die from Hendra, and the fourth of seven humans to succumb to the virus (below).
VIN (Veterinary Information Network) reports:
There is no known cure for Hendra virus (genus Henipavirus, family Paramyxoviridae). The disease gets its name from the Brisbane suburb where it was first isolated in 1994, from specimens obtained during an outbreak of respiratory and neurologic disease in horses and humans, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Humans become ill after exposure to the body fluids of horses infected with the virus. The natural reservoir for Hendra virus is suspected to be Australia’s flying foxes.
Veterinarians are more at risk to contract Hendra since they are the most likely to spend time with sick horses. A survey of 4,000 vets conducted by the CDC through the American Veterinary Medical Association found that even though vets were concerned about zoonotic disease, the concerns didn’t translate to better biosecurity practices. The results of this study highlight the need for veterinarians to put biosecurity practices into action and establish standard procedures to reduce infection of vets and their staff.
The Compendium of Veterinary Standard Precautions for Zoonotic Disease Prevention in Veterinary Personnel was published in the Aug. 1, 2008 Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. The 18-page document gives guidance on everything from isolating animals with infectious diseases to cleaning and decontamination. Its appendixes address zoonotic diseases of importance in the US as well as the characteristics of disinfectants.
The Australian Veterinary Association said:
Vets around Australia are mourning the death of Dr Rodgers. It is absolutely devastating to lose another vet so soon, and we must do everything within our power to stop this from ever happening again. All indications are that Hendra is here to stay. It is probable that cases will emerge in states other than Queensland. Governments around Australia need to take this disease seriously right now and invest in measures to address the problem.
Learn more about Hendra through ABC’s Catalyst.
Food, Inc. misses the mark: Food is a business
Two weeks ago I went to see Food, Inc. with a couple of food safety colleagues. Reference to the documentary pops up daily on blogs and listservs -- most remark on how it will change buying patterns, it's the modern-day version of The Jungle, and is a wake-up call to consumers about food.
I just don't see it.
What I got out of the Food, Inc. experience (beyond some pretty decent popcorn) is that the food system is complex and that there are multiple influences -- including business.
The documentary jumped around from issue to issue: chicken production is inhumane; food is controlled by corporations, corporations want to hide what they do from you; cheap food is bad for you; cheap food is unsafe; food could be produced more sustainably; corn is bad; corn is controlled by corporations; Monsanto is evil, etc.
It all spun out of control, concepts were oversimplified (like pathogenic E. coli appeared out of nowhere because of corn-fed beef and buying organic food is the way to go -- but it also all comes from the big, controlling corporations, so maybe don't buy it) and it left me empty at the end.
I guess I'm getting tired of the polarized representation of food issues, without the discussion of trade-offs or presentation of data.
The food safety story that was woven throughout the movie was of Kevin Kowalcyk, a 2-year-old boy who tragically died from an E. coli O157 infection linked to recalled ground beef. The horrible story needs to be told but the connection that was made to the other vignettes was tenuous. Kevin's story deserves a movie all its own.
There were winners (Walmart looked great to me, especially around their frank discussion of organic foods) and losers (big chicken producers Tyson and Perdue who reportedly didn't participate in the documentary). Being part of the documentary was a great opportunity for the big players to open up their doors and tell their stories.
Flashing text at the end of the movie spelled out the main message for those who weren't following along: food buyers have choices. This definitely fits in with a lot of what we've written about, and isn't new -- encourage individuals to ask questions about where their food comes from (what conditions it is grown under , what the producer/retailer/cook/server knows about food safety). Demanding labels (as was mentioned) isn't nearly enough -- we should be provided with data and a chance to make an informed choice.
Is it the last meal I ate that made me sick?
Michael Bauer writes the Between Meals column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Yesterday Bauer responded to an e-mail from a reader who had met a friend for lunch one day and explained,
“We both became quite ill an hour or so after we finished our meal.”
The diner wanted to know what to do if the restaurant food made them sick. Bauer responded by saying,
“Most common forms of food poisoning take anywhere from four to eight hours to incubate.”
It is not likely that the two diners were sickened by food eaten an hour before they felt ill.
A handy table from the FDA’s Bad Bug Book shows that the only bacterial foodborne illness known to show symptoms in fewer than two hours is Staphylococcus aureus. (That’s because this particular bacterium produces toxins before it’s even eaten; others don’t produce toxins until they’ve been sitting in your gut for a while.)
Even then, the average time between eating Staph-contaminated food and feeling sick is 2-4 hours. Very few feel sick in just an hour.
A physician commenting on Bauer’s response suggested that the two friends could have been exposed to a gastrointestinal virus earlier in the week that finally showed symptoms after eating at the restaurant together.
Rotavirus takes about two days to make you sick and symptoms of a norovirus can appear in a day or two.
After getting a few more details from the reader, Bauer said,
“I figured that it might have been spoiled fish, since what was consumed was fried and any off flavors might have been masked. However, tracing it back for sure is extremely difficult.”
Depending on the pathogen, a person with a foodborne illness will either start vomiting within a few hours or have diarrhea within a few days. In either case, the last thing you ate is often not the culprit.
A friend of mine, who is now a dietitian, has been keeping a food journal since high school. If she’s ever hit with a foodborne illness—and goes to the doctor, has a stool sample tested, discovers which bug made her sick, and remembers when she started feeling bad—she’ll have an excellent shot at figuring out which food made her sick and where she ate it.
If a sick person can only remember the last place they’ve eaten, though, they’re not considering all the possibilities—including the most likely possibilities.
CRAIG ANDREW-KABILAFKAS: This article made me barf
I'm usually immune to many of the crazy notions that appear in FSnet, but having been touched by the recent and tragic Pseudomonas aeruginosa-linked death of Brazilian model Mariana Bridi, reading Eating dirt can be good for you - just ask babies made me barf. Surely it's not too hard to understand that the evolutionary advantage Jane Brody references is Darwin's survival of the fittest. This means that the weak do not survive, they die. Yes, it is better for humanity in the long run, but are there really parents alive today that want to play Russian roulette with their infants?
Not me.
I know that 99% of the food that my kids eat is not sterile. If tested it in a food microbiology lab there will be a bacterial count, but hopefully no pathogens. I know that my mouth has trillions of bacteria resident in it even though I brush and floss my teeth twice daily. I know that the air is not sterile and that my nose connects to my throat. Some of the bacteria filtered by my nostrils will make their way into my throat and stomach. Same with my kids. I want my kids to survive and thrive so I get them to practice good personal hygiene. I teach them about understanding and avoiding risk. I think that it is an instinctive behaviour for children to crawl, but I prevented my children from crawling on the road because they had no concept of the risk of being hit by a car.
I also stopped them from putting dirt into their mouth. They are still alive, strong and healthy today. Bacteria don't have discretion. Mariana Bridi was in her prime and yet could not withstand the attack of a potent and pathogenic invader. All of our knowledge, technology, and intellectual effort could not defeat her Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Is society better off for her passing? 
Bridi's untimely death has affirmed my knowledge that survival of the fittest is still in play. It can also serve to remind that we are not good judges of what is truly meant by "fittest". Your child may look healthy and robust, but by exposing her to pathogens that are readily found in dirt and pet faeces you are conducting a life threatening experiment. You are playing Russian roulette with your child's life and that is not the way to ensure survival.
Practice good personal hygiene, good parenting and just hope that you and your family are fortunate enough to avoid the deadly, painful and destructive pathogenic bacteria that surround us.
Craig is a food microbiologist working as a food safety consultant across the Australasian region.
Maybe we should start kebab-blog
As a follow-up to last week's kebab/street meat post, today, the FSA published results of a survey of the content of 494 kebabs across the UK.
The study's authors report that without salad and sauces, the average kebab contains:
* 98% of daily salt
* nearly 1000 calories
* 148% of daily saturated fat
The authors also report the mislabelling of kebab meat, with meat species not declared or declared wrongly. In some instances, pork was present in samples labelled as Halal.
The Food Standards Agency’s Chief Scientist Andrew Wadge said:
'We welcome this new study. It is important that people are properly informed about the food they eat. However, our advice is that people don’t need to avoid doner kebabs altogether because of these findings. Like all types of food that is high in fat and salt they do not need to be cut out of your diet altogether."
Wonder if they sampled for pathogens, and if they found any.
Snow day in Raleigh; be cautious if eating peanut butter
I made it through Snowmageddon in Ontario back in December, and now we are living our second Snowmageddon in Raleigh. Pretty much everything is shut down. Local news stations have been showing cars sliding into the ditch and around corners all morning and there was a reported run on the staples at the grocery stores: milk, bread and eggs.
And there's about two inches of snow on the ground. 
The snow has an unexpected benefit for me -- I've got the U.S. Presidential inauguration in HD on CNN in the background. Dani was watching the crawl on the bottom of the screen when the following Salmonella-related message came up: "consumers urged to use caution eating peanut butter". Wow. I guess that means chew it, or eat it slow.
Food safety vs food security
My month-long break in Paraguay is coming to an end. It has been a hectic month – packed with family visits, celebrations, and of course, lots of [un-safe] food.
With concepts like “cross contamination”, “meat temperature”, and “hand washing” floating around my head I’ve been able to look at things differently. I concluded that we are decades behind the U.S. in terms of food safety.
While Americans worry much about food safety, Paraguayans are more occupied with food security. Access to food is more important than stopping to think whether it’s safe or not. I even have a hard time explaining what food safety is. I am not surprised; I had no idea when I started working for Doug. Food safety topics are not in the news much and I have not heard people discussing about it.
To find out more, I’ve sat around the kitchen a lot. I tried a few times to explain to the cook why she should wash her hands every time she touches raw meat and goes on to something else. All I got back were looks of ‘you are just crazy’. Her food is still delicious.
I asked her how often her kids have diarrhea. She said, not often, maybe once or twice a month. I asked her if she’s worried about it, she answered she’s not, it’s a normal part of being a kid.
Or maybe our stomachs are used to handling salmonella and E. coli better than others. It’s hard to know. When I moved to Kansas two years ago I survived on rice and toast for a week because I couldn’t stop barfing.
But sitting back and recalling some of my experiences on this side of the world, I am surprised I have not yet barfed once (not counting the New Years party, when I had too much champagne). 
A couple of weeks ago I went to eat one of my favorite meals - steak sandwich – better known as lomito. The best place I know is just a few blocks away - a humble-looking lomito stand. I took a bite out of my lomito and realized the meat was still pink on the inside. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the mayonnaise tub by the grill.
I wondered how long the mayo (probably home-made, with raw egg) had been sitting out in the heat. I wondered where he kept the raw meat or how he knew if it was done or not. Should I ask? I resolved that some things are better left unknown. I finished munching and handed him the money. He grabbed the bills with bare hands, put them in a box, and continued flipping steaks. (Note: the pic to the right is actually another lomito I ate during a short visit to Brazil, but that's pretty much how it looked like)
We do have nice restaurants where things like these don’t happen or at least we don’t see them happening. But in a broader picture, citizens and leaders of the country have plenty to figure out before they can tackle food safety concerns.
In the meantime, I will keep savoring the lomitos, chipa guazu, sopa paraguaya, asados, and such. For me, it is still awesome [un-safe] food.
Is Diet Coke Plus really a plus?
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It’s no secret. The obesity epidemic is still raging in the United States. Documentaries such as Super Size Me and TV shows like Big Medicine have helped to bring the public’s attention to the obesity problem in the US, but there is still a long way to go to encourage consumers to adopt proper eating habits and exercise regiments.
There have been quite a few fad diets out there that guarantee the latest “quick fix” for a spare tire around the waist or love handles. The health food market has also exploded with new products offering few calories and added vitamins and minerals. Consumers are also looking for products not only to help them lose weight, but also stay healthy by consuming products, like functional foods, to help prevent cancer. Functional foods, any fresh or processed food claiming to have a health-promoting and/or disease-preventing property beyond the basic nutritional function of supplying nutrients, are also being researched and developed by many scientists.
Functional foods are fast becoming a part of everyday life. Two-thirds of adults made an effort to buy more fortified foods in 2006 - up 17% over 2005. One-third of young adults age 18–24 regularly drink energy beverages, and more than half of mothers of preteens bought organic foods last year.
With the majority (69%) of Americans pursuing a preventive lifestyle and 27% taking a treatment approach, not surprisingly, products that offer specific health benefits that make it easier for consumers to address their individual needs are enjoying explosive sales growth.
How does the market classify whether or not a food is considered functional food? The FDA regulates food products according to their intended use and the nature of claims made on the package. Five types of health-related statements or claims are allowed on food and dietary supplement labels:
http://www.ific.org/nutrition/functional/index.cfm
* Nutrient content claims indicate the presence of a specific nutrient at a certain level.
* Structure and function claims describe the effect of dietary components on the normal structure or function of the body.
* Dietary guidance claims describe the health benefits of broad categories of foods.
* Qualified health claims convey a developing relationship between components in the diet and risk of disease, as reviewed by the FDA and supported by the weight of credible scientific evidence available.
* Health claims confirm a relationship between components in the diet and risk of disease or health condition, as approved by FDA and supported by significant scientific agreement.
Could junk food be advertised with health claims? Diet Coke Plus was introduced in 2007 by The Coca-Cola Company as an alternative to Coca-Cola Classic. The ingredient list includes the following added vitamins and minerals: magnesium sulfate (declared at 10% of the Daily Value (DV) for magnesium in the Nutrition Facts panel), zinc gluconate (declared at 10% of the DV for zinc), niacinamide (declared at 15% of the DV for niacin), pyridoxine hydrochloride (declared at 15% of the DV for vitamin B6), and cyanocobalamine (declared at 15% of the DV for vitamin B12).
Diet Coke Plus has just come under fire for using the word “plus” in their product name. According to the FDA, Diet Coke Plus is “misbranded … because the product makes a nutrient content claim but does not meet the criteria to make the claim.” Muhtar Kent, the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Coca-Cola Company received a warning letter from the FDA last week detailing regulations for using the word “plus” and Diet Coke Plus’ abuse of the word, along with the statement that the “FDA does not consider it appropriate to fortify snack foods such as carbonated beverages.”
I’ll be honest; I’ve bought Diet Coke Plus at the grocery store. I might’ve been trying to rationalize my caffeine addiction. It said Plus, it must be ok to drink. If they ever come out with an Organic Coke I’m sure people will be clamoring to buy it, supposing that it will be “all natural”.
The FDA has allowed Coke 15 days to prepare a letter detailing the actions that Coke plans to take in response to the warning letter, including an explanation of each step being taken to correct the current violations and prevent similar violations. “We take seriously the issues raised by the FDA in its letter,” Coke spokesman Scott Williamson said in a prepared statement. “This does not involve any health or safety issues, and we believe the label on Diet Coke Plus complies with FDA's policies and regulations. We will provide a detailed response to the FDA in early January."
Jim Romahn: It's time for general Canadian public to speak up
I’ve know Jim Romahn for about 15 years. His writing drives a lot of bureaucrats ballistic, which is why he’s recognized as one of Canada’s best journalists writing about food and agriculture.
Jim just sent me this column about food, protectionism and hypocrisy. The South Koreans went somewhat nuts about American beef earlier this year, with riot police called to quell the protests of tens of thousands.
Six months later and the Washington Post reported, what was the big deal?
“Low-priced U.S. beef has appeared in supermarkets here in recent days, after a decision by three major retailers to start selling it again, and the reaction has been brisk business and no political fuss. Fifty tons of U.S. beef disappeared from shelves the first day it was offered for sale."
That’s usually the way things work. Politicians worried about particular constituencies will make outrageous claims on behalf of all Canadians or Koreans or consumers in general, in the absence of any data. Yet when people are allowed to vote at the grocery store, with their wallet, conventional wisdom becomes political nonsense.
So here’s Jim’s take on Canada, South Korea, trade and BS.
Pity the beef and pork producers eager to increase exports to South Korea.
Trade talks have been dragging on for years.
For sure, the beef and hog producers of South Korea oppose dropping tariffs on Canadian products.
But there’s also a big problem in our own back yard.
The Koreans want to sell us cars, but Chrysler, Ford and General Motors are lobbying hard to maintain the 6.1 per cent tariff. So is the Canadian Autoworkers Union.
There is another big problem – our dairy industry.
The trade talks have expanded to bring in other countries to make a deal more attractive, especially to increase exports.
So far those talks involve Singapore, Chile, Brunei and New Zealand.
New Zealand wants to export its dairy products. And everybody knows Canadian dairy farmers won’t budge one iota.
So, after 13 rounds of negotiations with South Korea, and a few with the so-called P4, Canada’s special interests are blocking trade deals that would quite obviously benefit beef and hog farmers and all Canadian consumers.
It’s one thing to stonewall at the World Trade negotiations. It’s even more upsetting when our politicians stonewall on country-specific negotiations, and this P4 group of minor countries.
What are the chances our politicians will agree to trade terms that will increase competitive pressure on our auto industry?
What are the chances they will undermine supply management for the dairy and poultry farmers?
What hope, then, that Canadians will be able to heed the advice of Prime Minister Stephen Harper when he says the current economic crisis calls for free trade.
Harper reminds world leaders that protectionism gets blamed for some of the depth of the Great Depression.
It’s not world leaders who need a lecture. It’s our own Canadian protectionists.
What’s more, Harper has the tools to back his talk with action.
If he could make a deal with the P4, it would set the stage for him to take a far more aggressive position in the World Trade negotiations.
And there the goal from the beginning of the Doha round has been to benefit poor nations. And among the poorest people in those nations are farmers.
The Canadian Federation of Agriculture and a series of agriculture ministers have pretended we can take a “balanced” position in trade negotiations, winning market access for our exporters and continued protection for the marketing boards.
It’s obviously not true.
The Doha round talks have repeatedly stalled. Thirteen rounds of negotiations with South Korea have failed to yield a deal. And Canada is unlikely to stay at the negotiating table with the P4 because it won’t compromise with New Zealand.
It’s time for the general Canadian public to speak up and demand an end to political pandering to special interests. We can’t afford to waste our money and resources, especially as the rest of the world moves to capture the benefits of freer trade.
PETA takes on Victorino
KITV in Honolulu, HI reports that PETA has asked Shane Victorino, the Philadelphia Phillies star Center Fielder, to stop eating Spam. According to the PETA Files blog, Fox announcer Joe Buck, revealed that Victorino's favourite food is a popular Hawaiian dish, Spam musubi, during a recent telecast. Ever-trusty Wikipedia says that a Spam musubi is composed of a block of salted rice with a slice of Spam (cooked or uncooked) on top, and typically nori (dried seaweed) surrounding it to keep it in shape. Mmmm. I've never had Spam, but meat from a can doesn't really appeal to me.
KITV.com reports:
After finding out Victorino's favorite food is SPAM musubi, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' Assistant Director Dan Shannon sent him a letter, calling for him to give up SPAM because its maker Hormel is under an animal cruelty investigation.
PETA released video to news organizations from one of its investigator that went undercover at the pig farms. The video showed workers beating the animals.
The PETA representatives said they realize SPAM is popular in Hawaii and that he probably did not realize the conditions the pigs faced.
According to PETA, Investigators documented that workers at the Hormel supplier kicked and injured pigs, beat pigs with metal rods, and shocked pigs with electric prods--sometimes in the face. Workers reportedly killed piglets by slamming their heads against the floor.
The PETA Files also says that:
Phillies' Citizens Bank Ballpark has been ranked the "Most Vegetarian Friendly Ballpark" two years in a row for its impressive vegetarian offerings, such as Philly faux-steak sandwiches, "crab-free crab cakes," mock-chicken sandwiches, and veggie dogs.
I've never been to Citizens Bank Ballpark, but I did have an awesome cheesesteak at a Phillies game at the Vet a few years ago.
Maybe this video clip is a bit predictable.... oh well.
AVMA's new veal welfare policy
The American Veterinary Medical Association announced last week that they had passed a groundbreaking policy on veal calf housing that promotes both animal health and welfare. The resolution passed by a landslide 88.7 percent vote.The new policy states "that the AVMA supports a change in veal husbandry practices that severely restrict movement, to housing systems that allow for greater freedom of movement without compromising health or welfare."
The former policy consisted of only a few points on living conditions, including that the area the calves are kept in permits them to stretch, stand, and lie down comfortably.
"This is encouraging on two levels," explains Dr. Ron DeHaven, AVMA chief executive officer. "First, we are proactively seeking to improve the welfare of veal calves, and second, the resolution still affords the AVMA Animal Welfare Committee the opportunity to do a comprehensive analysis of the science and to consider all relevant perspectives of veal calf production."
The confinement of veal calves and other farm animals is one of many issues that animal activists are passionate about. Currently the Human Society of the United States is leading a campaign in California to pass legislation know as Proposition 2. Prop 2 is aimed mostly towards egg-laying hens, pregnant sows, and calves raised for veal in order to improve their living conditions. Perhaps the steps taken by the AVMA with new veal calf policies will help to continue their campaign.
Don Schaffner, guest barfblogger: Biking for food security
Today's intersection relates to the good folks at Barf Blog, and the cross-country adventures of a fellow food safety microbiologist.
Many professional food safety scientist readers of this blog may know Dr. Tom Montville. He's the coauthor of Food Microbiology: An Introduction and co-edited the first two editions of Food Microbiology: Fundamentals and Frontiers.
But the reasons for this post don't have too much to do with food safety, although they do have a lot to do with food, more specifically food security. And when I say food security, I don't mean defending the food supply against bioterrorism, although this is also one of Dr. Montville’s research interests. No, when I say food security, I mean it in the original sense, "availability of food and one's access to it".
Tom, you see, has managed to combine two of his passions: food, and riding his bicycle. He is currently riding his bicycle across the county (west coast to east coast) to raise funds for Elijah's Promise, which began as a small soup kitchen and has since become a multi-service agency that moves people out of poverty.
And (here’s the intersection) he's about to pass within 30 miles of Manhattan, Kansas!
I find his efforts very inspiring, and I hope you will too. Check out his blog to learn more.
Viruses
In it she writes that viruses are:
infectious parasitic agents tiny enough to pass through a microfilter that would trap bacteria and other microbes, tiny enough to fit millions on board a single fleck of spit. All viruses have at their core compact genetic instructions for making more viruses, some of the booklets written in DNA, others in the related nucleic language of RNA. Our cells have the means to read either code, whether they ought to or not. Encasing the terse viral genomes are capsids, protective coats constructed of interlocking protein modules and decorated with some sort of docking device, a pleat of just the right shape to infiltrate a particular cell. Rhinoviruses dock onto receptors projecting from the cells of our nasal passages, while hepatitis viruses are shaped to exploit portholes on liver cells.
I've been a big fan of viruses for a long time. I read a book in high school (Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC) which led me into molecular biology and genetics, where virology became my favourite undergraduate course. Angier succinctly summarizes why I think viruses are so cool:
They depend on our cells to manufacture every detail of their offspring, to print up new copies of the core instruction booklets, to fabricate the capsid jackets and to deliver those geometrically tidy newborn virions to fresh host shores. Through us, viruses can transcend mere chemistry and lay claim to biology.
Like cockroaches? Hit up some Irish businesses
FSAI chief executive said Dr John O'Brien was quoted as saying "Catering for increased turnover during the Christmas festivities can result in commercial caterers, restaurants and retailers working flat out to meet demands."
Dr. O'Brien goes on to say that pest control and proper storage are especially important around the holidays as special functions may mean large quantities of food are often prepared several hours in advance, increasing pressure on refrigeration storage, meaning procedures should be monitored carefully.
Here's the infosheet -- enjoy the giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches
McDonald's food handler in Calgary has hepatitis A
There has been a bunch of coverage locally and nationally. While watching Canada AM this morning I caught this on the Crawl; "Thousands exposed to Hep A at Calgary McDonald's" The Calgary Herald, and Calgary Sun both covered the story today.
From the Herald:
Ron Thompkins, who drives a semi-trailer truck in the area and eats at that McDonald's almost everyday, plans to get vaccinated. "This really sucks," he said, explaining that he's concerned about the cleanliness of McDonald's in general. "The bathrooms are very dirty. The toilets are filthy. It needs to be cleaned more."
I think it's interesting that Thompkins brings up that he's concerned about how often the bathrooms are cleaned, and still eats at the McDonald's almost every day. I'm not surprised, likely the safety of the food at this location was never in question for Tompkins until the hep A news hit -- that's an assumption I'm making based on him eating there often. Now he's been told about the risk and he's voicing something he noticed but didn't think was a problem. This is one of the problems food safety communicators face -- though around 1 in 4 people get sick each year, events like these are still quite rare, and only when they occur do some individuals (consumers, staff, managers) really take notice.
For today's iFSN infosheet sheet, we used the story as the hook, and focused on what food handlers can do. Hep a is more problematic for businesses than other pathogens because staff can have and pass on the virus without showing symptoms, and even if the food handler is a handwashing superstar you are going to have a line up outside your restaurant (or at the health unit/clinic) while patrons get their post-exposure shots. So maybe the answer for some businesses is to require (and possibly pay for) hep A vaccines for food handlers. Staff turnover, lack of protection from other bugs and the cost are problems, but vaccinations may be worth requiring to keep your company out of the newspaper.
In the land of the Conchords
My talk focused on the impact of electronic communication on how food safety is discussed in the ether of the internet, and how industry and government should be aware and ready to respond and use the same methods. I also spoke about iFSN's infosheets, and how we are attempting to use the same channels of info to get food safety messages out to the front lines in a compelling way.
A major topic at NZFSA's conference was what the food industry, with support from NZFSA, are doing to reduce the relatively high rates of campylobacterosis within the country. As I walked through Wellington this afternoon, I saw a huge poster of Flight of the Conchords -- a Kiwi comedy duo who has made it big in the US and Canada on HBO -- and thought that maybe one of their catchy tunes focusing on food safety might be a cool way to create a dialogue around food safety with a different set of target food handlers. Maybe something along the lines of Business Time.
Also had the chance to do some sailing (thanx to Philippa, Rod, Chris and Roger -- and I didn't puke this time, so that was pretty awesome.)
NFL discusses poop
Operators of Paul Brown Stadium want permission from the city to kill birds the birds by allowing stadium employees who are familiar with firearms be allowed to shoot birds a few days prior to an event, adding that company officials believe the shooting to be a “cost-effective way to get this problem under control.”
The bird problem reportedly solved itself initially, with fan noise on game days driving the birds away, said Bob Bedinghaus, the Bengals’ director of development. But the birds apparently have adapted. In fact, pigeon poop has become such a big problem around the National Football League, he said, that officials have discussed it at league meetings and stadium management meetings.
Poop falling into food and on patrons is probably not a good idea.
Augusta's Castleberry plant
canned meat products might contain Clostridium botulinumAccording to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this morning, investigators have linked hot dog chili sauce produced in Augusta to the first outbreak of botulism from commercially canned foods in nearly four decades.
The problem may be linked to a retort machine that wasn't working properly.
I drove through Augusta last week to snap a picture of the hallowed Augusta National's entrance. Eating food that might contain bot toxin is probably not good way to cure the yips.
Yawn. White House forms import safety group
President Bush met with the import safety working group yesterday and stressed,"I've called together key members of my Cabinet to review the procedures in place, the regulations in place, the practices in place to make sure that our food supply remains the safest in the world. The world is changing, and in order to make sure that we can continue to have the confidence of our consumers, that we will continually review practices and procedures to assure the American consumer."
Uh oh. The world's safest food supply? Where's the data to back up that claim? Politicians in Canada, U.K., France, Australia and New Zealand have all at some point claimed that theirs is the world's safest food supply.
Some of them are wrong.
And while it's important to focus on imports, don't forget to keep the home fires burning. As I said in USA Today this morning,
While it may be "psychologically comforting to blame others," what the U.S. needs is farm-to-fork food safety, said Douglas Powell, director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University. "Imports are a problem. So is food produced in the U.S. One should not distract from another."
Killing the regulator
A N.Y. Times editorial today said that "the Chinese government’s extraordinary decision to execute its chief food and drug regulator for taking bribes and allowing the sale of tainted drugs is a perfect example of all that is wrong with China’s approach to regulation."The editorial also says that "the scope of the problem is too big, too complex and too urgent for the United States — with $300 billion worth of Chinese imports a year — to wait for Beijing to act. American importers need to provide the first line of defense. Companies like Wal-Mart should send inspectors regularly to visit the factories of Chinese suppliers, to ensure that products are up to acceptable standards. Ultimately the American government will have to enforce these norms."
That echoes what I told Elizabeth Weise in USA Today last Wednesday:
"Whether your food comes from down the street or around the globe, you want to verify that producers and processors are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing."
The Wall Street Journal also ran a great piece today on food safety being used as a protectionist trade barrier.
Safety standards have a history of being used as trade barriers, and observers in China and the U.S. worry that a pattern may be reappearing. The back and forth of blocked imports looks increasingly like a trade battle, one in which accusations of endangering consumers have taken the place of charges of unfair competition and dumping.
"We are likely to see these requirements increasingly being used, and abused, as a trade barrier," says Leora Blumberg, an international-trade adviser based in Hong Kong for the law firm Heller Ehrman LLP. Ms. Blumberg says that a series of global trade pacts has reduced import duties across the board and restrained the ability of nations to block trade through other means.
I adopted a similar line in the Washington Post yesterday:
"(I've) watched food safety long enough -- 15 years -- to know that one country's scientific standard is another's non-tariff trade barrier. Science gets used and abused all the time."
And the L.A. Times this morning:
"Food safety issues are often used for political means in times of strained trade relations. … Politically, it's a standard tactic. They'll say it is a food safety issue, but really it's a political issue."
100 posts on barfblog
And now, with 100 posts on barfblog, and food safety news as prominent as ever -- that's me doing an interview for the Today show on NBC while driving back from Florida on Wednesday in a shirt borrowed from a reporter -- it's time for a recap.The Food Safety Network -- the FSnet listserv -- began in my basement office while I was a graduate student. In the aftermath of the Jan. 1993 Jack-in-the-Box outbreak of E. coli O157:H7, I started sharing electronic media accounts of food safety issues with some of my colleagues through the wonders of e-mail. I had an undergraduate degree in molecular biology, had worked for years as a journalist, and as communications thingy for the Information Technology Research Centre at the University of Waterloo.
By 1994, the e-mail distribution list was growing, and we undertook a research project to see if the daily FSnet mailings actually helped front-line workers.
This was before Al Gore invented the Internet, so it was nearly impossible to get e-mail access for the various government agencies participating in the trial. However, within months, the information superhighway was commonplace, my daily e-mail was converted to a listserv distribution system, and the daily FSnet postings went out beginning in May, 1995. FSnet and the other listservs are still available to whoever wants them in their e-mail; instructions are available here.
FSnet archives are available at foodsafety.ksu.edu dating back to Jan. 1, 1996. In Sept. 1996, I got a professoring job, and my lab began to expand. In 1998, the Food Safety Network website was launched, and by 2000, I had enough people working on news and in my lab that we started keeping track of things.
For the last five years, we have collected approximately 25,000 media accounts, scientific papers, reports, press releases and now blog postings related to all things food safety, each and every year. That's 125,000 individual items. About half of those items are edited and posted in the four daily listservs -- FSnet, Agnet, Animalnet and FFnet.
After starting on a Mac computer in my basement, I'm now working with a
small group of individuals passionately committed to reducing the incidence of foodborne illness. Wireless instead of dial-up means that we work in our living rooms or rooms around the world. And we have nicer Macs now.From produce to peanut butter and pet food, imports and outbreaks, my colleagues and students provide commentary about food safety issues from farm to fork. We want to make food safety a pop-culture phenomenon and change the way the world thinks about food. Through barfblog, we comment daily on food safety happenings including such categories such as celebrity barf and the "yuck" factor. Through donteatpoop.com, we encourage people to wash their hands, and not eat poop.
The first 100 posts on barfblog are just a beginning. And thanks to Bill Marler for his on-going support of our blogging efforts.
Organic foods and food safety: separate, antagonistic, or symbiotic?
That was the title of a talk I gave at the International Association for Food Protection annual meeting this morning in Orlando.I spoke about the evolution and marketing of organic, genetically-engineered free and local food production systems, and commented on the rise of food pornography. The slides are available here. The abstract for a paper Katija Blaine and I prepared in 2004 on organic and conventional food safety systems is available here.
The formal abstract is below.
Douglas A. Powell, Katija Morley, Stacey Cahill, Benjamin C. Chapman and Amy L. Hubbell
Scientific Director and Associate Professor, International Food Safety Network, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, 66506, U.S.
Fresh fruits and vegetables have been identified as a significant source of microbial foodborne illness for at least the past decade. Outbreaks have been linked to both conventionally and organically grown produce.
Previous studies have identified gaps between U.S. Food and Drug Administration on-farm food safety guidelines and organic standards in terms of microbial food safety. Although microbial food safety standards are often achieved indirectly under organic production, organic standards are process-based, and have nothing do to with end-product safety. Specific omissions include worker hygiene and recommendations for safe use of processing and irrigation water. Further, any guideline or standard is meaningless without robust verification. The production of safe food is the responsibility of everyone in the farm-to-fork chain -- conventional or organic -- and food safety, especially with fresh produce, must begin on the farm.
Petting zoos: Guidelines are there, will they reach the front-line?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection and the National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians have published an updated, Compendium of Measures to Prevent Disease Associated With Animals in Public Settings.The package includes guidelines for animals in school settings, handwashing recommendations, suggested visitor handouts, and information for vendors and staff.
Sounds great. The challenge is, how to compel individual petting zoo operators to actually follow best practices, short of being sued by Bill Marler.
Meet David Acheson: Your stomach's best friend
The story says that climbing the ranks in public health can be a frustrating business because, as many on the front lines of public health know, nobody knows your name when bird flu is under control, when pets are not poisoned, when bacteria-laden burgers aren't making kids sick.
The story also notes that Acheson eats a lot of organic food -- not because he thinks it's safer, but because his wife works at an organic food co-op in Clarksville (I hope he's checking on the microbial safety procedures because organic is a food production system, not a food safety system) and that he watches a lot of the Food Network. I wonder if Acheson notices as many food safety errors on the TV cooking shows as we did (and I really want to update that study; any potential grad students who want to watch TV?).
The story goes on to conclude by citing Acheson as saying that education and creative training will also be crucial. The story says, Chinese-language Food Network, anyone?
Chinese Don't Eat Poop shirt, anyone?
Veggie Booty suppliers?
The company reports that there was a positive sample of Salmonella Wandsworth found in the seasoning, though no reports from health officials have confirmed this yet. Newsday is reporting that yesterday afternoon the great lab folks at the Minnesota Department of Ag reported finding Salmonella in the snack product, but didn't suggest the source.
Reprints of the Washington Post story this morning suggest that the Chinese ingredients are to blame. But without the data, maybe this is just a convenient shifting of the problem to a country that has been in the news a lot lately.
The shift of blame to suppliers has happened recently with a ground beef recall as well -- both of these examples arise from processors who should know what their input suppliers do for food safety as part of HACCP prerequisite plans.
Natural, local, organic -- what's in a (French) label?
To me and the other two thousand food safety geeks who will converge in Florida at the annual International Association for Food Protection meeting next week, food safety means keeping disease-causing microbes (along with chemical and physical hazards) out of food.
Ask your neighbor, and they'll say food safety is something to do with nutrition, allergies, calories, and anything else.
So if food safety is a broad term, is food safety also a term that is broadly manipulated?
Despite the protestations of grocers and manufacturers and producers, food is already extensively marketed and differentiated on safety -- or at least perceptions of safety.The California Marketing Agreement covering leafy greens is talking about some sort of label representing certification on bags of lettuce and spinach. Is that implying safety?
Cauliflower, with a Primus Lab sticker that says, "When food safety counts," found in a large Guelph, Ontario, supermarket last year is pushing something.
Organic, natural, hormone-free, additive free: it's all directed at implied safety.
Below are a couple of images of organic almond milk purchased in France while Amy and I were touring about.
The approximate translation of the small print is:
"Bjorg’s commitments
- Bjorg chooses organic agriculture, a mode of cultivation that uses natural methods and processing that forbids all artificial flavorings and colors.
- To take advantage of the best part of nature, Bjorg creates recipes to offer you unique nutritional virtues.
For your security: strict controls
From production through to marketing, these organic products are controlled by certifying organizations that are independently registered. This product is certified by CCPAE Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 612-61E-08007 Barcelona."
Forget the implications. Provide meaningful measures of microbial food safety and American consumers, already inundated with food safety stories of the microbial kind, will buy it.
Thank you, Sarah Wilson
For the Government of Canada, it means, Food Safety Can Be Fun!
"The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Health Canada and the Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education (the Partnership) invite media to attend Food Safety Can Be Fun!, an exciting, interactive food safety event."Maybe. Or maybe it was as numbing as the June 21, 2007 press release from Health Canada reminding Canadians of "four simple steps they can take to protect themselves from food-borne illnesses: clean, separate, cook and chill."
Food safety is not simple. And Dr. Sarah Wilson has been helping me spread that evidence-based message since joining my lab, the Food Safety Network, in 2002. When consumers, reporters, and agencies like Health Canada, CFIA and the Partnership had food safety questions that went outside the paternalistic cook, clean, chill and separate, they turned to Sarah and her staff in the Food Safety Network information centre.
Sarah has now moved on to a new job, and hopefully much greener pastures. When I left Guelph for Kansas State University in 2006, I publicly stated that FSN was expanding, and that Guelph and Kansas would work together. My new administration agreed; the folks at Guelph responded they wanted to separate -- and maybe cleanse by cleaning, cooking and chilling -- and that there should be two Food Safety Networks.
There is one International Food Safety Network; one barfblog; one donteatpoop.com. We will miss Sarah Wilson.
Tyson hucksterism?
At the news conference, Tyson showed a commercial from that campaign in which an announcer says serving antibiotic-free chicken should help parents to "feel good about feeding your family." The Wall Street Journal reported that the products will be more expensive but the company provided no premium estimate beyond asserting that they would be "affordable for mainstream consumers."
The move is aimed at eliminating the sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in Tyson brand chicken. You probably can't read the label below, but there is a full-page version in today's USA Today that I saw while stranded at the Philadelphia airport. It says:
Chicken raised without antibiotics
No hormones administered
No artificial ingredients
Except Tyson will still use therapeutic antibiotics. And in the small print, it says:
Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones in chicken.
Who says food isn't marketed based on perceptions of food safety? Now if someone would start marketing based on microbial food safety.
The government isn't your mom
C'mon food industry, the government isn't your mom. You should not continually rely on regulators to protect you from everything, and expect them to know the risk associated with your business better than you do. The government is there to support public health and create an infrastructure to produce safe food and control disease.
Cameron Pallett, the lawyer representing the cattle farmers was quoted today as saying that the
Canadian government lost track of cattle imported from the UK in the 1980s and 90s and that "the government released a report in 2006 that said the likely cause of Canada's BSE crisis was one of these cows -- whoops." Mr. Pallett also goes on to say it took 18 months for Canada to act on a World Health Organization recommendation in 1996 to ban feed containing cattle or sheep remnants. So why didn't the cattle industry force a defacto feed ban by requiring that their input suppliers not use risky products? That could have been done without the government's help -- farmers, not the government, actually bought the feed.
Even if Pallet and his clients are correct about the mismanagement, how many other cows with the BSE were not counted or couldn't be counted? We still know little about BSE appearance and transmission. How well has the industry been implementing feed restrictions? The Edmonton Journal suggested not very well in 2005 (CFIA found mislabeled or problem feed during inspections) -- but went on to also blame the government.
It's garbage to suggest that the economic impact of BSE in Canada can be blamed primarily on one player. Like many food safety issues everyone from farm to fork had a role to play.
It's expected that farmers, processors, distributors, retailers and food service operators know the risks that come with their raw ingredients, processes and final products and how to manage them. If there are problems, it's industry's job to fix them. And if they can't, they face the repercussions.
FDA launches tomato initiative
FDA investigators in coordination with their respective state counterparts will visit tomato farms and packing facilities in Florida and Virginia to assess food safety practices and use of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs).
It's clear that the FDA thinks, as do I, that the produce industry must do more to ensure that everyone from farm-to-fork recognizes food safety risks and take concrete actions to reduce the risks of dangerous microorganisms. And in the absence of verification from within, government is stepping in.
Regulators and the industry in the past have have released food safety guidelines for tomatoes, but there is a lack of verification; it is unclear if all growers are actually following the guidelines. The FDA announcement is a good step, but the industry should have been able to do this themselves.
Guidelines are a first step, but we need more creative ways to compel everyone, from the person harvesting to the person distributing, to take food safety seriously, even in the absence of an outbreak.
A list of North American tomato outbreaks can be found here.
Check out our papers below:
Luedtke, A., Chapman, B. and Powell, D.A. 2003. Implementation and analysis of an on-farm food safety program for the production of greenhouse vegetables. Journal of Food Protection. 66:485-489.
Powell, D.A., Bobadilla-Ruiz, M., Whitfield, A. Griffiths, M.G.. and Luedtke, A. 2002. Development, implementation and analysis of an on-farm food safety program for the production of greenhouse vegetables in Ontario, Canada. Journal of Food Protection. 65: 918- 923.
We also published a book chapter entitled Implementing On-Farm Food Safety Programs in Fruit and Vegetable Cultivation, in the recently published, Improving the Safety of Fresh Fruit and Vegetables
Food safety is not simple
Cross-contamination and cooking a hamburger to 160F are not simple tasks. Most of food safety is not simple.
Warren also says that plastic cutting boards are safer than wooden, and that if the juice is still pink, "it's not done yet. If it's clear, it's done." Not so.
The only way to ensure that hamburger has reached such a temperature is to use a tip probe, instant-read digital meat thermometer. Research has shown that colour is a lousy indicator of doneness -- some burgers turn brown prematurely before 70 degrees C is reached, others can remain pinkish well beyond 70.
To further complicate matters, an individual hamburger will cook at different rates throughout the burger depending on thickness and fat content.
In one study it was found that when the outer temperature of hamburgers reached a temperature of 71.1ºC, the inside was only at a temperature of 56.7ºC. To check a burger, grab it with tongs, insert the thermometer sideways into the middle of the burger and wait a few seconds. As Pete Snyder of the Hospitality Institute in Minnesota has documented, when done correctly, one can observe the hot temperature at the surface and, as the probe is pushed into the hamburger, the temperature goes down. As the probe passes through the cold spot, the temperature goes up again. It is critically important that temperature not be taken with a stationary thermometer, but in a dynamic manner by pushing through the hamburger, so that a few Salmonella or E. coli in the middle of the hamburger are reduced.
Humble pie tops the menu for TV chef
Unannounced visits to the chef's cook school at Port of Menteith near Stirling between 2003 and last year resulted in no fewer than 13 recommendations to improve standards of cleanliness, equipment and food storage.
Perhaps most embarrassing of all, officials invited the Aston Martin-driving chef and his staff to attend a cleanliness seminar.
Nairn last night insisted the criticisms were minor and did not affect food safety, and revealed his cook school was shutting for a week this summer for a major refurbishment that would exceed health standards.
In 2004, my laboratory reported that, based on 60 hours of detailed viewing of television cooking shows, an unsafe food handling practice occurred about every four minutes, and that for every safe food handling practice observed, we observed 13 unsafe practices. The most common errors were inadequate hand washing and cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat foods.
Bathrooms without borders
Valle was quoted as telling ABC News, "It makes pretty good sense. You go into a men's or lady's room, you clean yourself up, you wash your hands, and then you have to touch a doorknob that everyone else who just used the bathroom touched. It could be seen as paranoia, but it makes perfect sense to me."
Valle is carrying the legislation on behalf of a friend and fellow member of the Massachusetts National Gaurd, Douglas Flavin, who brought up his sanitary "pet peeve" during weekend training together.
Flavin was quoted as saying in an interview that, "You wash your hand and you've got to grab the knob that some guy just had his pissy hand all over. It's been annoying me for some time."
Valle said the law, if signed by the governor's pen, would not require existing bathrooms to retrofit their doors to remove doorknobs and re-hang the doors -- a grandfather clause that might stave off opposition from the building unions. "Maybe the the doorknob lobby, but not the builders," he said.
Bathroom innovations can be seen in many places, from the all-in-one handwashing units frequently found in Kansas and Missouri (and have serious problems)
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to the retractable toilet seat in a woman's washroom in a Marseille, France restaurant.
Visit donteatpoop.com for an inventory of handwashing materials.
Letterman: Researchers advise, don't eat poop
The story comes from extensive wire coverage about the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University in recent months, and can be summarized by:Don’t-eat-poop T-shirts, barfblog, and a group of individuals passionately committed to making the world's food safer. That's the International Food Safety Network (iFSN) at Kansas State University.
Dr. Douglas Powell , scientific director of iFSN leads a team of researchers who want to make food safety a pop-culture phenomenon and change the way the world thinks about food, from farm-to-fork. They comment daily on food safety happenings at
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barfblog, which includes categories such as celebrity barf and yuck factor. At the height of the E. coli O157:H7 spinach outbreak in 2006, Powell noted that people who got sick were eating cow feces, and advised, Don't Eat Poop. T-shirts to encourage proper handwashing -- and not to eat poop -- are available in English, French, Chinese and Spanish.
For further information:
foodsafety.ksu.edu
donteatpoop.com
http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu
Thanks to Dan Thomson at K-State for alerting us to the Letterman broadcast.
Learning from animals
At the 2005 Florida Strawberry Festival, a 7-year-old Tampa girl and a 53-year-old St. Petersburg woman who visited the petting zoo acquired E. coli O157:H7, required extensive medical treatment and settled lawsuits for millions of dollars.
Last month, several cases of cryptosporidium, which causes severe diarrhea, were diagnosed across Greater Manchester (U.K.) after people visited local farms on educational trips.
There have been over 20 outbreaks of severe illness from petting zoos in the past decade.
And now, Canadian researchers have reported that operators and visitors at petting zoos in Ontario aren't doing what they are supposed to be doing.
Scott Weese, a clinical studies professor at the University of Guelph, and colleagues report in the July 1 edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases that in a study of 36 petting zoos in Ontario between May and October of 2006, they observed infrequent hand washing, food sold and consumed near the animals, and children being allowed to drink bottles or suck on pacifiers in the petting area.
So seven years after 159 people, mainly children, were thought to be sickened with E. coli O157:H7 traced to a goat and a sheep at the 1999 Western Fair in London, Ontario, and seven years after all Canadian fairs were urged to adopt 46 recommendations to enhance petting zoo safety, many are still doing a lousy job.
In commenting on the Florida settlement last month, Seattle attorney Bill Marler said, "It's a hard lesson for petting zoos and county fairs to learn, but they really need to do more than what they have been doing."
Weese noted that risk can be significantly reduced by locating hand-washing stations at the exit of a petting zoo, posting signs promoting good hygiene and educating people about the risks of bringing food, beverages or items that may end up in a child’s mouth into the zoo.
Such measures echo recommendations issued in 2001 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unfortunately these reports and recommendations do not offer advice on how to ensure that fair operators are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing.
In 2003, U.S. researchers, in a study of livestock at 29 county and 3 large state agricultural fairs, found E. coli O157:H7 in 13.8 per cent of beef cattle, 5.9 per cent of dairy cattle, 3.6 per cent of pigs, 5.2 per cent of sheep, and 2.8 per cent of goats. Over seven percent of pest fly pools also tested positive for E. coli O157:H7.
The bad bugs are there and handwashing may not be enough to get rid of them.
The E. coli O157:H7 that sickened 82 people in 2002 at the Lane County Fair in Oregon appears to have spread through the air inside the goat and sheep expo hall. In a case-controlled study, health investigators found that the percentage of sick people who washed their hands after leaving the Lane County animal barns -- 31 percent -- was only slightly lower than the percentage of healthy people who washed their hands -- 36 percent. In other words those who washed their hands were at almost the same risk of contracting E. coli, O157:H7. One child sickened at the fair, 23-month-old Carson Walter of Eugene, spent a month at Doernbecher Children's Hospital before coming home.
These learning experiences raise questions: how best to motivate fair managers to provide petting zoos that are microbiologically safe? Should the urban public be allowed to interact with livestock at all? Should petting zoos be inspected, as restaurants are, and the results displayed?
Prof. Hugh Pennington of the U.K. has gone so far as to say that children under five (who are more vulnerable because of their still-developing immune systems) should be banned from visiting livestock farms because of the serious risk of acquiring E. coli O157:H7 infection from farm animals. Such a ban already exists in Sweden.
There is much to learn from interacting with animals, farms, the world. The challenge is to do so in a microbiologically safe manner.
Douglas Powell is scientific director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University
foodsafety.ksu.edu
dpowell@ksu.edu
Spinach (leafy green), worse than the green leaf
In this article, all about the double standard of pot smoking, comes a resurfacing of the comparison of pot and spinach (not something I'd want to see if I was in the spinach business, well maybe, depends who your target market is I guess). Even fark.com has a link to the story, with the headline More people died last year from eating spinach than from smoking pot
This is another reference to spinach being worse than pot, following up on what Willie Nelson reportedly said last year after being charged with pot possession:
"It's a good thing I had a bag of Marijuana instead of a bag of spinach. I'd be dead by now."
This example is a reminder of what happens when you make people sick and don't have verification of all the things you are doing to reduce risk. An do a good job talking about all of your measures that are in place. People manage outbreaks all the time, fix problems that lead to them and get on with business.
The discussions that occur on the internet on outbreaks (especially the spinach and peanut butter outbreaks) provide a template for how rapidly interested consumers engaged in discussions around food safety. It used to be at the dinner table that these discussions happened, and damage was limited because it was small pockets of discussion. Now we have many people globally instantly discussing food safety issues and stories get big. Fast.
If I was involved of the risk management or communications at a spinach or leafy green company (or any company that makes a food product that might be linked to an outbreak) I'd have a plan together on how to manage these types of discussions, to get my messages out in places like youtube , myspace, facebook, wikipedia and the blogs (and use the comment fields to discuss and respond) and put a face on who is managing things. Be rapid, relevant, reliable and repeat your messages. I'd give my outbreak a myspace page, put my press conferences on youtube and generate a place for discussion where I could respond. And I'd be ready to do it now, not when the outbreak hits.
As demonstrated by the legs of this story, it's too late now.
Beer and biofuels
Helmut Erdmann, director of the family-owned Ayinger brewery in Aying, nestled between Bavaria's rolling hills and dark forests with the towering Alps on the far horizon, was quoted as saying, "Beer prices are a very emotional issue in Germany - people expect it to be as inexpensive as other basic staples like eggs, bread and milk. With the current spike in barley prices, we won't be able to avoid a price increase of our beer any longer."
The story notes that in the last two years, the price of barley has doubled to about US$270 per tonne as farmers plant more crops such as rapeseed and corn that can be turned into ethanol or biodiesel. As a result, the price for the key ingredient in beer -- barley malt, or barley that has been allowed to germinate -- has soared by more than 40 per cent, to around 385 euros or $520 per tonne, from around 270 euros a tonne two years ago.
Ben and I share the German's frustration.
As do many of us at the International Food Safety Network (iFSN).
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Doggy dining
Watching dogs in restaurants, stores and trains as we tour France has made us wonder if indeed 60 million Frenchmen can't be wrong.
Yet the other night during dinner at a patio table next to us, a couple sat with their ‘tween son and a tiny doggy that they passed from person to person until the food came. The Yorkie was then expected to sit calmly under a chair while his family ate. Within minutes he started yelping when a large stray wandered by looking for handouts. Most of the diners good-naturedly ignored the dog, but our neighbors, clear dog lovers, juggled patting the big beast, feeding table scraps to their own puppy, keeping the two from scuffling (surely the tiny dog would win), and finishing their dinners. The management softly discouraged feeding scraps to the stray, but there was no real effort made to dissuade him from joining the families.
No one seemed bothered.
But poop happens. Having to engage in athletic contortions to avoid dog poop in the narrow streets of Nîmes, Marseilles or Toulouse makes us recognize that dogs without yards, grass-lined sidewalks, and pooper-scoopers, quickly make an otherwise lovely city unsanitary. One pioneering doggy-friendly restaurant in St. Petersburg, Florida discovered this when a canine guest had diarrhea during peak hours. The owner said, "Ultimately, we're here to serve people, not dogs," and reverted to the no-dogs-allowed camp.
As lawmakers in Oregon, Missouri, Washington, Florida, Chicago, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, New York City and San Diego have discovered, there are reasons why dogs and their companions should -- and should not -- be allowed to “have a brewski together, a hot dog together or whatever they want” as former governor Jeb Bush worded it a year ago in enacting Florida's legislation.
Florida appears to have considered the risks -- at least on paper. And although doggy dining may be convenient for a client, for the restaurant owner it’s not as simple.
Under the law, Florida cities are able to enact an ordinance allowing restaurants to apply for permission to open their patio doors to dogs, under the following conditions:
• food service employees must not touch, pet or handle dogs while serving food or beverages;
• food service employees must wash their hands promptly after touching, petting or handling dogs;
• patrons must be advised to wash their hands before eating and the restaurant must provide waterless hand sanitizer at each table;
• dogs must not come into contact with serving dishes, utensils and tableware or other items involved in food service (this is the only applicable law in France);
• dogs will not be allowed on chairs, tables or other furnishings.
• accidents involving dog waste must be cleaned immediately and the area must be sanitized;
• cats and other pets are not covered by the law; and,
• local governments can issue a fee to the restaurants for permit.
While the benefits for a dog-loving nation may seem apparent, there are any number of risks: tripping, biting, dog fights, barking, allergies, and the transfer of dangerous microorganisms such as E. coli, salmonella and cryptosporidium, among others. If it's difficult to get employees to wash their hands after using the bathroom, what about after touching a dog? And do public health inspectors, who already investigate both dog bites and restaurants in many cities, really need more of both without extra help?
The transfer of pathogens from dogs to humans (and vice-versa) is well-documented -- but not on restaurant patios. The outbreaks of foodborne illness just aren't there. A pre-rehab Britney Spears changing her baby's diaper on a restaurant table likely poses a greater risk.
As pet owners, we would likely choose to frequent restaurants that allow our (exceedingly well-behaved) dogs on the terrace, as we have done in the past.
If we were restaurant owners, we would want to know we weren’t serving poop, whether it came with the bags of spinach, was ground up in the beef that wasn’t sufficiently cooked, or transmitted on our patio by a pet. Further, we'd want to know the dog -- and more importantly the owner -- before they came anywhere near our patio.
The evidence suggests that dogs can and should be allowed on restaurant patios -- but only at the discretion of restaurant staff and only if staff and owners follow the Florida protocol.
Amy Hubbell and Douglas Powell are with the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University.
What's a consumer to do?
Madeleine Ferrières a professor of social history at the University of Avignon, France, writes in Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, first published in French in 2002, but translated into English in 2006, that "as soon as man learned how to write, he left evidence of his fear of poisoning himself with toxic food."
I started reading this book last year, but was stalled. Now, traveling in France with Amy and steeping myself in the history of the area, I've revisited it with a new vigor.
Audrey Brown reported on May 23, 2007 for the BBC that after working undercover for a couple of major U.K. supermarkets, she observed staff all too willing to change best-before dates, repackage dated food, and generally show a disregard for any potential health impacts.
But Ferrières reminds us in the introduction to the American edition that "the fear of poisoning has never been reserved for the world's great and powerful. It is a collective fear, shared socially. Furthermore, we still experience it."
Today it's produce, pet food and peanut butter.
In 1184 Toulouse, France, from where I write this, city leaders "took three archetypal measures regarding butchering: the profit of the butchers must be limited to one denier out of 12 (eight per cent); partnership between two butchers was forbidden, and selling the meat of sick animals was likewise forbidden unless the buyer was warned." Similar articles on butchering were created in Montpellier (1204), Avignon (1246), Marseilles (1253) and Salon (1293).
Below is the public slaughterhouse in Toulouse, which was closed in 1989 and reopened as an art museum in 1997. This slaughterhouse, opened in 1831 just outside of town, consolidating the dozens of slaughterhouses which were located in the center of the city like other French cities, beginning in the 12th century, to observe the health of animals before slaughter and to facilitate the collecting of taxes.
Ferrières provides extensive documentation of the rules, regulations and penalties that emerged in the Mediterranean between the 12th and 16th centuries. But rules are only as good as the enforcement that backs them up. The owners of the supermarkets documented by the BBC would have been subject to fines, flogging or banishment.
As today's society grapples with how best to validate that food is indeed what it says it is -- and safe -- and as the huskers and buskers emerge with cure-alls, I find some comfort in Ferrières' incisive words:
"All human beings before us questioned the contents of their plates. … And we are often too blinded by this amnesia to view our present food situation clearly. This amnesia is very convenient. It allows us to reinvent the past and construct a complaisant, retrospective mythology."
What's your score, mate?
And it'd be even better if restaurants and regulators provided the public with information about the safety of the city's restaurants.
Restaurants and food service establishments are a significant source of the foodborne illness that strikes up to 30 per cent of citizens in so-called developed countries each and every year.
Sydney officials are now being pressured to release information about the safety of local restaurants and bolster restaurant safety in general.
After watching the mish-mash of federal, state and local approaches to restaurant inspection in a number of western countries for the past decade, I can draw two broad conclusions:
• Anyone who serves, prepares or handles food, in a restaurant, nursing home, day care center, supermarket or local market needs some basic food safety training; and,
• the results of restaurant and other food service inspections must be made public.
Here's why.
Parenting and preparing food are about the only two activities that no longer require some kind of certification in Western countries. For example, to coach little girls playing ice hockey in Canada requires 16 hours of training. To coach kids on a travel team requires an additional 24 hours of training.
It's unclear how many illnesses can be traced to restaurants, but every week there is at least one restaurant-related outbreak reported in the news media somewhere. Cross-contamination, lack of handwashing and improper cooking or holding temperatures are all common themes in these outbreaks -- the very same infractions that restaurant operators and employees should be reminded of during training sessions, and are judged on during inspections. Some jurisdictions -- such as the city of Fort Worth, Texas -- place so much importance on teaching these lessons they require mandatory food handler licenses and have invested in an infrastructure of training that demonstrates the city's commitment to public health. Other cities and states have no training requirement.
There should be mandatory food handler training, for say, three hours, that could happen in school, on the job, whatever. But training is only a beginning. Just because you tell someone to wash the poop off their hands before they prepare salad for 100 people doesn't mean it is going to happen; weekly outbreaks of hepatitis A confirm this. There are a number of additional carrots and sticks that can be used to create a culture that values microbiologically safe food and a work environment that rewards hygienic behavior. But mandating basic training is a start.
Next is to verify that training is being translated into safe food handling practices through inspection. And those inspection results should be publicly available.
A philosophy of transparency and openness underlies the efforts of many local health units across North America in seeking to make available the results of restaurant inspections. In the absence of regular media exposes, or a reality TV show where camera crews follow an inspector into a restaurant unannounced, how do consumers -- diners -- know which of their favorite restaurants are safe?
Cities, counties and states are using a blend of web sites, letter or numerical grades on doors, and providing disclosure upon request. In Denmark, smiley or sad faces are affixed to restaurant windows.
Publicly available grading systems rapidly communicate to diners the potential risk in dining at a particular establishment and restaurants given a lower grade may be more likely to comply with health regulations in the future to prevent lost business.
More importantly, such public displays of information help bolster overall awareness of food safety amongst staff and the public -- people routinely talk about this stuff. The interested public can handle more, not less, information about food safety.
Lots of cities still do not disclose restaurant inspection results, worried about the effect on business, but they aren't great cities.
Sydney is.
And instead of waiting for politicians to take the lead, the best restaurants, those with nothing to hide and everything to be proud of, will go ahead and make their inspection scores available -- today.
Food -- fashion over facts
Dangerous microorganisms like E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella cannot be sensed by sight and are equal opportunity pathogens -- they will happily adulterate so-called quality cuts of meat.
Bittman also says that "if you grind your own beef, you can make a mixture and taste it raw," adding that, "To reassure the queasy, there’s little difference, safety-wise, between raw beef and rare beef: salmonella is killed at 160 degrees, and rare beef is cooked to 125 degrees."
Kids, don't try this at home. Or anywhere else. Ground beef of any sort needs to be 160F.
Even with quality cuts like steaks or roasts, dangerous bugs can contaminate the exterior of the meat. That's why rare steak is relatively safe with an external searing. In the process of grinding, whatever pathogens are on the outside become internalized in the burger -- whether the meat is ground at a factory or the kitchen counter-top.
Bitman concludes by saying that cooking time depends on the size of the burger but that his take about 6 to 8 minutes total, for rare to medium-rare.
Except that color or time are lousy indicator of doneness. The only way to properly tell if a burger is microbiologically safe is to stick it in, using a digital meat thermometer (preferably a tip-sensitive one). Most people, trying not to sicken their family or guests, overcook burgers. A 160 F burger, verified with a thermometer, satisfies and is safe.
Bittman joins Nina Planck, who at the height of the fall 2006 E. coli O157:H7 spinach outbreak, wrote in the Times that E. coli O157:H7 "is not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. … It's the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighboring farms."
The natural reservoirs for E. coli O157:H7 and other verotoxigenic E. coli is the intestines of all ruminants, including cattle -- grass or grain-fed -- sheep, goats, deer and the like. The final report of the fall 2006 spinach outbreak identifies nearby grass-fed beef cattle as the likely source of the E. coli O157:H7 that sickened 200 and killed 4.
Being a fashionable foodie is fun for some; a few facts can keep it safe. Don't eat poop.
Where will genetically engineered food place in history?
In reviewing the past decade of apocalyptic predictions related to all foods genetically engineered, I can only conclude, what a massive waste of well-meaning time, energy and money that could have been instead devoted to fewer people sick from microbial foodborne illness.
A story out of Canada once again fawningly reported that all things organic were booming.
What caught my eye was the statement by the spokesthingy for Loblaw Companies Ltd., who said, "As long as you are in the business of giving consumers choice, I think you have to have organics as part of your offering."
This from the same company who, when asked in 1999, and 2000, if they would be interested in giving consumers choice and offer a genetically-engineered Bt sweet corn -- the benefit being significantly reduced pesticide use -- responded with, no, we can't tell consumers that pesticides are used to grow sweet corn.
Whatever kinds of food production, processing and distribution system we humans come up with, what matters is not the technology, but whether the results make people sick. There's lots of food-related things that sicken 30 per cent of all citizens in developed countries each and every year -- genetically engineered food isn't one of them.
Clinton rides the food safety wave -- again
Those two events, more than any other, dramatically changed the public discussion of food safety in the U.S. The Jack-in-the-Box outbreak had all the elements of a dramatic story: children were involved; the risk was relatively unknown and unfamiliar; and a sense of outrage developed in response to the inadequacy of the government inspection system. The newly inaugurated President Clinton made microbial food safety a Presidential issue.
Today, the N.Y. Times is reporting in a larger story about food safety and federal regulatory oversight, that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first presidential candidate to make food safety reform a part of a campaign platform.
In addition to signing on to a bill to create a single food inspection agency by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, Senator Clinton said in a telephone interview that she would double the agency's budget over five years, double the number of inspectors, mandate a minimum frequency for inspections and provide mandatory recall authority.
Hillary Clinton told the Times that, "We’ve had a long history of problems with food safety because of the divided system, But it was not as acute a problem in the minds of many Americans because we didn’t have so many outbreaks of food-related illness. There has not been much support from the Bush administration, and now we are playing catch-up. We need a new system of food safety prevention.”
Training Day
But, the head coach of the Fighting Irish football team and the manager of Tailgaters differ on placing blame. Whereas Miki Young, Tailgater's owner, suggested that the poor work habits of her staff led to the poor inspection results,
Charlie Weis hasn't publicly blamed his Fighting Irish players for the breakdown in the Sugar Bowl against LSU. This quality, Weiss' responsibility for his team's performance would make him a pretty good restaurant manager. When Weis and the Irish lose, thousands of fans may be disappointed, school officials may get angry and some staff may lose their jobs, but it's really not a big deal. When Miki's (or any other restaurant's) staff screw up it can be a really big deal: patrons get ill, and could die. The World Health Organization estimates that up to 30 per cent of citizens in so-called developed countries get sick from the food and water they consume each and every year. However, coaching is valued much more than food safety in North America. For example, to coach youth house league hockey in Ontario requires 16 hours of training. To open the doors behind the bench requires 4 hours of prevention services training. To coach kids on a travel team requires more. Shouldn't some minimal requirements be established for those running a restaurant or preparing food?
It's unclear how many illnesses can be traced to restaurants, but almost every week there is at least one restaurant-related outbreak reported in the news media somewhere in North America. Cross-contamination, handwashing and improper temperatures are all common themes in these outbreaks -- the very same infractions that restaurant operators and employees should be reminded of during training sessions, and are judged on during inspections. Some jurisdictions -- such as the city of Fort Worth, Texas -- place so much importance on teaching these lessons that they have mandatory training for all food handlers. Fort Worth requires food handler licenses and has invested in an infrastructure of training that demonstrates the city's commitment to public health. If they can do it why can't others? The Fort Worth Public Health Department's promotion of food safety garnered the the coveted Crumbine Consumer Protection Award for Excellence in Food Protection in 2004, the Super Bowl of food safety.
Running a restaurant is like running a sports team. The kitchen and the wait staff operate like offensive and defensive units. Each staff member has her own job, and each depends on another's performance, one bad move can lead to a foodborne illness. The inspectors are the referees, and they show up to make sure that everyone is playing by the rules.
Managers, like coaches, need to provide the tools, set examples, and foster the culture of the team, in this case, food safety. In the Chicago area in 2003 a Chili's restaurant was linked to over 160 confirmed cases of Salmonella. Health officials determined the Salmonella was due to employees who were unable to follow proper hand washing techniques as management had made a decision to keep the restaurant open for two days even though its water supply was interrupted. Hot water isn't needed for effective handwashing, it's just that people don't like washing their hands in cold water -- and in the absence of hot water Salmonella was passed on.
In April 2005, a 25-year veteran employee at the popular burger-joint, Peter’s Drive-In, in Calgary, AB, reported to work ill. Sixteen people got sick from E. coli O157:H7 after drinking marshmallow-flavored milkshakes that said worker had prepared – 15-year old Sara Burgess was in the hospital for two weeks and had to undergo dialysis treatment because of kidney failure due to infection. The then-owner of the restaurant asked rhetorically "what was I supposed to do?" A training program for restaurant operators might have been good(thanx for the pic Michelle).
But even ensuring that sick workers stay at home won’t always protect patrons from harmful bacteria. Some of the pathogens associated with foodborne illness, such as hepatitis A and Salmonella can be passed on with out symptoms. According to research published in the Journal of Food Protection last
information, and a training regime that is supported by regulators, which focuses on food safety risk year, 12 per cent of staff associated with restaurant outbreaks in Minnesota tested positive for Salmonella, but only half reported feeling sick. Managers and food handlers need to know this factors could lead to reduced risk.Miki Young told the St. Joseph County Health Department representatives at a hearing about her inspection record, "Everybody knows I mean business; If you don't take care of business, you'll be let go." In the words of Randy Bachman, food safety training can help food handlers and managers ensure that they are takin' care of business.
Blogging at iFSN
See how happy we look -- or at least how happy we looked when we were all together in Kansas City in Feb.
And Brae too.
With about 500 unique visitors so far, it's been fun to watch how people find barfblog and why. It's predominantely celebrity news and other pop culture stories, like various takes on the 5-second rule.
Amy and I are looking forward to blogging from France for five weeks, beginning Monday. Just like when met a year-and-a-half ago.
dp
Americans more concerned about food safety
www.fmi.org/media/mediatext.cfm
No kidding. The seven produce outbreaks sickening over 700 and killing at leat four in fall 2006 have raised American awareness of where food safety problems arise
http://www.foodsafety.ksu.edu/en/article-details.php?a=3&c=32&sc=419&id=1030
and created a public hungry for microbiologically safe food
http://foodsafety.ksu.edu/en/article-details.php?a=3&c=32&sc=419&id=1018
Single food safety agency for the US?
www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN0847466620070508
that Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, said on Tuesday that one independent agency with broad power would do a better job of protecting U.S. food safety than the current piecemeal system, and that the food safety system was "fragmented" and needed reform, citing the ongoing investigation of melamine in pet food and livestock feed, adding, "I believe it's time we now move to create a single food agency."
Are single food inspection agencies really the answer? The Canadian Food Inspection Agency certainly has its problems (Sorry, bureaucrats aren't really that into you, http://foodsafety.ksu.edu/en/article-details.php?a=3&c=32&sc=419&id=963)
and competition amongst agencies has its merits. But maybe a single agnecy can marshall resources and help foster a culture that respects microbial food safety.
Maybe Bureaucrat Man will become the food safety seal of approval
dp
Blaming consumers
Jim Gamble, president of St. Helena Little League, said the organization's snack shacks now serve only pre-packaged and pre-cooked food, although I suppose they could get pre-cooked patties if they really wanted them.
The patties were supplied by the Richwood Meat Company of Merced, Calif., which has been involved in a recall since the illnesses came to light a few weeks ago. Recently, a company official said consumers just needed to cook their hamburgers thoroughly. A Napa County Environmental Health echoed those statements in the story today, saying that the public can avoid E. coli contamination by cooking all beef -- especially ground beef -- thoroughly.
The complete story is available at:
http://www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2007/05/06/news/local/iq_3936802.txt
But are consumers really the problem, or just part of the problem? My thoughts below.
dp
Produce, pet food and peanut butter -- what's a consumer to do?
06.may.07
Commentary from the Food Safety Network
foodsafety.ksu.edu
Produce, pet food and peanut butter.
Once home, there was nothing individual Americans could have done to prevent any of the illnesses and deaths associated with these products.
Yet there are a multitude of well-meaning groups who preach to the masses that food safety begins at home.
Since 1998, American consumers have been told by government- and industry-types to FightBac, that is to fight the dangerous bacteria, viruses and parasites by cooking, cleaning, chilling and separating their food. Solid advice, but limited.
For example, in 2004, Salmonella-contaminated Roma tomatoes used in pre-made sandwiches sold at Sheetz convenience stores throughout Pennsylvania sickened over 400 consumers. The FightBac folks told the public in a press release that, "In all cases, the first line of defense to reduce risk of contracting foodborne illness is to cook, clean, chill and separate."
Consumers were effectively being told that when they stop by a convenience store and grab a ready-made sandwich, they should take it apart, grab the tomato slice, wash it, and reassemble the sandwich.
Which would have done nothing to remove the Salmonella inside the tomatoes.
Are consumers really expected to cook all their fresh tomatoes and leafy greens untill 165F to kill salmonella? Fry up peanut buter? Bake the cat food (not that it would do any good)?
Food safety begins on the farm, and extends through processing, distribution, retail, food service and the home. And everyone has a responsibility to reduce the number of harmful bugs that may be present in food.
Yet last week, a California meat processor involved in another E. coli O157:H7 recall said the illness could be avoided if consumers just handled their beef correctly. He was blaming consumers, something most in the meat industry abandoned in the years following the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box outbreak. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture dropped the blame game in 1994.
In mid-1994, Michael Taylor was appointed chief of USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. On Sept. 29, 1994, USDA said it would now regard E. coli O157:H7 in raw ground beef as an “adulterant,” a substance that should not be present in the product. By mid-October, 1994, Taylor announced plans to launch a nationwide sampling of ground beef to assess how much E. coli O157:H7 was in the marketplace. The 5,000 samples would be taken during the year from supermarkets and meat processing plants “to set an example and stimulate companies to put in preventive measures.” Positive samples would prompt product recalls of the entire affected lot, effectively removing it from any possibility of sale.
That's the long-winded version for what a USDA official said in a 1994 television interview: we'll stop blaming consumers when they get sick from the food and water they consume.
Thirteen years later and the same message was stressed by Barbara Kowalcyk, who visited Kansas State University last month. Barbara's life was profoundly shaken in 2001 following the death of her two-and-a-half year old son, Kevin, from complications due to an E. coli O157:H7 infection.
"What happened to my child was horrific," said Kowalcyk, "and afterwards, I was appalled at how little attention is focused on this very serious public health issue that affects millions of Americans each year."
After years of tireless volunteering and advocacy on behalf of the 76 million Americans sickened each year by the food and water they consume, Kowalcyk has formalized her activities by creating the Center for Foodborne Illness (http://www.foodborneillness.org).
In her talk and during our conversation afterwards, Kowalcyk emphasized that she always stressed safe food handling and found it particularly galling when groups directly -- or indirectly -- blamed consumers. Today, such accusations usually take the form of unsubstantiated statements such as, "The majority of foodborne illness happens in the home." This, coupled with the cook, clean, chill, separate messages targeted at consumers (available at your grocer's meat and seafood counter), perpetuates the myth that consumers are the primary cause of foodborne illness.
But as produce, peanut butter and pet food demonstrate, such messages are incomplete. The World Health Organization recognized this back in 2001 and included a fifth key to safer food: use safe water and raw materials, or, source food from safe sources (http://www.who.int/foodsafety/consumer/5keys/en/index.html).
The first line of defense is the farm, not the consumer. Every mouthful of fresh produce, processed food or pet food is an act of faith. And every grower, packer, distributor, retailer and consumer needs to put aside the paternal proclamations and work instead on developing a culture that actually values and protects microbiologically safe food.
Douglas Powell is scientific director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University.
dpowell@ksu.edu
All natural hucksterism?
The original stories can be found at:
http://media.www.kstatecollegian.com/media/storage/paper1022/news/2007/04/25/News/Chipotle.To.Offer.Only.Naturally.Raised.Meats.Starting.May.1-2879745.shtml
and
http://media.www.kstatecollegian.com/media/storage/paper1022/news/2007/04/25/Opinion/Consumers.Should.Appreciate.Purchase.Meat.Raised.Without.Chemicals.Restaurants.S-2879717.shtml
Below are examples of a couple of the ads - the same ones Amy and I saw on a billboard outside Kansas City a couple of months ago and prompted me to pronounce, "I'm never eating there again." (Which won't really impact Chipotle's bottom line since I ate at one once in Manhattan, KS; not a fan). Here's why.
dp
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Chipotle misses the microbiological point
01.may.07
K-State Collegian
Douglas Powell
http://media.www.kstatecollegian.com/media/storage/paper1022/news/2007/05/01/Opinion/Chipotle.Misses.The.Microbiological.Point-2889868.shtml
Editor,
The Chipotle campaign, summarized in advertisements and endorsed by the Collegian ("Chipotle to offer only naturally raised meats starting May 1" and "Consumers should appreciate, purchase meat raised without chemicals," April 25) is great marketing and lousy science.
Chipotle states that, "The hallmarks of Food With Integrity include things like unprocessed, seasonal, family-farmed, sustainable, nutritious, naturally raised, added hormone free, organic and artisanal." That may be a record for the most buzzwords in one sentence. What's missing is "microbiologically safe."
Each and every year, some 76 million Americans are sickened by the food and water they consume. "Organic" and "local" don't describe safeness.
Kudos to Chipotle for capitalizing on hucksterism.
But given the ubiquitous outbreaks of E.coli and salmonella on spinach, lettuce and tomatoes, I choose to purchase food from those who value and promote microbiologically safe food.
Douglas Powell
Scientific director of the International Food Safety Network, associate professor of diagnostic medicine/pathobiology
A new year in Kansas
I met this girl.That's what I wrote a year ago today.
But I would have left Guelph anyway.
The International Food Safety Network at Kansas State is flourishing and is now exclusively online at www.foodsafety.ksu.edu. We're an integral part of Kansas State University's ambitions in the area of food safety and security, barfblog is being relaunched today with groovy new software courtesy of Seattle-attorney and all-around nice guy, Bill Marler, and we have poop shirts. And a whole bunch of other ideas.
Most important to you, the reader, news has gone out every day. We have several new and enthusiastic students at K-State, Brae Surgeoner, who completed her MSc with me, has joined Kansas State as my full-time research assistant, PhD student Ben Chapman is carving out his affiliated but unique identity, and there are several others out there in the ether, comprising our virtual laboratory.
We at the International Food Safety Network seek to reduce the incidence of foodborne illness. We passionately believe in developing and evaluating the use of new messages and media to compel individuals from farm-to-fork to practice safe food behaviors and help create a culture that values microbiologically safe food.
Special thanks to K-State pres Jon Wefald and veterinary college dean Ralph Richardson, who along with Kansas State University as a whole, have made significant investments to establish a top-notch food safety and security team with which I, along with the others at the International Food Safety Network, are privileged to be associated.
Oh, and I met this girl. And we got married.
