The 3-year-old son of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony had a poop in their pool and it cost $6,000 to clean.

Oh The Scandal reports that Marc told Jay Leno this week, “He had an accident in the pool. It got into the filtration system and they charged us to clean it. That was expensive. He took a $6,000 dump in the pool!”
 

The New York Times is reporting tonight that the produce industry — rocked by several major recalls in recent years linked to outbreaks of salmonella, E. coli and other bacteria — has been searching for a better way to wash the lettuce, spinach and other greens it bags and sells in grocery stores and to restaurants.

Now, the nation’s leading producer of bagged salad greens, Fresh Express, says that washing them in a mild acid solution accomplishes the task.

The company plans to announce on Friday that it is abandoning the standard industry practice of washing leafy greens with chlorine and has begun using the acid mixture, which it claims is many times more effective in killing bacteria. The new wash solution, called FreshRinse, contains organic acids commonly used in the food industry, including lactic acid, a compound found in milk.

Mike Burness, vice president of global quality and food safety at Chiquita Brands International, which owns Fresh Express, said,

“We do believe it provides a much higher level of effectiveness versus the chlorine sanitizers in use today. This technology was developed to raise the bar.”

Mr. Burness said the breakthrough came when researchers at the company combined lactic acid with another organic acid, peracetic acid. The two together, he said, worked much better than either one separately and also achieved markedly better results than chlorine.

Fresh Express issued three separate recalls this year of packaged salad greens after random testing found salmonella, E. coli and listeria in bags of its products.
Fresh Express said that its new cleaning mixture was 750 times as effective as chlorine in killing bacteria suspended in wash water. It is also at least nine times as effective as chlorine in killing bacteria that has become attached to the leaves of produce.

Mr. Burness said that lettuce and other greens were cut up in the company’s plants, washed in water containing the acid mixture, typically for 20 to 40 seconds, then rinsed, dried and bagged. He said another advantage is that the acid wash did not bleach the greens, making them pale in color, as chlorine can.
The company said that it planned to license the mixture for use by other producers.

Fresh Express has not published its research, so food safety experts said on Thursday that they were unable to adequately evaluate the company’s claims.
Fresh Express said that it had informed the F.D.A. about its use of the acid wash mixture, but that it was not required to get approval for the switch because the ingredients were already approved for use in the food industry.
 

Don’t them Harvard boys know nothin’?

Never reopen a place until you’re sure the norovirus has been taken care of and all employees are healthy.

Following reports of a small norovirus outbreak linked to the Harvard Faculty Club last week, the Boston Globe reports this morning that as many as 200 people may have been affected by a norovirus outbreak, forcing the restaurant and lodge to close for a second time.

The club, which closed last week because of concerns about the virus, shut down again Tuesday as about 100 people reported becoming ill after eating at the club between Easter brunch Sunday and Tuesday morning.

To be fair, everyone is saying the right things, but noro outbreaks are often far more serious and insidious than people realize.

Louise Rice, director of public nursing for the city, explained Harvard voluntarily closed the club when the first wave of illnesses was reported last week, and the club brought in an outside cleaning crew to scrub the building down, The city inspected the club, and Rice said the building was “spotless.’’

The city also screened full- and part-time employees at the club, about 100 of them, before it reopened Sunday, she said.

But by Tuesday morning, Harvard notified the city that a number of people had reported becoming ill after eating at the club between Easter Brunch and Tuesday morning.

There seems to be some sort of disconnect between words and actions.

Chapman says that while dirty bathrooms can be gross, like the gotcha moments on hidden camera programs, there really isn't any information that suggests a place with a dirty bathroom is any more or less likely to cause an outbreak than a place with a clean bathroom. Lots of restaurants have separate handwashing facilities in the kitchen, and risk-based inspection systems focus on factors that lead to illness as identified by the CDC and WHO -- not the floors, walls and ceilings, and how many flies are on a fly strip.

But what about on cruise ships?

A team of researchers from Boston University School (BUSM), Carney Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance and Tufts University School of Medicine, have found that widespread poor compliance with regular cleaning of public restrooms on cruise ships may predict subsequent norovirus infection outbreaks (NoVOs).

This study, which appears in the November 1st issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, is the first study of environmental hygiene on cruise ships.
Outbreaks of acute gastroenteritis (AGE) often occur in close populations, such as among cruise ship passengers. Recent epidemiologic investigations of outbreaks of AGE confirmed that 95 percent of cruise ship AGE outbreaks are caused by norovirus.

Despite biannual sanitation monitoring and hand hygiene interventions among passengers and crew members, 66 ships monitored by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experienced NoV infection outbreaks (NoVOs) between 2003 and 2008.

Trained health care professionals evaluated the thoroughness of disinfection cleaning of six standardized objects (toilet seat, flush handle or button, toilet stall inner handhold, stall inner door handle, restroom inner door handle, and baby changing table surfaces) with high potential for fecal contamination in cruise ship public restrooms.

The researchers found only 37 percent of the 273 randomly selected public restrooms that were evaluated on 1,546 occasions were cleaned daily. The overall cleanliness of the six standardized surfaces on each ship ranged from four to 100 percent. Although some objects in most restrooms were cleaned at least daily, on 275 occasions no objects in a restroom were cleaned for at least 24 hours.