After reading (and translating) the latest food safety infosheet about a Minnesota salmonellosis outbreak, I knew the outbreak revealed flaws in both food safety policy and food safety culture at workplaces.

In this case, one of the two employees infected with salmonella working at the delicatessen section, spread the bacteria to costumers after being in direct contact with baby chicks he owned. That immediately reminded me about something I experienced three weeks ago. While driving back to Kansas City, I stopped by a Burger King (yes, once every 6 months I will have one, especially when I don’t feel like cooking after driving for two hours on the most boring stretch of highway in the U.S.).

When I pulled up to the menu thinggy, a printed note pasted over one of the products read (right, exactly as shown):

“Manufacurer Out Of Stock.”

Besides misspelling manufacturer, it made me wonder how much the people touching and preparing food really care. If they can’t spend 15 seconds proofreading this sign, which was posted at least in three different places, how much do you think they know about food safety?

Food safety should be farm-to-fork, so train employees and use these handy infosheets we send out every 2-3 weeks, because they are proven to actually have a positive impact. Or don’t, and next time you could actually be featured on one of them.
 

In Sept.. 2007, my friend Frank was running food safety things at Disney in Orlando, and asked me to visit and speak with his staff.

“Doug, I want you to talk about food safety messages that have been proven to work, that are supported by peer-reviewed evidence and lead to demonstrated behavior change,” or something like that.

I said it would be a brief talk.

There was nothing – nothing – that could be rigorously demonstrated to have changed food safety behavior in any group, positive or negative. Everything was about as effective as those, ‘Employees must wash hands’ signs.

Sometime around 2001 things started to change in my lab at the University of Guelph. I’d gotten tired of genetically engineered food, had gone about as far as we could with the fresh produce on-farm food safety thing, and I wanted to focus more on the things that made people barf.

Chapman and I were playing hockey a lot – one of the advantages of having an on-campus office right beside two full-sized ice hockey surfaces (not the miniature size available in Manhattan, Kansas) – and there was a bar and restaurant that overlooked the one ice surface where we often engaged in after-hockey food safety meetings with our industry, provincial and federal government colleagues.

We had all this food safety information, and the manager of the bar around 2003 was into food safety, so we thought, if daily sports pages are posted above urinals and on the doors of washroom stall, why not engaging food safety information?

It took us awhile to become engaging, but we listened to criticism and made things better. We experimented with different formats in restaurants and on-line. There’s an entire paper describing all this but it hasn’t been published yet (accepted, but not published).

Meanwhile, Chapman took ownership of these food safety infosheets, they got translated into different languages depending on the capabilities of whatever students were around, and we had lots of e-mails from all over the world from people who like them and use them in the workplace.

But a bunch of e-mails doesn’t count as much in the way of evidence.

So Chapman (left, with Dani, 10 years ago at my place) partnered with a food safety dude at a company in Canada and they made things happen (we are forever grateful, dude, above right, exactly as shown, and you know who you are).

Katie and Tiffany had to watch hours of video, Tanya and me helped with the design, but otherwise it was Chapman, going to these sites at 5 a.m. to make sure the cameras were set up. I went once when visiting from Kansas, but otherwise, stayed out of the way, other than years of nagging to write it up, finish his thesis, and the weekly attempts to correct his horrendous spelling and grammar on the infosheets.

But after all those years and effort, Chapman has finally shown a food safety message that can translated into better food safety practices at food service. After exposure to the food safety infosheets, cross-contamination events went down 20 per cent, and handwashing attempts went up 7 per cent. We controlled for various factors as best we could.

Since September 2006 over 150 food safety infosheets have been produced and are available to anyone at www.foodsafetyinfosheets.com. The website has had a recent redesign, adding a search function, automatic email alerts and RSS feeds. The new database is also sortable by pathogen, location and risk factor.

Now I have something to tell Frank.
 

With the end of the National Hockey League regular season last night – people in Kansas will have no idea what I am talking abooooout – it’s fitting Canadian Ben Chapman gets top billing in the small market of Raleigh, North Carolina – they used to be the Hartford Whalers – where the Carolina Hurricanes have proven they can suck as bad as the Toronto Maple Leafs.

General Manager Jim Rutherford, from Beeton, Ontario, what went wrong? Is it because Chapman moved to Raleigh?

The Charlotte Observer features Chapman this morning and has a few nosestretchers, beginning by billing Chapman as a molecular biologist: yah, me too, except neither of us has run a gel in the past decade.

Ben Chapman, a molecular biologist (right, sorta as shown, with a lot of photoshop), considers it a distinct honor to publish some of his academic findings on barfblog.com and post scholarly writings in restaurant kitchens.

The N.C. State University assistant professor, who also publishes academic findings in peer-reviewed journals, is a food safety expert. …

Chapman was inspired by flyers posted above urinals in an Ontario sports bar near where he did his graduate work. Then he washed dishes in a university restaurant for three months (nosestretcher alert – it was one month) and learned that food handlers care about celebrities, music and pop culture.

He replaced statistics with narratives and wrapped the information sheet in plastic, because in a kitchen that indicates something is important.

When he posted the information sheets in kitchens where video cameras monitored how often 47 food handlers washed their hands and switched knives after cutting raw chicken, it turned out that "telling stories about foodborne illnesses and the consequences to food handlers makes a difference," he said.

Since he conducted the study and moved to North Carolina, he's learned about other tools he plans to tap to get his message across - YouTube, mommyblogs and Twitter.

Traduzido por: Manoelita Warkentien
O mais novo folheto de Segurança Alimentar, que é uma página gráfica de histórias relacionadas a segurança alimentar – direcionadas para manipuladores de alimentos, está agora disponível em
www.foodsafetyinfosheets.com
Destaques do novo folheto:
- Foi necessário hospitalizar 7 dos 21 casos.
- A Shigella é eliminada nas fezes de indivíduos contaminados até duas semanas depois do sintomas terminarem. Lavar as mãos é um fator preventivo.
- Ron e Sarah Bowers abriu processo em nome de seu filho de dois anos de idade, que começou apresentar sintomas de shigellosis (náusea, e cólica abdominal) em 27 de Fevereiro.
Folhetos de Segurança Alimentar são criados semanalmente e são colocados em restaurantes, atacados, fazendas e usados em treinamentos por todo o mundo. Se você quiser solicitar qualquer tópico para o próximo folheto ou foto, por favor, contatar Ben Chapman em Benjamin_chapman@ncsu.edu . Você pode seguir as histórias dos folhetos de segurança alimentar e barfblog em twitter @benjaminchapman e @barfblog.