Observation

  • We don’t need no education: burger preparation, what consumers say and do in the home

    Posted: October 10th, 2011 - 4:10am by Doug Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The authors state:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    consumer, cook, Education, food safety, Hamburger, Observation, Survey, video
  • People say they will pay more for safer food, will they? Someone needs to test at retail

    Posted: February 8th, 2011 - 3:15pm by Doug Powell

    Willingness-to-pay studies are excellent indicators of what people think they will do in imaginary situations.

    Willingness-to-pay studies are terrible indicators of what people will actually do at the grocery store.

    Brian Roe, professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at Ohio State University (isn’t that The OSU?) and Mario Teisl of the University of Maine report in the journal Food Policy, that based on surveys from 3,511 individuals, Americans would be willing to pay about a dollar per person each year, or an estimated $305 million in the aggregate, for a 10 percent reduction in the likelihood that hamburger they buy in the supermarket is contaminated by E. coli.

    A monkey just flew out of Wayne Campbell’s butt (see video below from last week’s Saturday Night Live).

    By comparison, a 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis estimated the value of eradicating a specific type of E. coli contamination from all food sources would result in a benefit valued at $446 million.

    In the questionnaire, they set up six hypothetical scenarios around the purchase of either a package of hotdogs or a pound of hamburger. They set prices for the packages – both "status quo" foods and those treated with either ethylene gas processing or electron beam irradiation to reduce contaminants – and then laid out a variety of probabilities that the treated or untreated food packages contained contamination with either E. coli or listeria, another pathogen that can cause food-borne (sic) illness.

    They followed by asking respondents to choose one of three actions: buy the food treated with the pathogen-reducing technology, buy their usual brand, or stop buying this product altogether.

    The results showed that consumers will reach a limit to how much they want to pay to reduce their chances of getting sick. If the treated product cost only 10 cents more than an untreated package, about 60 percent of respondents said they'd buy the improved product. But when that higher price reached $1.60 more per package, less than a third would opt for the treated product.

    The structure of the survey also allowed researchers to see the influence of human behavior and opinions on likely illness outcomes.

    "If the food industry were forced to put technology in place that lowered the presence of E. coli and that ramped up prices to the extent where everybody had to pay about a dollar more out of pocket each year for hamburger, we're saying that, according to this model, that would be about an equal tradeoff for the U.S. population. And if the technology costs only about 10 cents per person instead, that would seem like a good deal to most people," he said.

    "If regulators could become more comfortable with this measurement process, agencies might change the way they conduct their cost-benefit analysis. And that would be an interest of ours, to see if our work and others' work in this area will eventually change the way people attack these questions."

    So it’s more about changing the way estimates are done. Estimates are lousy surrogates. I’m all for marketing food safety – at retail, food service, markets, everywhere. Brag about test results, use big signs, smart phone readers, just be able to back it up.
     

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    Consumers, food safety, Observation, Price, Retail, Survey, willing to pay
  • Most don’t do the Dracula when sneezing or coughing

    Posted: July 13th, 2010 - 12:35pm by Doug Powell

    Observational research is so much more meaningful – either direct or with video – than self-reported surveys. Of course, everyone says they wash their hands, but they don’t.

    Same with blowing the nose or coughing. Health types have been promoting the Dracula-move – expelling your inner germs into the crook of your arm – but when medical students secretly watched hundreds of people cough or sneeze at a train station, a shopping mall and a hospital in New Zealand, most people failed to properly prevent an airborne explosion of infectious germs.

    The work was done in the capital city of Wellington over two weeks last August, at the tail end of a worrisome but fairly mild wave of swine flu illnesses. It was a time when the pandemic was international news, and public health campaigns were telling children and adults to be careful about spreading the virus.

    The good news is that about three of every four people tried to cover their cough or sneeze, in at least a token attempt to prevent germs from flying through the air.

    The bad news is that most people — about two of three — used their hands to do it.

    Study author Nick Wilson, an associate professor of public health at the Otago University campus in Wellington, said,

    "When you cough into your hands, you cover your hand in virus. Then you touch doorknobs, furniture and other things. And other people touch those and get viruses that way.”

    Only 1 in 77 pulled the Dracula move, and about 1 in 30 used a tissue or hankerchief.

    The researchers didn't report numbers on this, but several times they saw people spit on the floor, including at the hospital.

    Wilson’s team logged 384 sneezes and coughs.
     

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    Compliance, cough, count, dracula, elbow, Observation, Sneeze
  • People handle food any way they want

    Posted: March 11th, 2010 - 8:20am by Doug Powell

    Some form of direct observation is the only way to do meaningful food safety behavior research, and the phrase, consumer food safety education, should be banned.

    Or at least try something new – the stuff that is out there just doesn’t work.

    That’s what I take from a preliminary summary of research led by Christine Bruhn, director of the Center for Consumer Research at the University of California, Davis, and Ho Phang, prepared by Meatingplace.

    Sure, those are a couple of my primary messages, so it’s easy to agree with someone who agrees with me, but nice to hear it confirmed.

    Bruhn and colleagues videotaped 200 volunteers in their homes while they prepared burgers and salad. She observed their methods of defrosting the meat — frozen, preformed burgers — their refrigerators' temperature, whether or not they put themselves at risk for cross-contamination and how they determined whether the meat was done.

    Of those in the study:

    * Twenty-five percent said they prefer their burgers pink.
    * Eighty-three percent said they used visual clues, rather than a meat thermometer, to determine the doneness of their burgers.
    * About half owned a meat thermometer, but almost all of those participants said they used it on larger cuts of meat, not burgers.
    * Seventy-five percent said they were unlikely to use a meat thermometer on burgers.

    Even though participants knew they were being videotaped, many did not follow recommended guidelines when preparing their burgers:

    * Although 90 percent of consumers were observed washing their hands prior to food preparation, the average hand-washing time was just seven seconds, and only 31 percent dried their hands with a clean towel (either a paper towel or a cloth towel that had not been used previously).

    * Potential cross-contamination — defined by the study as "an event in which pathogens could be transferred from one surface to another as a result of contact with a potential source of contamination" — occurred in 74 percent of the households.

    * While a bar graph showing the temperature distribution of the finished burgers demonstrated that many were at or near the recommended 160 degrees F, a few of the burgers' temperatures were recorded to be much lower — as low as 112 degrees F. (Study coordinators observing consumer behavior made sure all burgers were cooked to 160 F before volunteers consumed them.)

    Even after the exercise, only 23 percent of participants said they would use a meat thermometer on burgers in the future.

    Bruhn said,

    "Consumer education is not sufficient. Take the extra step. It protects the public, and it protects you."

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    bruhn, consumer, Hamburger, Observation, Survey, video
  • Shoot, shovel and shut up - the wrong approach for animal and zoonotic diseases

    Posted: November 1st, 2009 - 6:52am by Doug Powell

    Daughter Sorenne woke up around 6:15 a.m. after a big Halloween night (thanks for the costume, Katie). Then the clocks on the computer changed and I realized it was 5:15 a.m.

    Damn you daylight savings.

    So while Sorenne plays on the floor and fills her diaper, I’m looking at a poignant release from the France-based World Organization for Animal Health, inexplicably referred to as OIE (it’s a French thing) reiterating the importance of animal health rules to control human disease.

    When the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease was discovered in Canada in May, 2003, Alberta premier Ralph Klein famously declared that any

    "self-respecting rancher would have shot, shovelled and shut up."

    In 1184, city leaders in Toulouse, France, introduced some of the first documented measures to oversee the sale of meat: profit for butchers was limited to eight per cent; the partnership between two butchers was forbidden; and, selling the meat of sick animals was forbidden unless the buyer was warned.

    By 1394, the Toulouse charter on butchering contained 60 articles, 19 of which were devoted to health and safety.

    As outlined by Madeleine Ferrières, a professor of social history at the University of Avignon, in her 2002 book, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, the goal of regulations at butcher shops -- the forerunners of today's slaughterhouse -- was to safeguard consumers and increase tax revenues. Animals from the surrounding countryside were consolidated at a single spot -- the evolving slaughterhouse, originally inside city walls -- so taxes could be more easily gathered, and so animals could be physically examined for signs of disease.

    It's no different today: slaughterhouses are common collection points to examine animals for signs of disease and to collect various levies. And like medieval times, one of the most basic rules is animals that cannot walk are forbidden from entering (the slaughterhouse or city).

    Bernard Vallat, Director General of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), reminded the world this morning that veterinary legislation is the foundation of any efficient animal health policy.

    Veterinary legislation is a critical infrastructure element for all countries. In many OIE Member countries, the veterinary legislation has not been updated for many years and is obsolete or inadequate in structure and content for the challenges facing veterinary services in today's world.

    Dr Vallat says that it is important that the veterinary services have the authority to enter livestock premises and other establishments and take the actions needed for early detection, reporting and rapid and effective management of any animal diseases as soon as they are detected. Such actions include the capacity to seize animals and products, to impose standstills, quarantine, testing and other procedures; to control animals and products at frontiers; and to require the destruction and safe disposal of animals and all articles considered to present a risk of disease transmission and to public health. These activities represent the core activities of veterinary services in the field of animal health control and veterinary public health and the legislation must provide the necessary authority as a minimum.

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    Cup, Disclosure, Jaw Wired Shut, Mad Cow Disease, Observation, Oie, Shoot, Shovel, Zoonotic
  • Shock and shame: How to increase handwashing compliance

    Posted: October 15th, 2009 - 1:31pm by Doug Powell

    A British study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concluded that people are more likely to wash their hands properly after using the toilet if they are shamed into it or think they are being watched.

    As part of a flood of handwashing information for today’s World Handwashing Day, the study, published in the American Journal of Public Health found that with no reminders, 32 percent of men and 64 percent of women used soap.

    The observational study reported on the behavior of people using toilets at motorway service stations in Britain over 32 days.

    When prompted by an electronic message flashing up on a board asking: "Is the person next to you washing with soap?," around 12 percent more men and 11 percent more women used soap.

    Other messages flashed on the electronic boards included:

    • Water doesn't kill germs, soap does; and,
    • Don't be a dirty soap dodger.

    The message that produced the strongest positive response was: "Is the person next to you washing with soap?"

    The researchers also noted "intriguing differences" in the behavior of men and women: While women responded to simple reminders, men tended to react best to messages that invoked disgust, such as:

    • Don't take the loo with you -- wash with soap, and
    • Soap it off or eat it later.

    I like the last one.

    We’ve undertaken both shock and shame attempts at handwashing messages (below). Results pending.

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    Messages, Observation, Research, Shame, Shock
  • Eat My Brain

    Posted: January 12th, 2009 - 5:42pm by Doug Powell

    In May 2008, thousands of South Koreans took to the streets to protest the impending importation of U.S. beef. In a classic example of the social amplification of risk theory, citizens were apparently convinced that substandard beef was headed for South Korea and they would all develop mad cow disease.

    Now, some citizens are fighting back.

    JoonAng Daily reports that more than 1,000 Korean-Americans filed a group lawsuit against a Korean broadcaster yesterday, claiming its coverage of the supposed health risks of U.S. beef humiliated them and subjected them to mockery in the United States.

    In April last year, Seoul-based MBC broadcast a report on U.S. beef warning that consumption of the meat may lead to the human form of mad cow disease. Following the airing of the “PD Diary” episode, tens of thousands of South Koreans took to the streets to protest a Seoul-Washington agreement that reopened the Korean beef market to U.S. products.

    The protests continued for months, rattling the new Lee Myung-bak administration. …

    “We demand that MBC and the chief producer of PD Diary pay for the psychological damage and broadcast a correction report and an apology,” said Lee Heon, legal representative of the group. …

    Lee said the plaintiffs were insulted by PD Diary as its report insinuated that anyone who eats U.S. beef will contract the human form of mad cow disease. He also argued that because of the report, people living in Korea came to look down on overseas Koreans who have eaten U.S. beef for years.

    And every time I hear of some frivolous story about mad cow disease – not the serious stories where innocent people die – I think of this 1995 song by Vancouver band, The Odds.
     

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    Beef, Eat My Brain, Korea, Observation, Odds, U.s.
  • Mad cow Korea: Social amplification of risk, Internet style

    Posted: May 31st, 2008 - 1:13pm by Doug Powell

    One of the most influential papers I ever read was in a 1988 issue of the journal, Risk Analysis, entitled, The Social Amplification of Risk: A Conceptual Framework, by Roger E. Kasperson, Ortwin Renn, Paul Slovic, Halina S. Brown, Jacque Emel, Robert Goble, Jeanne X. Kasperson and Samuel Ratick. Today the paper seems particularly prescient for the events going on today, 20 years later,  in South Korea, where riot police were bracing for what could be the largest anti-government protest during weeks of rallies against an agreement to resume imports of U.S. beef.

    Some 2,500 people gathered at a protest site in central Seoul, with thousands more expected to join them after a separate rally. Police estimated the total turnout would be about 20,000, the biggest in weeks of anti-U.S. beef protests.

    Other reports said up to 100,000 protesters were present.

    About a dozen farmers in traditional funeral clothes marched Saturday on a downtown street on the way to the main protest site, carrying signs with anti-government slogans. They also carried the severed head of a cow (right).

    South Korea agreed last month to reopen what was formerly the third-largest overseas market for U.S. beef. It had been shut for most of the past 4 1/2 years following the first U.S. case of mad cow disease in a Canadian-born cow in Washington state in 2003.

    That deal, coupled with some sensational media reports, sparked fears of mad cow disease and triggered weeks of near-daily street protests calling for scrapping and renegotiating the agreement (left, protesters carry a sign symbolizing U.S. beef infected by mad cow disease, from Reuters).











    The abstract from the Kasperson, et al., paper, is below.

    One of the most perplexing problems in risk analysis is why some relatively minor risks or risk events, as assessed by technical experts, often elicit strong public concerns and result in substantial impacts upon society and economy. This article sets forth a conceptual framework that seeks to link systematically the technical assessment of risk with psychological, sociological, and cultural perspectives of risk perception and risk-related behavior. The main thesis is that hazards interact with psychological, social, institutional, and cultural processes in ways that may amplify or attenuate public responses to the risk or risk event. A structural description of the social amplification of risk is now possible. Amplification occurs at two stages: in the transfer of information about the risk, and in the response mechanisms of society. Signals about risk are processed by individual and social amplification stations, including the scientist who communicates the risk assessment, the news media, cultural groups, interpersonal networks, and others. Key steps of amplifications can be identified at each stage. The amplified risk leads to behavioral responses, which, in turn, result in secondary impacts. Models are presented that portray the elements and linkages in the proposed conceptual framework.




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    Korea, Observation
  • Show me, don't tell me

    Posted: May 16th, 2008 - 9:51am by Doug Powell

    Show me, don't tell me: That's what I thought as I glanced through the latest survey from the International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation on May 14, 2008.

    The survey of 1,000 American adults, conducted in February and March of 2008, found that,

    "while more than three-quarters of Americans (82%) say they are confident in their ability to safely prepare food, many do not take steps to reduce the spread of bacteria in their kitchen. For instance, less than half (48%) report using separate cutting boards for raw meat or poultry and produce, and just 29% say they use a meat thermometer. … Most (92%) report washing their hands with soap and water when preparing food, and nearly as many (79%) say they store leftovers within two hours of serving. But just 15% report checking the wattage on their microwaves, and even fewer (7%) say they use a meat thermometer when using their microwave."

    Danielle Schor, Senior Vice President of Food Safety for the IFIC Foundation and registered dietitian, said,

    “Consumers are a lot more confident about their ability to safely prepare food than they ought to be, based on what we learned. We still have a long way to go to educate the public about the basics such as avoiding cross contamination and cooking to proper temperature."

    We've been doing a bunch of observational research over the past year and results will start trickling out in the next few months. Until then, as Brae Surgeoner wrote in the June 2007 issue of Food Protection Trends

    "The study of consumer food-handling practices has relied almost exclusively on data obtained in self-report surveys. … The problem is that people often lie.

    "In 1999, a team of Australian researchers, in their article, “A Video Study of Australian Domestic Food-Handling Practices,” impressed upon readers of the Journal of Food Protection the discrepancy that exists between what consumers say they do, and what they actually do. Comparing responses to a food-safety questionnaire administered prior to video surveillance of participants in their home kitchens, the researchers found significant deviations between stated and actual behavior.  For example, there was a highly significant difference between self-reported and observed hand-washing practices. … Without observing actual behavior, food safety educators may be developing interventions that are successful in changing what individuals report they do, but may do little in changing what they actually do."

    Oh, and anyone who says that avoiding cross-contamination is simple should be videotaped preparing a meal -- preferably with a few kids running around or some other distractions similar to actual scenarios -- and the video analyzed by trained coders looking for food safety, including cross-contamination, mistakes. My videos are at http://www.youtube.com/SafeFoodCafe, and I make mistakes -- or at least what may be defined as a mistake. That's because food safety -- including avoiding cross-contamination -- is not simple.


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    Cross-contamination, Observation, Survey
  • Superbug found in Canadian pork products

    Posted: March 19th, 2008 - 12:54pm by Ben Chapman

    Helen Branswell of the Canadian Press reports that Canadian researchers have found antibiotic-resistant Staph in pork products in available at Canadian retail stores:

    [The discovery] raises questions about how the contamination occurred, how frequently it happens and whether it has implications for human health.

    Just under 10 per cent of sampled pork chops and ground pork recently purchased in four provinces tested positive for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, lead researcher Dr. Scott Weese reported Wednesday in a presentation to the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta.

    To date Weese's team has tested 212 meat samples bought in four different provinces. Most were pork chops but the group also tested a few pork shoulder roasts and some ground pork.

    None of the pork roasts carried the bacteria but an equal percentage of pork chops and ground pork did. The rates of positive MRSA tests ranged from zero per cent in one province to 33 per cent in another. Weese didn't want to name the provinces.

    What is most interesting to me are Weese's comments about what food handlers actually do:

    "If they do what they're supposed to do in terms of meat handling, then it should be perfectly safe. But do people do that is the question?"

    What food handlers do (whether in the restaurant, packing house, slaughter house or home) is an area of uncertainty, and there isn't a whole lot of data around it.  We've been conducting some research of food handler practices using observation,  (T6-12, An Exploratory Study of Food-handling Practices at Church Dinners in Canada was presented at IAFP in 2007) and will be presenting some of our newest findings this summer at IAFP in Columbus, OH.
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    Msra, Observation, Pork