Don’t eat poop. And if you do, cook the poop. Thoroughly.

Which is why I don’t eat raw oysters. Who knows what poop they’ve filtered through their bivalves.

In 2009 public health authorities traced the source of two outbreaks, in Auckland and Waikato, back to the Coromandel, according to today's New Zealand Medical Journal.

Ten people were infected at a catered event in Auckland and three at a Cambridge restaurant. Four more at the Auckland event ate oysters but did not fall ill. Neither venue nor the oyster farm is named in the journal report.

In Cambridge, two of the unlucky diners ate their oysters raw while the third consumed cooked oyster Kilpatrick but complained the shellfish was undercooked and sent it back for re-cooking.

The Food Safety Authority closed the growing area where the oysters came from in late July 2009 following the Auckland outbreak but eight days before the Cambridge diners had their contaminated meal.

The journal report says the leaking sewer was found only by chance. In early August 2009 the Thames Coromandel District Council reported the sewer had been disturbed during maintenance of the wastewater treatment plant near the oyster growing area.

"The pipe had been leaking partially treated effluent into the stream that flowed into the affected growing area," says the report by public health doctor Richard Wall and colleagues.

Dr Wall and colleagues say temperatures above 60C deactivate norovirus, although cooking oysters has not been shown to reliably inactivate viruses.

In 2006 imported Korean oysters were blamed for five outbreaks of the disease. One of these was at Eden Park in which it was estimated more than 300 corporate guests at an All Blacks-Ireland test were poisoned after eating the raw oysters.

If cat poop coffee is just too passé, then coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of the rare South American Jacu bird may be for you.

The bird apparently eats only the best, ripest Arabica berries and excretes the beans in piles under the coffee trees, which are then collected, washed, dried and roasted in the usual way.

It’s being sold in Brisbane at Merlo cafes during December (they claim to be the only importers of the coffee in Australia). This particular Jacu coffee comes from Camocim Estate, a certified biodynamic/fairtrade farm in Pedra Azul, Espirito Santo, Brazil.

For those who lwant to pay $10 for a cup of poop coffee, Food Network star Ted Allen teamed up with The Onion’s “Today Now!” to prepare a meal to try and impress pretentious asshole friends with.

Ingredients include:
• stupid ass trendy piece of fish
some kind of nut you never heard of
; and,
• puree of baby something or other.

1. Chose the most expensive piece of fish you can find

2. Spend way too much time processing nuts

3. Dredge fish in nuts

4. Cook for 3 minutes per side

5. painstakingly prepare turnips when you could just have gotten them from a can.

The video promoting Ted’s book is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RMUDw4_e93Y. Language warning.

My friend Farmer Jeff e-mailed me this morning. He’s not doing so well, but still has fire in his belly and the Oregon strawberry outbreak prompted him to write.

Jeff was a pioneer in fruit and vegetable growing in southern Ontario. I’m sure he got a chuckle when he heard that Monsanto announced last week it was going to start selling a consumer-oriented herbicide-tolerant Bt sweet corn. Jeff was growing, labeling and selling Syngenta’s Bt sweet corn over a decade ago (that's Jeff, in the white T-shirt and banana pants doing what he loves -- talking farming).

But Jeff always had a receptive ear for my microbial food safety rants and he always tried to fit my theories into the practicalities of farm life: especially strawberries.

Jaquith Strawberry Farm in rural Washington County, Oregon is a 35-acre strawberry producer, has been identified as the source of an E. coli O157:H7 that has killed one and sickened 15; four people went to the hospital, including two people who suffered kidney failure.

The farm sold potentially tainted fresh strawberries to buyers who in turn distributed them to roadside stands and farmers markets in Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, Yamhill and Clatsop counties.

The last of the berries were sold Aug. 1, but health officials are worried that consumers might have stored some of them in the freezer or turned them into uncooked jam.

Anyone who bought strawberries from a stand north of Marion County and as far east as Clackamas County should throw them out. They were sold in unmarked containers without labels.

According to reports in The Oregonian, once it became apparent an outbreak was emerging, epidemiologists kicked into high gear, grilling patients on what they had eaten and where to find a common link. Many said they bought strawberries from a roadside stand.

Next, epidemiologists drove to homes to collect berries from freezers for testing. They quizzed roadside stands where patients had shopped. Those questions turned up Jaquith Strawberry Farm as the likely source of the contamination.

William Keene, senior epidemiologist with Oregon Public Health, suspects the source might be deer he saw roaming through the fields. Scientists took more than 100 soil and other samples from the farm this weekend and sent them to a lab outside Seattle for testing, hoping to confirm the source of E. coli O157:H7.

In the scramble to unravel an E. coli outbreak traced to strawberries, Oregon food safety experts have spent days poring over sales information.

Jaquith Strawberry Farm provided hand-written lists of buyers, sometimes first names only, to food safety specialists. Officials then worked the phones, calling all the people on the list. But the calls didn't stop there. What they discovered is that the berries sometimes changed hands, traveling from buyer to farmers markets and then to consumers.

And sometimes farmers bought the berries and resold them as their own crop, a practice that is illegal.

"Apparently, it is more common than we thought," said Vance Bybee, head of food safety at Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Deer, like other ruminants, are the natural reservoirs for shiga-toxin producing E. coli like O157:H7 (that’s right, Food Inc. fans, it’s not just feedlot cattle). Deer were the suspected source in the 1996 E. coli O157:H7 in unpasteurized Odwalla juice that sickened 76 and killed a 16-month-old. Deer meat has also been involved in at least two recognized E. coli outbreaks.

My friend Jeff says the pickers should have noticed the deer poop, or at least been aware, and as another farmer friend would suggest, “shoot the f***ers.”

Jeff says agriculture is going backwards.

A table of strawberry-related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/strawberries-related-outbreaks. The overwhelming majority of these outbreaks are related to handling, not growing. But, stuff happens.
 

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!”