In January 1993 I was in 10th grade. I had just discovered the Violent Femmes and punk rock; was worried about figuring out calculus (I eventually did); and spent most of my time being uncool and longing to be cool. Probably pretty similar to every other awkward teenager. I didn't have a clue that a tragic foodborne illness outbreak was unfolding in the Pacific Northwest and that the event would eventually define a bunch of what I focus on every day.

I had never even heard of Jack-in-the-Box.

The outbreak was linked to four deaths, over to 700 illnesses and almost 200 hospitalizations. E. coli O157:H7 contaminated hamburger was then undercooked and served to thousands from 73 Jack-in-the-Box restaurants. Jack-in-the-Box will forever be linked to this event - and over the past 18 years has become a prominent force in food safety risk reduction.

News of this outbreak hit on President Clinton's inauguration day and as Doug has written,

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.

And the first focus went to E. coli O157:H7 - the serogroup linked to the Jack-in-the-Box illnesses. Food microbiologists and epidemiologists have seen lots of other equally dangerous shigatoxin-producing serogroups (shigatoxin is what makes E. coli O157:H7, along with its ability to stick to cells so devastating). Here's a list of the non-O157 STEC outbreaks we've been able to find going back to the mid-1990s.

Later this afternoon I will be on my way to Lincoln, NE to meet with a group of academics, researchers, extension folks and regulators to talk about a large 5-year integrated project focused on reducing STECs from farm-to-fork that USDA NIFA has funded. Through the wonders of the Internet, Doug will be Skyping in.

LINCOLN, Neb. -- The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today that it has awarded a research grant to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) to help reduce the occurrence and public health risks from Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) along the entire beef production pathway. Dr. Chavonda Jacobs-Young, acting director of USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), is scheduled to award the $25 million grant to the UNL-lead research team today at the university in Lincoln.

"Shiga toxin-producing E. coli are a serious threat to our food supply and public health, causing more than 265,000 infections each year," said Chavonda Jacobs-Young, acting NIFA director. "As non-O157 STEC bacteria have emerged and evolved, so too must our regulatory policies to protect the public health and ensure the safety of our food supply. This research will help us to understand how these pathogens travel throughout the beef production process and how outbreaks occur, enabling us to find ways to prevent illness and improve the safety of our nation's food supply."

Dr. James Keen at UNL, along with a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary team of researchers, educators and extension specialists, will use the $25 million grant to improve risk management and assessment of eight strains of STEC in beef. This work will include the O104 strain that caused the recent outbreak in Germany. The project will focus on identifying hazards and assessing exposures that lead to STEC infections in cattle and on developing strategies to detect, characterize and control these pathogens along the beef chain. This knowledge will then be used to find practical and effective STEC risk mitigation strategies. The five main objectives of the project include:

Detection: develop and implement rapid detection technologies for pre-harvest, post-harvest and consumer environments.

Biology: characterize the biological and epidemiological factors that drive outbreaks of STEC in pre-harvest, post-harvest, retail and consumer settings.

Interventions: develop effective and economical interventions to lessen STEC risk from cattle, hides, carcasses, and ground and non-intact beef and compare the feasibility of implementing these interventions for large, small and very small beef producers.

Risk analysis and assessment: develop a risk assessment model for STEC from live cattle to consumption to evaluate mitigation strategies and their expected public health impacts.

Risk management and communication: translate research findings into user-friendly food-safety deliverables for stakeholders, food safety professionals, regulators, educators and consumers.

For more check out the full PR here.
 

 To all broken hearts: don't eat prepackaged cookie dough before it's baked.

That’s the message health-types conclude from a June 2009 outbreak of shiga-toxin producing E. coli (primarily O157:H7) in Nestle Toll House cookie dough that sickened at least 77 people in 30 states. Thirty-five people were hospitalized – from cookie dough.

The 2009 investigation, which involved extensive traceback, laboratory, and environmental analysis, led to a recall of 3.6 million packages of the cookie dough. However, no single source, vehicle, or production process associated with the dough could be identified for certain to have contributed to the contamination.

The researchers could not conclusively implicate flour as the E. coli source, but it remains the prime suspect. They pointed out that a single purchase of contaminated flour might have been used to manufacture multiple lots and varieties of dough over a period of time as suggested by the use-by dates on the contaminated product.

Flour does not ordinarily undergo a kill step to kill pathogens that may be present, unlike the other ingredients in the cookie dough like the pasteurized eggs, molasses, sugar, baking soda, and margarine. Chocolate was also not implicated in this outbreak since eating chocolate chip cookie dough was less strongly associated with these illnesses when compared with consuming other flavors of cookie dough.

The study authors conclude that "foods containing raw flour should be considered as possible vehicles of infection of future outbreaks of STEC."

During the investigation, three strains of STEC were discovered in one brand of cookie dough — although it wasn't the same strain involved in the outbreak.

Manufacturers should consider using heat-treated or pasteurized flour, in ready-to-cook or ready-to-bake foods that may be consumed without cooking or baking, despite label statements about the danger of such risky eating practices, the authors conclude. In addition, manufacturers should consider formulating ready-to-bake prepackaged cookie dough to be as safe as a ready-to-eat food item.

Eating uncooked cookie dough appears to be a popular practice, especially among adolescent girls, the study authors note, with several patients reporting that they bought the product with no intention of actually baking cookies. Since educating consumers about the health risks may not completely halt the habit of snacking on cookie dough, making the snacks safer may be the best outcome possible.

A Novel Vehicle for Transmission of Escherichia coli O157:H7 to Humans: Multistate Outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 Infections Associated With Consumption of Ready-to-Bake Commercial Prepackaged Cookie Dough—United States, 2009
http://www.oxfordjournals.org//our_journals/cid/prpaper.pdf

The Weber-Morgan Health Department said today that E. coli has been found in the water of the Ogden Valley summer camp where 11 girls got sick.

Department spokeswoman Lori Buttars said "we received the confirmations of our tests today, and we found E. coli bacteria in the kitchen water and spigots at Camp Shawnee and Camp Ben Lomond, so we are in the process of working with them to fix that situation, and in the meantime people who go there will need to bring in their own water and use it for everything."

The girls got sick after spending Aug. 2 to 5 at Camp Shawnee. They were part of a group of 45. The girls complained of severe abdominal pain, diarrhea and nausea.

The story does not say what strain of E. coli was involved but a previous story noted a shiga-toxin producing E. coli (STEC) was involved in the ollnesses.

Camp Shawnee and Camp Ben Lomond are girls and boys camps respectively.

They are located near Eden and share a common water system. The camps are owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The New York Times reports this morning that two major American companies, Costco Wholesale and Beef Products Inc., have gotten tired of waiting for regulators to act on non-O157 STECs (shiga-toxin producing E. coli) and are proceeding with their own plans to protect customers.

Last month, Costco, one of the nation’s largest food retailers, quietly began requiring its suppliers of bagged produce, including salad greens and mixes, apple slices and baby carrots, to test for a broad range of toxic E. coli.

“We know this is where we have to go and there’s no reason to wait,” said Craig Wilson, the food safety director of Costco. In the last two weeks, he said, most produce suppliers have added a test that can detect the strain from the European outbreak as well (E. coli O104).

The company also plans to test all of the ground beef sold at its warehouse stores. Costco operates a large ground beef plant in Tracy, Calif., and Mr. Wilson said the plant recently began evaluating testing procedures to detect the broader range of E. coli in the hamburger it makes and the beef trimmings that go into it.

As an added step, the company plans to ask suppliers of the trimmings to do their own testing, starting later this summer, he said.

Costco’s new testing requirements come as the federal government continues to drag its feet on what to do about the expanding E. coli threat. After four years of study, the United States Department of Agriculture finished drafting rules in January for how the industry should handle the “Big Six” E. coli in ground beef.

But the proposal has been stalled within the Office of Management and Budget, which reviews most federal regulations before they are released. Details of the proposal are confidential, but many in the industry expect that the rules would require testing or even make it illegal to sell ground beef that contained the additional strains of toxic E. coli.

The landscape is changing partly because tests created by U.S.D.A. scientists that can quickly pinpoint the presence in food of the “Big Six” E. coli are now being developed for commercial sale by test-kit companies. Some kits are already on the market.

A table of non- E. coli O157 STEC outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/nonO157outbreaks