I’ve been hanging out at fairs and the sorts lately, like the Wamego Tulip Festival and Phillipsburg Rodeo. I always check for handwashing stations where there is contact with the animals and food involved. However, the animals are not the only risk at fairs and festivals and the consumer cannot always be the scapegoat.

Thirteen businesses and food stalls were ordered to shut down at the Oxegen and the Dún Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures in Ireland due to food safety violations.

“The FSAI said that it is unacceptable that some food businesses are continuing to breach food safety laws and warned all food business operators to place robust food safety systems and hygiene practices top of their agenda.”

Consumers should wash their hands and do everything they can to avoid foodborne illness, but when the food handlers are the problem there’s not much the consumer can do.
 

Raw chicken is probably the first thing that most people think of when thinking of foodborne illness. You would think chefs would know to use a thermometer to prevent undercooked chicken from ending up on the table.

However, tonight I witnessed a chef on 24 Hour Restaurant Battle (on the Food Network) serve some raw chicken to his diners. Not just to any person at that, but Marcus Samuelsson and Scott Conant, who were judges on the show. At least they got it right, immediately recognizing the risks and spitting it out.

Every person in the vicinity turned around when Samuelsson pointed out: “That is dangerous; that is not undercooked, it’s raw.”

If your restaurant makes people barf, it’s not going to fare so well. Mr. Blumenthal learned that the hard way last year when his restaurant was shut down due to norovirus.
The chef on the show also learned the hard way; the raw chicken cost him the $10, 000 prize.
 

Patrons of two Grand Lake, Colorado, restaurants are being urged to get either immune globulin (IG) or hepatitis A shots following the discovery that a worker employed at both eateries has a case of hepatitis A.

The two restaurants were identified by the Denver Post as Sagebrush BBQ & Grill and Max & T's Bar and Grill by the Grand County Public Health department.

Officials emphasized that both restaurants have had very good inspection records and are cooperating in the investigation.

The health department said there are no other confirmed cases of hepatitis A at this time.

The always colorful and geographically precise, Bill Keene, senior epidemiologist with Oregon Public Health, told The Oregonian yesterday that mystery Mexican-style fast food chain restaurant A is Taco Bell.

"It's been clear for weeks that Taco Bell was the source for many of the illnesses. It's equally clear that it's not all Taco Bell. It's also not a single Taco Bell restaurant."

The first cases appeared at the beginning of April and continued through the third week in July. Dozens were sickened in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, with a sprinkling of cases across the rest of the country. One person in Oregon -- a woman in her 20s in Klamath County -- got sick.

Keene said,

"It's very striking to have two such similar outbreaks at roughly the same time and both of them affecting Taco Bell. The similarities might be a coincidence."

Although no one food or menu item has been named a culprit, Keene said epidemiologists think that lettuce, tomatoes or both were to blame.

"It's not 100 percent sure it's one or the other but those are the chief suspects," he said. "We've been unable to tease them apart because everyone eats both."

Keene said the food involved in the outbreaks was clearly contaminated before reaching Taco Bell franchises.

"It's not something that they're doing wrong. One of the products that they using in their food was contaminated."

The company did not return a phone call seeking comment.

CDC officials would not confirm that the company involved in the outbreaks was Taco Bell.

Naming a restaurant could have an economic impact on the company's bottom line, said Kristen Nordlund, an agency spokeswoman.

The outbreak is also considered to be over though both the FDA and CDC are continuing to investigate.

"There's no inherent reason for people to stop eating at Taco Bell now," Keene said.

Canadian Agriculture Minister and would-be comedian Gerry Ritz on Thursday told Postmedia News that last week's massive recall of all Brandt ready-to-eat deli meats exposes gaps in Canada's meat inspection system, stating,

"I'm concerned that the paperwork that Brandt had was less than strenuous, I'll call it. We are in there looking through some of that. We're looking at different protocols, at having them reporting in different ways. At the end of the day, we'll have a better plant."

Sarah Schmidt, following up on her Postmedia story yesterday about the delay in detecting problems at the Brandt Meats Toronto-area plant, said the Canadian Food Inspection Agency – which reports to the Canadian Parliament through the Minister of Agriculture – only checked out the Brandt plant after pressure from public health types.

As in, we got a bunch of sick people, it came from this plant, maybe you should look harder, do we have to do your job as well?

Ritz was further quoted as saying,

"It takes a combination of work between CFIA, public health and the industry of record. I think everyone learns from every one of things. We always do that 'lessons-learned' aspect of it. Having said that, we always strive to do better and I think in this case, certainly it could always be worse and we try to make a better system as we move forward."

Minister, by worse, do you mean when 23 people die from listeria in Canada in 2008?

Ritz also said, "we hiring people as fast we can."

Inspectors? Scientists? PR hacks? How’s the quality control on those fast hires?

The owner of the Rock and Rolls Cafe, Chapel St Leonards, U.K., was fined £2,000 and ordered to pay costs of £400 after his cafe failed a food hygiene inspection in August 2009.

Breaches of food safety offences included failing to control flies and keep work surfaces clean.

In a refreshing restatement of why inspections take place, Coun Sandra Harrison, portfolio holder for health at East Lindsey District Council, said,

"It is important that food business owners remember that their reputation is on the line and they could receive a hefty fine if they are found to be breaching food safety standards. In this case we have seen significant improvements but these types of incidents should never occur. When we do detect food safety issues we will always take action because it is putting the health of our community at risk."
 

There are some recurring myths in the public discussion of foodborne illness and the reasons 76 million Americans barf every year from the food and water they consume, and the New York Times is recycling them all.

Author Eric Schlosser (“Unsafe at Any Meal,” New York Times, Op-Ed, July 25) overstates the protective role of government while casting aspersions against what he calls industrial agricultural and unchecked corporate power. His rant on the Colbert Report last year was legendary.

Henry Miller who used to do biotechnology work at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration writes in the Times this morning, “The vast majority of food poisoning is caused by individuals’ mishandling of food; common lapses include the mishandling or undercooking of poultry and the inadequate refrigeration of food. More expansive, expensive, onerous regulation is not the answer; better education of consumers is.”

Our review of the data found a complete mish-mash about where “the vast majority of food poisoning illness is caused” and that no conclusions could be drawn. Produce, pot pies, pet food and pizzas don’t have much to do with consumers. And how would this better education be conducted?

If someone wrote in and said Americans have the safest food supply in the world, all the big three mythologies would be represented.

Food safety is not simple and the public discussion – which affects individual behaviors from farm-to-fork – is a mess.
 

For years, no matter where I lived, there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken fast-food restaurant nearby – what’s now called KFC -- and the scent of special herbs and spices was in the air and in my clothing.

I’d eat the stuff once a year, and immediately regret the indulgence.

There’s a tragic case involving a KFC that is being heard by the Australian Supreme Court involving 11-year-old Monika Samaan, who is suing KFC, claiming the source of her salmonella poisoning was a Twister her father said he bought at the outlet on October 24, 2005.

In testimony today, three former staff at KFC Villawood, near Sydney said they would drop chicken pieces on the floor, help themselves to food and throw chicken strips at each other as 'pranks.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports KFC has denied responsibility for Samaan’s illness, which has left her with severe brain damage and quadriplegia.

Hatem Alhindawiq, 20, who began working at the Villawood branch in September 2005, told the court that a few weeks after he started there he and his friends would lock each other in the cool room and ''maybe chuck chips … at each other, that kind of stuff''.

They would also throw chicken nuggets and chicken strips and ''muck around, slap each other and run away, all that sort of stuff'', he said, adding that chicken strips were ''the easiest to chuck''.

Mr Alhindawiq said he saw a friend who was a cook at the outlet accidentally drop a piece of chicken as he was unloading the deep fry basket. It fell onto a ''breading table'' where chicken is floured before being cooked, and then onto the floor. ''He was like, 'Oh, don't worry' … look, it's only flour,' and he grabbed it and he chucked it back in.''

Danielle Cabassi, 19, who worked at the branch for two years from 2005, said she often saw the cooks fail to wash their hands between working with raw chicken and removing cooked chicken from the fryer. They would use tongs, but there was still blood on their hands, the interior student said.
 

On July 12, 2010, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and research partners presented data and a press release that concluded nearly 1 out of every 25 restaurant-associated foodborne outbreaks with identified food sources between 1998 and 2008 could be traced back to contaminated salsa or guacamole, more than double the rate during the previous decade.

Today, CDC revealed there are two multistate outbreaks of Salmonella infections, each involving a different Salmonella serotype: Hartford and Baildon, and that the sick people have been showing up since April and the numbers peaked in June.

Salsa and guac must be on the CDC’s mind because they’ve fingered “a Mexican-style fast food restaurant chain, Restaurant Chain A,” as associated with some illnesses. And if it’s been narrowed to a single chain restaurant, it’s probably a supply issue; salsa safety begins with the ingredients, on the farm.

Among persons eating at Restaurant Chain A, no specific food item or ingredient was found to be associated with illness for either outbreak. The numbers of new cases for the Salmonella Hartford outbreak have declined substantially since a peak in early June 2010. The numbers of new cases for the Salmonella Baildon outbreak have declined substantially since a peak in late June 2010. The number of new cases of illness associated with these outbreak strains appears to have returned to baseline, indicating the outbreaks are not ongoing.

In both outbreaks, the FDA worked with CDC and state partners to conduct a traceback investigation. The tracebacks focused on produce that ill individuals reported eating and that had been implicated in previous outbreaks of salmonellosis. The extensive traceback effort was initiated to determine if a common source or supplier could be identified to help focus the epidemiologic investigations. No common food source was identified in either traceback. The FDA also sampled and tested produce items and did not find either outbreak strain. As with previous outbreaks in which contaminated produce may be the factor, produce tracebacks present substantial challenges because of the short shelf life of the product and the industry's comingling of product from multiple sources.

CDC stressed:

• There are over 2,500 serotypes of Salmonella.Hartford and Baildon are very rare serotypes of Salmonella.

• CDC used its Emergency Operation Center facilities and mobilized employee and student volunteers to conduct two large case-control studies within several weeks of each other. These studies involve calling thousands of U.S. residents to screen them for eligibility into the study and, once determined eligible, interviewing them about the foods they had eaten during a certain period. These studies are not possible unless people who are called agree to be interviewed. CDC thanks every person who participated in these telephone interviews.

• The Mexican-style fast food Restaurant Chain A, as well as their food suppliers and distributors, were very cooperative in providing extensive information to public health officials as various leads were explored.