Sprouts served on Jimmy John’s sandwiches supplied by a farm called Tiny Greens sickened 140 people with Salmonella, primarily in Indiana in late 2010. In Jan. 2011, Jimmy John’s owner Jimmy John Liautaud said his restaurants would replace alfalfa sprouts, effective immediately, with allegedly easier-to-clean clover sprouts. This was one week after a separate outbreak of Salmonella sickened eight people in the U.S. Northwest who had eaten at a Jimmy John’s that used clover sprouts.

Those frequent recalls and concerns about the safety of sprouts have prompted Jason’s Deli to drop them from its menu nationwide for the remainder of 2012.

“We’ve lost confidence in sprouts,” Daniel Helfman, Jason’s Deli director of public relations, told Mike Hornick of The Packer. “We’re all about food safety and the health and wellness of our customers. Bottom line, when you look at what’s occurred with sprouts just in the last year or so, the recalls and warnings, it’s enough that we feel we have to walk away for all of 2012 and maybe 2013. The sprout industry is trying to restore confidence, but that’s just going to take time. I can’t imagine other restaurants aren’t looking at this.”

Representatives of the International Sprout Growers Association were not immediately available for comment.

The change, already in place in some markets, will take full effect sometime in April. Beaumont, Texas-based Jason’s Deli has more than 230 restaurants in 28 states.

But be careful: Jason’s Deli is replacing sprouts with organic spinach and field greens.

A table of sprout-related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/sprouts-associated-outbreaks.

There's been another recall of mung bean sprouts grown in Victoria (that’s where Melbourne is).

For the second time this month, mung beans and mung bean and alfalfa sprout mixes have been recalled due to E. coli contamination. The salad mixes were grown in two separate locations, one in Flowerdale north of Melbourne, and the other in Gippsland in Victoria's south east.

ABC News reports that “last year 46 people in Germany died from eating E. coli contaminated sprouts, however this is a different strain of the bacteria and considered unlikely to make people sick.”

Fifty-three people died in the German E. coli O104 sprout outbreak. And again, no details on what kind of E. coli, or if anyone is sick.

A table of sprout-related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/sprouts-associated-outbreaks.

 Madeline Jonah, 80, died after eating E. coli tainted food at a British Columbia (that’s in Canada) nursing home in Nov. 2011 her family is still seeking answers.

The Province reports that Kiwanis Park Place, a White Rock independent living facility was found in violation of a number of food-preparation standards weeks before the victim and two other seniors fell ill.

Langley woman Kathy Jonah says she has been tormented by a lack of answers and empathy from officials after her mother died.

“I just want someone to be accountable,” Kathy Jonah said. “The management [at Kiwanis Park Place] hasn’t called me back, and they haven’t offered me an apology or anything. It’s like a slap in the face.”

Kiwanis Park Place, a subsidized independent-living complex operated by Crescent Housing Society, offers food services under the licensing of Fraser Health Authority.

An investigation by the authority determined that the three seniors were likely infected with E. coli because of the facility’s food preparation, inadequate cooking or improper cleaning of food surfaces.

Fraser Health spokesman Roy Thorpe-Dorward said Crescent Housing Society voluntarily ended its food-services program, so there will be no further probes into the outbreak. The facility had no previous E. coli issues, Thorpe-Dorward said.

Jonah said that because of B.C.’s wrongful-death laws she has no way to hold anyone accountable.

Ben Doyle of the Trial Lawyers Association of B.C. says family members can’t effectively sue for damages in the deaths of children, seniors and the disabled, because the law only accounts for damages for loss of income support.

“We have legislation that makes children, seniors and people with disabilities worthless,” he said. “We’re pushing for legislation that respects the lives of all individuals and not just breadwinners.”

Officials with Crescent Housing Society did not answer interview requests on Monday.

A Minnesota high school science project that involved hunting and butchering deer -- including one road-kill capture -- and turning the meat into venison kabobs backfired when 29 students were sickened with a rare kind of E. coli food poisoning, investigators say.

Linda Carroll of msnbc reports the 2010 incident, just now reported in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases (abstract below) highlights the risks of E. coli contamination, not just from factory-produced meat, but also from small, local providers.

Doctors first knew they had a problem in December 2010 when two kids from the same high school turned up at a Minnesota hospital with abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. Fearing they had a food poisoning outbreak on their hands, they quickly called in the state’s top-notch public health officials.

Both teens had taken part in a school environmental science and outdoor recreation class that involving hunting, shooting and butchering six white-tailed deer, explained Joshua Rounds, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Public Health. A seventh deer was harvested after being hit by a car, the report says.

The deer were processed on school grounds and then grilled and eaten in class a few weeks before the students got sick.

Epidemiologists interviewed 117 kids in five class periods and found that 29 definitely had become ill, but not with E. coli O157:H7, the strain commonly associated with food poisoning from ground beef.

Rounds suspected the deer might have carried another E. coli strain that also produces poisons known as Shiga toxins. He was right. Samples from the students and the deer meet turned up E. coli O103:H2, which is part of a larger category of non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bugs, known as STECs.
Scientists also turned up another E. coli strain, E. coli O145:NM that didn’t produce Shiga toxins.

People don’t usually get sick from eating hunks or steaks of muscle meat, Rounds said. In this case, however, the meat had been skewered and cooked only to medium-rare. The skewers had dragged contaminants from the meat’s surface down to the center of the kabobs, which hadn’t been cooked to a high enough temperature to kill the bacteria.

Another factor was hand-washing when handling meat -- or the lack of it, Rounds said.

“If you think about high school males, they’re probably not the best when it comes to food safety practices,” he said. “So you can have cross-contamination.”
The case is a reminder, Rounds said, that all meat, no matter where it comes from, should be treated with careful precautions.

Rounds JM, Rigdon CE, Muhl LJ, Forstner M, Danzeisen GT, Koziol BS, et al. 2012. Non-O157 Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli associated with venison. Emerg Infect Dis http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1802.110855

Abstract

We investigated an outbreak of non-O157 Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli at a high school in Minnesota, USA, in November 2010. Consuming undercooked venison and not washing hands after handling raw venison were associated with illness. E. coli O103:H2 and non-Shiga toxin–producing E. coli O145:NM were isolated from ill students and venison.