bites, barfblog and food safety need your continued support
There’s no shortage of food safety news; there is a shortage of evidence-based, incisive approaches that challenge food safety norms and may eventually lead to fewer sick people.
The International Food Safety Network evolved into bites.ksu.edu over the past year as a way of consolidating and making food safety news delivery more efficient. In addition to the web repository, the bites-l electronic newsletter is distributed 2-3 times a day to a dedicated subscriber base of some 10,000 in 60 countries; a list that has been focused and refined by offering continuous, daily food safety news since 1994. barfblog.com – averaging well over 10,000 unique hits a day -- along with weekly food safety infosheets (available in multiple languages), and videos, are now prominent food safety resources.
Sponsorship opportunities are now available for bites.ksu.edu, barfblog.com, and the bites-l listserv (as well as the infosheets and videos; how about a movie?).
In addition to the public exposure – why not stick your company logo on the bites-l newsletter that directs electronic readers to your home site or whatever you’re flogging that week -- and reaching a desired audience, you can receive custom food safety news and analysis. We’ve also resurrected the food safety risk analysis team – assessment, management and communication – and offer 24/7 availability and insanely rapid turnaround times. If your group has a food safety issue -- short-term or long-term -- work with us, rather than having us write it up in barfblog.com, book chapters and scholarly papers as another case study of what not to do.
The money is used to support the on-going expenses of the news-gathering and distribution activities, and to develop the next generation of high school, undergraduate and graduate students who will integrate science and communication skills to deliver compelling food safety messages using a variety of media. Research, training and outreach are all connected in our food safety world.
If you have a sponsorship idea, let’s explore it. Feeling altruistic? Click on the groovy new donate button in the upper right corner of bites.ksu.edu. Want to just send a check? Make it out to:
K-State Olathe Innovation Campus, Inc.
18001 W. 106th St., Ste 130
Olathe, KS 66061
913-541-1220
913-541-1488 Fax
tbogina@kstateoic.ksu.edu
http://kstateoic.ksu.edu
and send to the attention of Terri Bogina
Here’s some additional information.
bites.ksu.edu is a unique comprehensive resource hosted at Kansas State University for all those with a personal or professional interest in food safety. We find credible, current, evidence-based information on food safety and make it accessible to domestic and international audiences through multiple media. Sources of food safety information include government regulatory agencies, international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), peer-reviewed scientific publications, academia, recognized experts in the field and other sources as appropriate.
All bites activities emphasize engaging people in dialogue about food-related risks, controls and benefits, from farm-to-fork. bites strives to provide reliable, relevant information in culturally and linguistically appropriate formats to assist people in identifying, understanding and mitigating the causes of foodborne illness.
bites LISTSERV
The bites.ksu.edu listserv is a free web-based mailing list where information about current and emerging food safety issues is provided, gathered from journalistic and scientific sources around the world and condensed into short items or stories that make up the daily postings. The listserv has been issued continuously since 1995 and is distributed daily via e-mail to thousands of individuals worldwide from academia, industry, government, the farm community, journalists and the public at large.
The listserv is designed to:
• convey timely and current information for direction of research, diagnostic or investigative activities;
• identify food risk trends and issues for risk management and communication activities; and
• promote awareness of public concerns in scientific and regulatory circles.
The bites listserv functions as a food safety news aggregator, summarizing available information that can be can be useful for risk managers in proactively anticipating trends and reactively address issues. The bites editor (me – dp) does not say whether a story is right or wrong or somewhere in between, but rather that a specific story is available today for public discussion.
barblog.com
barfblog.com is where Drs. Powell, Chapman, Hubbell and assorted food safety friends offer evidence-based opinions on current food safety issues. Opinions must be evidence-based – with references – reliable, rapid and relevant. The barfblog authors edit each other – viciously.
TWITTER
Breaking food safety news items that eventually appear in bites or barfblog are often posted on Twitter (under barfblog or benjaminchapman) for faster public notification.
INFOSHEETS
Food safety infosheets are designed to influence food handler practices by utilizing four attributes culled from education, behavioral science and communication literature:
• surprising and compelling messages;
• putting actions and their consequence in context;
• generating discussion within the target audiences’ environments; and
• using verbal narrative, or storytelling, as a message delivery device.
Food safety infosheets are based on stories about outbreaks of foodborne illness sourced from the bites listserv. Four criteria are used to select the story: discussion of a foodborne illness outbreak; discussion of background knowledge of a pathogen (including symptoms, etiology and transmission); food handler control practices; and emerging food safety issues. Food safety infosheets also contain evidence-based prescriptive information to prevent or mitigate foodborne illness related to food handling. They are now available in French, Spanish and Portugese.
bites bistro videos
A nod to the youtube generation, but we don’t really know what we’re doing.
These are the various information products we deliver daily, in addition to research, training and outreach. If you or your group is interested in sponsoring any or all of these food safety activities, please contact me directly.
dp
Dr. Douglas Powell
associate professor, food safety
dept. diagnostic medicine/pathobiology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS
66506
cell: 785-317-0560
fax: 785-532-4039
dpowell@ksu.edu
bites.ksu.edu
barfblog.com
Sarah Reasoner: Enhancing food safety distance education
Daughter Courtlynn is going to visit for American Thanksgiving in late November. Got her plane tickets last night. But even with the new flights from Dallas, getting to Manhattan (Kansas) just isn’t that easy.
That’s one of the reasons folks at Kansas State University went big into distance education. It’s just too much time spent on travel. My mother even figured out Skype last week so she could see granddaughter Sorenne.
But is there a better way to deliver food safety information by distance? And who better to answer that question than a food safety distance education person who wants to get an advanced degree?
Sarah Reasoner (right, with her hubby) had to watch and film me so much for distance education, I figured, maybe it’d be useful to actually figure out what works and what doesn’t for distance ed. So she’s been doing a part-time Masters degree while having more babies. And now she gets to tell her academic department, Diagnostic Medicine/Pathobiology at Kansas State University, all about it.
Sarah writes:
Distance education has experienced rapid growth in recent years in enrollment and technological advancements. These advancements have created a unique opportunity for instructors to implement emerging technologies into distance education courses and enhance student’s learning experiences. This presentation explores food safety distance education at Kansas State University, emerging web tools and how to affectively implement such tools into existing food safety distance education courses. Future research possibilities regarding the enhancement of distance education are also discussed.
Sarah talks at 8:30 Friday morning in Mosier 202. That’s in the vet college. In Manhattan (Kansas). Her slides are below. We’ll tape the talk, because how can you not tape a talk about distance education. And put it on the web. Students hate seeing themselves talk, and so do I, but it’s a useful learning tool. I’ve learned to dress better after seeing myself on video.
barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/uploads/file/Enhancing Food Safety Distance Education.pptx
The failure that is Food Safety Education month
Linda Rivera (right, pic from Washington Post) is the face of everything that is wrong with Food Safety Education month.
As The Washington Post reports this morning:
In Room 519 of Kindred Hospital, Linda Rivera can no longer speak.
Her mute state, punctuated only by groans, is the latest downturn in the swift collapse of her health that began in May when she curled up on her living room couch and nonchalantly ate several spoonfuls of the Nestlé cookie dough her family had been consuming for years. Federal health officials believe she is among 80 people in 31 states sickened by cookie dough contaminated with a deadly bacteria, E. coli O157:H7.
The impact of the infection has been especially severe for Rivera and nine other victims who developed a life-threatening complication known as hemolytic uremic syndrome. One, a 4-year-old girl from South Carolina, had a stroke and is partially paralyzed.
In a baffling waste of resources, groups like the International Food Information Council, have decided that food safety education month – that apparently starts today – is all about educating consumers with sanitized messages; that if consumers were only made aware they had a role to play in food safety, outbreaks related to contaminated peanut butter, produce and cookie dough would be reduced.
Whenever a group says the public needs to be educated – in this case about food safety -- that group has utterly failed to present a compelling case for their cause.
I cringe, and remember a Lewis Lapham column I read in Harper’s magazine in the mid-1980s about how individuals can choose to educate themselves about all sorts of interesting things, but the idea of educating someone is doomed to failure. Oh, and it’s sorta arrogant to state that others need to be educated; to imply that if only you understood the world as I understand the world, we would agree and dissent would be minimized.
Given all the outbreaks – produce, pet food, peanut butter, that have nothing to do with consumers, any food safety information – not education -- campaign should include what the World Heath Organization has been advocating since 2002: source food from safe sources. An evaluation of message effectiveness should also be a bare minimum and rarely happens.
An honest Food Safety Education month would include food safety stories, tragic or otherwise, and a rigorous evaluation of what has worked, what hasn’t worked and what can be improved, rather than a checklist of ineffective and often inaccurate food safety instructions with the cumulative effect of blaming consumers. Telling people to wash their hands isn’t keeping the piss out of meals.
But judge for yourselves in what I am sure is a completely spontaneous and unscripted video from IFIC on why ordinary consumers feel they should be doing more.
Shurly some mistake: Whole Foods to offer health advice, healthier foods
Whole Foods Market has terrible food safety advice, blames consumers for getting sick, sells raw milk in some stores, and offers up fairytales about organic and natural foods.
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The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Whole Foods chief John Mackey is now going to reposition the Austin, Texas, chain as a champion of healthy living in a return to its natural-foods roots.
"We sell a bunch of junk," he said, vowing to promote healthier lifestyles for its customers and employees. "We've decided if Whole Foods doesn't take a leadership role in educating people about a healthy diet, who the heck is going to do it?"
Given the track record outlined above, almost anybody and any group would be better qualified than Whole Foods. Besides, as soon as someone says they’re going to educate someone else, it’s propaganda rather than compelling, evidence-based information,
I look forward to the whoppers being offered up as educational material in Whole Foods' future.
Another foodsafetyathome website - as bad as Journey
If you ran a $5.5-billion-a-year corporation that made a variety of ready-to-eat deli meats, and those products killed 22 people and sickened another 53, causing the company to lose millions and trust in the food safety system to be further undermined, how would you go about rebuilding that trust, that brand?
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Maybe make public all the listeria test results the corporation undertakes in the form of a live, continuously updated website; maybe have live video cameras that people could check out on the Internet to see how these delicious deli-meats are made; maybe market these food safety initiatives at retail.
Or blame consumers.
Maple Leaf Foods announced yesterday as part of their continuing Journey to Food Safety Leadership – I wish they were already there, but Don’t Stop Believin’ – they were launching a food safety at home website.
“In keeping with our mandate of becoming a leader in food safety education, we have launched a new website to help consumers understand the important role of food safety at Maple Leaf and in your homes.”
(I have this stupid Journey video on in the background that I’m about to paste below and I can’t tell whether it’s the music or that statement that just made me barf a bit in my mouth.)
If Maple Leaf believes they can be leaders in food safety education, why is there no mention that pregnant women shouldn’t eat Maple Leaf or any other deli meats or other refrigerated ready-to-eat foods?
More data; less Believin’.
And Journey still sucks.
Michele Samarya-Timm, guest barfblogger: Handwashing...it's in the hole
It’s a classic film...you know the scene…families leisurely at poolside, going for a swim, enjoying a summer’s day—an errant candy bar splashes in the midst of the bathers and when it is finally observed floating in the water someone screams…
Doodie! Doodie!!
The languid setting suddenly switches to one of shock, repulsion and pandemonium as everyone subsequently rushes to distance themselves from the buoyant turd. Yup, I could see something similar happening in real life. How easily the public is repelled when a potential threat is so conspicuous.
Aw…don’t touch it!
The raucous distancing the scene portrays is not far from what would happen in reality…if poop was always so visible. But “poop” and a host of other micro flora undesirables are not always so discernable in the pool or on our hands. The ubiquitous reality of pathogens such as Norovirus, shigella, staph, and a quantity of others hitchhiking on our skin should be cause for a similar reaction – but towards the nearest supply of soap and water. Convincing others of the importance of clean hands would be easier if potential contaminants were always so clearly visible and distasteful.
Turds. Double turds.
Observational studies continue to show us that when contaminants are out of sight, handwashing is out of mind. What better time than National Clean Hands Week and National Food Safety Education Month to renew our efforts to motivate others to get rid of doodie and other unwanted flora on their hands?
It’s no big deal.
Yes it is. Yeah, maybe Bill Murray could be the poster child for “Don’t Eat Poop.” But so should we. Keep reminding, keep educating, and keep upholding the practice of using soap and water to distance us from pathogens.
When it comes to handwashing, we all need to “be the ball.”
Related websites:
Food Safety Education Month: http://www.foodsafety.gov/~fsg/september.html
National Clean Hands Week: www.cleanhandscoalition.org
Michéle Samarya-Timm is a Health Educator for the Franklin Township Health Department in New Jersey.
