bites barfblog and food safety: information procedures
People often ask me, “Doug, how do you choose the information that goes in bites.ksu.edu? Do you have a basis for any of your food safety rants on barfblog? Why are you such a jerk?
People often ask Ben, “Why do you write so much about vomit?”
People often ask Amy, “Why are you with Doug?”
When we ran the food safety information centre back in Canada, we had detailed procedures for how to answer questions, what information was provided and why. We don’t answer questions so much anymore, but we do provide a lot of information so I figured we better clearly understand what we do and why. This is more for us and all the students that come through my lab than it is for you. Really, it’s me, not you.
bites.ksu.edu is a unique comprehensive resource for all those with a personal or professional interest in food safety. Dr. Powell of Kansas State University, and associates, search out 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.
Throughout all bites activities, the emphasis is on 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, Dr. Powell, 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.
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TWITTER
Breaking food safety news items that eventually appear in bites or barfblog are often posted on Twitter 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. And now, available in French, Spanish and Portuguese.
bites bistro videos
A nod to the youtube generation, but we don’t really know what we’re doing.
The face of E. coli: Vancouver petting zoo edition
Although the Vancouver Coastal Health authority had identified a cluster of E. coli infections as early as last Thursday, no public health warning was issued, said spokeswoman Anna Marie D’Angelo.
All 13 cases that have presented so far are thought to be related to exposure to the the PNE petting zoo.
The Vancouver Sun reports that B.C.’s Medical Health Officer Dr. John Carsley, said,
“We were suspicious on Thursday when two cases were reported, then there were more on Friday. … “We wrestle very seriously with this issue of whether to do a public alert or not. It depends very much on the outbreak, and if there is a continued risk out there.”
The family of 14-month-old Jacklyn Simpson (above, right, photo from Vancouver Sun), who was stricken with the illness after visiting the petting zoo, believes that had they known about the outbreak, they might have been able to get help earlier.
That’s one of the reasons to issue public alerts – so additional illnesses can be prevented. E. coli O157 also spreads easily from person-to-person so public warnings may help reduce additional transmissions.
And it would be helpful if public health types would clearly articulate why they go public about foodborne illness outbreaks and when. Saying, "we wrestle with it,” does not enhance public confidence. Or prevent additional illnesses.
Duck and Cover: It's Food Safety Education Month
Watching the pronouncements and proclamations for Food Safety Education month makes me think about kids in the 1950s getting educated about nuclear bombs: Duck, Cover and Roll.
In the film, below, substitute foodborne illness for atomic bomb, and substitute consumers have a role, for duck, cover and roll.
In a month of foodborne illness, the signal of impending doom is not an air raid siren, but more likely explosive diarrhea; you might even be out playing when it comes.
The advice in Duck and Cover is as useful in protecting against radiation as the advice from various government, industry and advocacy types is in preventing foodborne illness.
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.
Health dept: We balance public's need to know with needs of business; 20 sick with Hepatitis A in Illinois
KWQC is reporting that two workers at the Milan, Illinois, McDonald's tested positive for Hepatitis A but TV6 has learned one of those tests came back a month ago.
Even though the first case was confirmed back in mid-June, the Rock Island County Health Department didn't close the McDonald's until this past Wednesday. By then, another case had been confirmed.
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The health department now says it didn't respond back then because it didn't know back then. The health department says it didn't find out about the case on June 9th until July 10th, a month later.
By law, the health department should have been notified within 24 hours. At a press conference Saturday afternoon, health department staff said the system broke down.
Wendy Trute with the Health Department said,
"There's a network of providers and there's a whole list of people responsible for reporting infectious diseases or communicable diseases."
The Health Department also says in addition to the two confirmed cases at the Milan McDonalds, there are also confirmed hepatitis A cases involving other local businesses.
We then asked which businesses, Trute said,
"You know what? It's not our policy to name them, nor is it the policy of the state health department. However, I can assure you we have worked with them and they have taken all the necessary pre-cautions required of them."
As far as communicating details to the public, the Health Department says it tries to balance the public's need to know with the needs of any business that may be involved.
There are 20 confirmed Hepatitis A case in Rock Island and surrounding areas, with 11 people being hospitalized.
The swine flu problem isn't in the pigs
As easy as it may be to assume, there’s no evidence that the swine flu spreading through Mexico and beyond is sickening pigs now.
The World Health Organization reports that illnesses in Mexico are climbing close to 1,000 with more than 50 deaths—all of which are human. Eighteen of those cases were laboratory confirmed by labs in Canada.
Though, as a precaution, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is “asking swine producers, veterinarians and labs to increase their vigilance in monitoring for and reporting swine disease.”
Is that a better use of resources than increasing monitoring activities of flu-like symptoms in humans?
The Public Health Agency of Canada website says of human swine influenza, “Sporadic human infections with swine flu have occurred, however these are usually caused by direct exposure to pigs,” and, “Human to human transmission of swine influenza has been documented.”
Are Canadians getting the whole story? Is this the best way to protect public health?
In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified 20 human cases of swine flu in several states, and an investigation website outlines what is known about the virus to this point (it’s susceptible to certain antiviral drugs) and the steps being taken to find out more.
This information gives the public a better picture of the possible risks to their health and how those risks are being managed.
The interested public can generally handle more, not less, information about food safety.
Canadian government and Maple Leaf need to come clean on who knew what when in listeria outbreak
Let the dancing begin – the wordplay salsa, the Ottawa shuffle, the Rideau skate.
Whatever it’s called there’s a lot of wordsmithing this morning as Canadian Press reports that listeria was discussed at a July 24, 2008 meeting between suits from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Maple Leaf, despite previous denials that listeria was ever mentioned.
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CFIA and Maple Leaf now say they initially denied Listeria came up at the July meeting because it was not mentioned in the context of Canada's outbreak, which at that date had yet to be confirmed by lab tests.
So media outlets are running with the story, even though CFIA executive vice-president Brian Evans has a perfectly solid explanation that there was "absolutely no discussion" during the meeting about Listeria being linked to one of Maple Leaf's Toronto processing plants.
"Discussions focused on ensuring consistency of import monitoring with other jurisdictions for microbial pathogens, including Listeria.
"As the executive vice-president of CFIA, I have had countless conversations about Listeria and microbial control with industry. This kind of general conversation about food safety is par for the course during meetings with industry."
That’s probably true. But CFIA and Maple Leaf -- especially Maple Leaf if it’s the world-class thingy it claims to be – need to publicly state, for the record, who knew what when, instead of continuous damage control every time someone asks a question.
Notes from the July meeting, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, show that while Mr. Evans and Mr. McAlpine (of Maple Leaf) did talk about hog and pork operations, they also discussed "food safety in relation to Listeria."
Further information is blanked out in the documents released by the CFIA.
Way to build consumer confidence. Stop being reactive and take control of the situation. Or maybe there is something to hide.
