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.
NEHA 2009 Annual Educational Conference training showcase materials
I'm in Atlanta for the National Environmental Health Association's Educational Conference.
At 1pm today I'll be presenting during the Food Safety Training Showcase (Courtland Rm at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta for those of you who are in town).
You can find the materials I'll be presenting at bites.ksu.edu/NEHA2009.
Managing food safety at convenience stores
I didn’t know C-store was short for convenience store – the kind at street corners and attached to gas stations. But that’s what you learn when you read Dean Dirks.
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Dean says:
• In your weekly newsletters or communications with employees, post articles about other retailer’s misfortunes or law suits. The point isn’t to smear other retailers but to keep the fear in the minds of your team. Don’t let associates go a day without thinking about it. (check out our weekly food safety infosheets and subscribe for the free electronic distribution)
• Require your district managers, store managers and foodservice managers to become ServeSafe certified.
• Develop food safety audits to be completed daily at the store level and have regular audits completed at the district level. Record temperatures of refrigeration and product every four hours, date and rotate products, constant hand washing to name a few. All foodservice professionals know what needs to be done and inspected. The question being, are you doing it?
• Develop a food borne illness reporting procedure. Have a form on site that collects only contact information and train your associates to never comment other than to take the information. In addition, make sure the customer is given the corporate office’s contact information.
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• Make it a policy that only the food service director or vice president (senior management) follows up on the call to the customer.
• If more than three customers call with the same symptoms then you legally have a food borne outbreak. The next step is to get the County Health Department involved. The worst thing you can try to do is hide it.
And as Sheetz discovered in a 2004 outbreak of Salmonella that sickened over 400 and was linked to tomatoes in ready-to-eat sandwiches, know your suppliers.
Infosheets can impact food safety training
Through iFSN's infosheets, we try to put a compelling spin on food safety information, attempting to draw in even the laziest, creepiest and stonedest of food handlers. That's why we use skulls sometimes.The infosheets are received by 300 direct e-mail subscribers, over 7,000 FSnet subscribers, and are distributed by many public health inspectors and environmental health officers during inspections and food handler courses (if you want to subscribe to receive infosheets directly, e-mail bchapman@uoguelph.ca).
Each sheet contains information about a recent outbreak coupled with recommendations on how a food handler or operator can avoid the same problems in their business. Some of the largest food service, retail and food processors in the world use our infosheets on a weekly basis and the feedback we've received has been awesome. One company said they changed their food safety training to all-infosheets, and they knew it was working when they overheard employees talking about the stories during lunch breaks. That contributes to a culture of safe food.
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Still, we need your help to keep going. Each week the guts of the infosheets are generated by fabulous undergraduate and graduate students who pull news and find great stories, search out gross (and sometimes disturbing) pictures, and help create the framework for the sheets.And as one of our biggest fans, an environmental health officer, wrote in response to this infosheet:
“Now that's some funny stuff! Those folks at iFSN have a great sense of humor. This is obviously no dry and boring government info.”
If our funding goes away, we'll be forced to start making cheaper infosheets that contain dry and boring government info. Please help us avoid that; there's already too many bureaucrats in the world. Send money.
