Food Poisoning, Foodborne Illness Information and Research : International Food Safety Network : BarfBlog

After the Jack in the Box E. coli O157:H7 outbreak of 1993, the one that placed microbial food safety on American TV dinner plates, the company hired Dave Theno and developed an industry leading food safety program.

A year after Maple Leaf cold-cuts killed 22 and sickened 53 in Canada, the company announced it has launched a new web site and that consumers need to do more.

I’m not making this up.

On Friday, Maple Leaf CEO Michael McCain (right, exactly as shown), on his Journey-tribute band path to food safety leadership, said,

“There’s lots we can and are doing to become a global food safety leader and it’s our job to make food as safe as possible, but there’s also lots that consumers can do to further protect themselves and their families and practice good food safety.

“This week we launched a new Maple Leaf website which is a huge leap forward in reaching consumers. Its taken us over two years in the making and it’s a great site with neat gadgets like meal planning tools, recipes, cooking and shopping tips, and most importantly food safety insights through clicking on ‘food safety at home’ at the top right of the home page. 

“I think this website is one of the coolest food sites out there, it’s interactive, informative and highlights where Maple Leaf is going as a company. We hope you will visit and welcome your feedback!!”

People that write with not one, but two, exclamation marks, are doubly desperate to get attention. It’s like double dick fingers. Dude, since you think it’s such a cool food site, and since you devoted two years of resources to this complete waste of Internet surfing, if I was a shareholder wondering where this company was going, I’d be yelling SELL, SELL, SELL!!!

(note the all CAPS and triple exclamation marks)

Companies like Jack in the Box recovered because they did the right thing – and didn’t blame consumers. Provide meaningful information to consumers, especially those at risk, like pregnant women and older folks. Make your test results public. And try not to write total bullshit like, our new website “is a huge leap forward in reaching consumers,” when you have no evidence to prove such assertions other than wine-soaked dreams at the cottage.
 

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I got an e-mail from the vice-president of communications for Maple Leaf Foods on Saturday afternoon.

She was sending me a blog that her boss, Michael McCain wrote, about his new knowledge of listeria and the role of food safety inspectors.

I figure she’s making at least $150,000 to do her vp communicating, so, even though I was a dick, I felt OK responding,

“Thanks for forwarding this in a timely manner. I blogged about it yesterday.”

It was about 24 hours earlier.

And while McCain and Maple Leaf go about enhancing their communications reputations, even the mother country, land of the cook-your-turkey-till-it’s-piping-hot advice, has decided listeria is a problem, maybe we can’t rely on manufacturers, maybe listeria is everywhere like Michael McCain says, so maybe we better tell old people they could be at risk.

The U.K. Food Standards Agency commissioned a bunch of research and figured out that people over the age of 60 are more likely to take risks with 'use by' dates than younger people and that eating food like cold-cuts beyond its 'use by' date increases the risk of food poisoning from listeria.

A recent sharp rise in the number of people taken ill with listeria has seen more older people affected. The number of cases rose by 20% in 2007 and has doubled since 2000, this increase occurring predominantly among people over 60.

The number of cases of listeria in people over 60 years of age has doubled in the past nine years. And one in three of the people who get food poisoning caused by listeria die as a result.

Listeria is a type of food poisoning bacteria that can live and grow in a wide range of food – chilled ready-to-eat food in particular – for example pâté, cooked sliced meats, certain soft cheeses and smoked fish.

Dr Andrew Wadge, Chief Scientist at the FSA, said,

The rise in listeria food poisoning among older people is worrying. Listeria can make people very ill, and 95% of cases end up needing treatment in hospital.

'There are some really simple steps people can take to prevent getting ill in the first place: be aware that 'use by' dates indicate how long food will remain safe, and then make sure you stick to them; always follow the storage instructions on the label; and make sure your fridge is cold enough – between 0°C and 5°C is ideal.

'These are the three messages that our new campaign is focusing on and Food Safety Week is a good time to be raising awareness of them."

VP communications thingy: stop sending me e-mails that you or any of your underlings – and I know how many people at Maple Leaf subscribe to bites.ksu.edu and barfblog.com – know was repetition and maybe work on an information strategy so that the genius dieticians in Canadian old-folks homes stop serving unheated cold-cuts to their patients. That’s how 22 people died last year.

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He may ooze empathy and smooth, but Canadian politicians on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food’s Subcommittee on Food Safety beware: Michael McCain (below, not exactly as shown) really isn’t that into you.

Sure he got dressed up for the committee appearance last night, prefaced it with a little foreplay at a luncheon for business types, and said I’m sorry, it was all me, but when a guy says that, he really means, it’s all you.

McCain just wants to get into your pants, or pants pockets, in the form of public tax dollars for inspections to ensure a future food safety façade so the profits at Maple Leaf Foods won’t be further inconvenienced by death and illness from deli meats.

McCain of Maple Leaf Foods has become the latest corporate type to ask for government help in the form of increased inspection. The dude from Kellogg’s did the same thing in the U.S., as did the growers of lettuce and spinach in California, and tomatoes in Florida. They all said the same thing: we can’t figure out how to provide a safe product while sucking in profits, so government, please, do it for us (that way, when there is an outbreak, we can at least say we met enhanced government standards). If anyone wants to know why government at best sets a minimal standard, read the testimony of Carole Swan, President of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Dr. Brian Evans, Executive Vice-President of CFIA.

All of this is tragically embarrassing.

And this ain’t rocket surgery.

Opposition MPs praised McCain for taking responsibility for the tragedy and questioned whether the government should do more to accept part of the blame.

No. Stop being taken in by the fabulously handsome McCain. The best food producers and processors will go far beyond government standards to provide a safe product; they make the profit; they should make it safe. They should brag about it.

McCain told business leaders earlier on Monday, perhaps after a lunch of liquor and delicious deli meats, that the food industry "has to raise its game" because it doesn't take food safety seriously enough.

“This industry has to raise its game. It has to take food safety more seriously, it has to invest more in food safety, and it has to improve its record of delivering safe food to consumers."

Wow. Sixteen years after Jack-in-the-Box and McCain and his $5.5 billion a year company discovers food safety after killing 21 people. He also felt it necessary to lecture parliamentarians and others that ‘poke and sniff’ methods of inspection were outdated. That rhetoric is at least 20-30 years outdated.

You know (a listener said my overuse of ‘you know’ on a Baltimore phone-in show yesterday was appalling and that as a professor lecturing to ‘glasses’ I should know better; I told him I had a voice for print and he should watch his spelling) Amy and I need people to help out with baby Sorenne. I’m not sure we need a village, but babysitters and friends are handy a few hours a week so we can slog through some work. Or shower. Sorenne is 4-months-old.

I’m somewhat baffled, however, when the so-called leaders of multi-billion dollar corporations or producer groups ask for babysitters in the form of government inspectors. Are your managers 4-month-olds that need someone to play ga-ga with? Help to get in their walker?

Canadian parliamentarians, stop being swooned by this guy. NDP MP Malcolm Allen said, “The only way you can get trust back with the public is through third-party verification.”

Apparently the star-struck Mr. Allen, thinking he was asking a tough question, showed himself as the star-struck girlfriend, who knows nothing about food safety, like the shitfest of third-party (non)verification at the Peanut Corporation of America plant which led to nine dead and 600 sick from Salmonella.

Here’s what is appalling about all this: no one, or at least me, expects anything but the bare minimum from government. The CFIA types can say they’re sorry all day, they’ll still have jobs and still go off for six-months of French lessons to move up in the Canadian government bureaucracy.

Michael McCain (above, exactly as shown), who runs that $5.5. billion a year company manufacturing products identified for decades at high risk of listeria, could stick with, yeah, we screwed up, we should have learned from all these past listeria outbreaks, we should have paid attention to the positive test results sitting in our filing cabinets, we’re sorry.

As Steve Martin once said, ‘But Noooooooooooo.’

Instead, McCain makes a big deal out of hiring a food safety dude after the fact, and lectures the rest of the industry and the country on what should be done; instead it’s like dating the worst kind of reformed smoker or born-again addict preaching to everyone else: forget minimal government regulations, forget the preaching, sell safe food. Listeria didn’t just come along 10, 20, 30 years ago, or yesterday, as you would have Canadians believe.

McCain, take care of your own shop, the one that happily makes money. Then maybe we can talk about another date.

Until then, I’m just not that into you.

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The beat goes on.

Brian Evans, executive vice-president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, wrote in the Globe and Mail this morning that the only part of a July 24 meeting between officials from Maple Leaf Foods and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that concerned listeria centred around consistency between Canada's approach to import testing and monitoring, and that of other countries.

Michael McCain of Maple Leaf said the same thing in a March 4, 2009, press release,

"While we welcome open discussion of the outbreak in any and all reviews to ensure appropriate lessons are drawn from this tragedy, we take the strongest possible exception to any inference that we withheld information from the public."

As I said March 4, those explanations are 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.

Evans also writes today that,

These consultations had nothing to do with the listeria outbreak that was brought to light several weeks later and to which the agency responded quickly and professionally.

No one can judge whether the agency responded quickly and professionally because a detailed timeline of who knew what when is simply not available. If McCain really valued “open discussion of the outbreak” they would publicize their own listeria test results leading up to the public recall in an outbreak that killed 20.

Bamba bamba.

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Elizabeth Payne, of the Ottawa Citizen's editorial board, writes that when the president of Peanut Corp. of America was hauled in front of a congressional hearing in Washington last week, Canadians should have been paying attention.

And cringing.

Few things have underlined the gap in the way our two countries approach food safety like the sight of company president Stewart Parnell sitting with arms folded while a congressman, in a theatrical flourish, offered him some of his company's tainted peanut products. Mr. Parnell's company is at the centre of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened 600 people and may have killed eight in recent months.

On this side of the border, Michael McCain of Maple Leaf Foods was named Business News Maker of the Year -- a year in which his company was found to be the source of a listeriosis outbreak linked to 20 deaths and hundreds of illnesses. To be fair, Mr. McCain took responsibility in a way that Peanut Corp. executives did not. He deserved recognition for his compassion and efforts to reassure a rattled public that it was safe to go back to the deli counter.

But that should not be the end of the story. The aggressive effort in the U.S. to quickly get questions answered about the tainted peanut outbreak there is instructive.

Payne goes on to say that already Americans know more about the mechanics and timeline of this salmonella outbreak than Canadians do about the gaps and failures than may have exacerbated the listeriosis outbreak.

Nearly seven months later, Canadians still don't know exactly who knew what when. There have been no answers to the crucial question of whether a quicker response could have saved lives and how a similar tragedy could be prevented or contained sooner. Until we know that, nothing has been learned from the 20 deaths. Instead of answers, we got a PR campaign, tasteless cold-cut jokes and a toothless and too-late investigation into what happened.
 

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Daughter Braunwynn returned to Ontario last night after a great visit.

Her super-sweet 16 is less than two weeks away, so during lunch on Sunday with Amy and Sorenne and Bob, we asked what she might be studying at university (not a fair question cause I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up).

She mentioned science, psychology, maybe journalism – she liked writing.

Amy and I sorta jumped, saying that if she wanted to write, then write, and that maybe J-school wasn’t the best place to learn writing.

I teach a journalism class on food safety reporting, but there’s not much to teach: writers write, and just like scientists, they need to ask the right questions.

Braunwynn, the 15-year-old, gets it; Canadian journalists covering Michael McCain, Maple Leaf and listeria? Not so much.

There are exceptions, like Rob Cribb at the Star, but a couple of holiday puff pieces stood out. On Jan. 4, 2009, the Canadian Press correctly noted that the Canadian government has not yet named the leader of a promised probe into the listeriosis outbreak that killed 20 people -- a lag critics say discredits an already suspect process.

But then they go on to excessively quote the union dude who thinks that inspectors with beer-like listeria googles are the solution. He represents the food inspectors union. Of course he wants more inspectors. As new NC State professorial thingy Ben wrote, more inspectors is not the answer.

Then there’s the researchers. They always want more research. And new technology. Oh, and to blame consumers. Because you know, consumers are the weak link when it comes to ready-to-eat deli meats. And when the researcher making such public proclamations is an advisor to Maple Leaf, that should be disclosed. Journalism 101. I’m sure glad my previously pregnant wife didn’t rely on your expert advice.

Bert Mitchell had it right the other day when he wrote that while Michael McCain has been gathering year–end goodwill for his handling of the Maple Leaf  listeria outbreak, “it is too early for applause. Effective long term solutions have not been put in place.”

For the budding journalists, there are still basic questions to be answered, questions that have nothing to do with more research, more inspectors, a public inquiry or any other narrow special interest, but questions that may help prevent any future unnecessary deaths of 20 people and  unnecessary illness of hundreds if not thousands of people:

• who knew what when;

• why aren’t listeria test results publically available; and,

• if listeria is everywhere, why aren’t there warnings for vulnerable populations?
 

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Canadian reporter Jim Romahn writes:

Michael H. McCain is a wily strategist.

First, as president and chief executive officer of Maple Leaf Foods Inc., he made a big deal of dismissing advice from the company’s lawyers and accountants to not admit any liability for Canada’s most notorious case of food poisoning last summer.

He won praise from business reporters and public relations consultants for that.

In fact, the spin doctors had much more to say about that than the failure to safeguard consumers of Maple Leaf deli meats.

Now McCain has pulled an even better trick.

He has claimed the high moral ground in settling class-action lawsuits.

For $27 million, tops, he has bought freedom from a court case that could have proven highly embarrassing to Maple Leaf.

The ongoing coverage could well have become the final nail in consumer confidence in Maple Leaf products.

The lawyers were sure to ask who knew what and when.

They were sure to ask about the degree of plant contamination as the company continued to ship products, failing to first hold them for testing and clearance.

That, of course, is what’s being done now.

The lawyers will trot out evidence that more than half of the samples – one each from different batches or products – collected by municipal health units across Ontario contained Listeria monocytogenes.

The lawyers would no doubt challenge McCain’s claim that Listeria are so common in food-processing plants that it’s challenging at the best of times to eliminate them. They might have conceded that to be true of listeria in general, but would ask how Maple Leaf handled the more dangerous strain that showed up at the Bartor Road plant in Toronto.

The lawyers will ask why Maple Leaf ignored Health Canada warnings that cold cuts should not be served to people with weak immune systems – i.e. the elderly, infants and young children, pregnant women and those under medical treatment to suppress their immune systems.

Why do Maple Leaf’s cold cuts fail to warn these people about Health Canada’s advice? Of course, the same could be said of the labels on any Canadian-made cold cuts. Buyer beware!

The last place Canadians can turn to for answers to these questions is the inquiry Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised in the heated exchanges of an election campaign as the Listeria crisis continued.

I notice that Harper did not promise a PUBLIC inquiry.

He has not named a person or panel to head an inquiry.

He has not promised to reveal a report of an inquiry or its recommendations.

I’m certain the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Maple Leaf will be lobbying hard for Harper and his government to forget the promise of an inquiry. And, failing that to “contain the damage,” as the public relations are wont to advise.

So two goals scored by McCain so far. Will he make it a hat trick.

I sincerely hope not, but given Canada’s record on food safety in the food business, I’m far from optimistic.

Or as The Kids in the Hall asked, Who’s to Blame?

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Amy’s first meal after returning home with baby Sorenne? A snack spread of soft goat cheese with bite-sized pate and beet sandwiches, something I picked up from my Danish mentor, John Kierkegaard, back when I worked as a carpenter’s helper.

Smoked salmon or turkey breast, with tomato slices and fresh basil was on the menu for breakfast. That should cover many of the potentially listeria-laden foods that pregnant women shouldn’t eat for nine months. But you won’t hear that from listeria expert Michael McCain of Maple Leaf Foods, who is still strangely silent on the tough questions.

Amy’s mom was here for the birth and that turned out to be awesomely cool. But she did have to fly home through the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, which according to KNXV-TV, contains numerous restaurants with “major health violations.  In some cases, repeatedly failing to follow health code requirements. …

“Famous Familigia in Terminal 4 received 17 major violations including ‘deli slicer soiled with food debris’ and 12 of 15 employees ‘without food service worker cards. …’

“In October 2008, the Kokopelli Deli in Terminal 3 was cited after an employee ‘washed his hands then brushed his teeth with his fingers then went to work with food.’  In Terminal 4 at Flo’s Shanghai Cafe, employees were caught ‘cutting chicken with bare hand,’ ‘portioning peanuts onto chicken bare handed.’”

If you’re waiting on an e-mail reply from me on anything in particular, you may be waiting awhile longer. And while my usual e-mail style is terse, typing one-handed means the responses will be terserer. It’s nothing personal, just a baby thing. Really. It’s not you, it’s me. Really.

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Spirits were high Saturday night as the Toronto Maple Leafs opened their at-home hockey season night to the rhythms of the Smashing Pumpkins.

Fresh off an unexpected victory against defending Stanley Cup champs, the Detroit Red Wings, on Thursday, and with a bad Def Leopard live performance following the game, things were looking up for the Leafs.

The Leafs lost horribly to Montreal on Saturday night and reality set in.

Companies, like hockey teams, can also show flashes of brilliance, only to revert to old ways.

Michael McCain, president and CEO of Toronto-based Maple Leaf Foods, was widely praised for his compassionate and heartfelt response to the deaths of now 20 people from Maple Leaf cold-cuts.

But now Mr. McCain has taken to lecturing Canadians on the realities – or at least Mr. McCain’s realities – of the inevitability of listeria in everything, reminding me of the Tragically Hip song that goes, “I thought you beat the death of inevitability to death just a little bit. …

“We don’t’ go to hell, the memories of us do.”

McCain is using the increased media spotlight not to call for increased warnings to vulnerable populations, like the 20 who died, and pregnant woman (because, after all, listeria is everywhere) but to say how unfair it is that McCain’s Maple Leaf Foods has to compete with small plants.

"Right now, we have two-tier system. It is clear to me and, I think, most scientists would agree with this, that the provincial standards are not at the same level as the federal standards. … Right now, saying it's acceptable for Canadian consumers to have one standard that applies to companies like Maple Leaf and another standard that is significantly below that for many, many others who are provincially inspected is not right for consumers. …

"That's actually the travesty. If they were aware and they made a conscious choice that's acceptable to them, everybody is free to make a good choice. But I think the travesty here is they're probably not even aware of different standards out there."

OK, Mr. McCain, give consumers the choice and, as Carl says, stop whining. Market food safety. Advertize your allegedly superior food safety protocols. Put it on the label. And warn those populations who are particularly vulnerable – and missing from your latest missives.

Below is a video clip from the Canadian band and hockey fanatics, The Tragically Hip, with some apt lyrics:

Oh, and the joke making the rounds in Canada?

“Q & A's from Health Canada

“ Q: The Stanley Cup was recently on tour in my town, and I kissed it. Do I have to worry about being infected by listeria?

“A: You are safe.  The Stanley Cup has not been in contact with any Maple Leaf in over 40 years.”

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