Lessons from Wales; fallacy of food safety inspections
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Do more inspectors make food safer?
No.
The latest evidence is from Professor Hugh Pennington, who concluded in a report last week that serious failings at every step in the food chain allowed butcher William Tudor to start the 2005 E. coli O157 outbreak, and that while the responsibility for the outbreak, “falls squarely on the shoulders of Tudor,” there was no shortage of errors.
Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan picked up on that theme yesterday and pledged to do everything possible to prevent a repeat of the E.coli outbreak of 2005 – for the sake of the families affected.
“Poor hygiene practices at the abattoir and the butcher’s premises” caused the outbreak, but he added,
“These failings were not dealt with effectively by the Meat Hygiene Service or local authority environmental health officers. …” Environmental health inspectors need to “sharpen up” and “drill down beyond the box-ticking part of the inspection process to the potential danger of the reality beyond.”
In his report Pennington said an inspector who made four pre-arranged visits to Tudor’s in the run-up to the outbreak, should not have allowed him to continue using one vacuum-packing machine for both raw and cooked meat because of the risk of cross contamination.
Among his 24 recommendations, Pennington said all checks should be unannounced, unless there were exceptional circumstances.
Don’t tell mom the babysitter’s dead.
What would Sarah Palin do? Peas in Alaska source of campylobacter, 18 sickened
My mom was a hockey mom. She and dad drove me all around Ontario to play hockey. I still remember the brawl between some of the hockey moms when we played Galt (before it was Cambridge). The cops were called. I may have been 13. My mom wasn’t involved (at least she won’t admit she was involved).
I coached and helped out with my four girls playing hockey, so I guess I was a hockey dad. I’m not a pit bull and don’t wear lipstick.
Sarah Palin may be a hockey mom who thinks the Flintstones are an accurate representation of human-dinosaur co-habitation and is open to war with Russia, but what I’d really like to hear about is how the vice-presidential candidate responds to foodborne illness in her own backyard.
The Anchorage Daily News reports that a farm in the Matanuska Valley has been called the focal point of a campylobacter outbreak that has sickened at least 18 people in Southcentral Alaska after they ate raw peas.
Mat-Valley Peas in Palmer sells the peas in 5- and 10-pound bags with cooking instructions that would have prevented the outbreak, but some retailers and sellers at farmers markets have repackaged the peas in smaller quantities and left out the cooking instructions, said Joe McLaughlin, state epidemiologist with the health department.
The first of the 18 cases, including one person who was hospitalized, occurred Aug. 1.
And my mom, she never had to brag about being a hockey mom. She was the real deal.
