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

The new web site is sorta ready to go.

I say sorta because it’s a work in progress that can be continuously updated and improved. The beta-version, warts and all, is now available.

The fastest way to receive food safety news is to subscribe to barfblog.com. If something’s happening, we try to blog it, rapidly, and with analysis. barfblog can also be followed on twitter.

bites.ksu.edu is continuously updated throughout the day and night and other times. When sufficient news exists, I will send out a summary, much like the current FSnet listserv. You can subscribe to receive this daily (or more) summary on the front of bites.ksu.edu, and can choose between html (pretty pictures and hyperlinks) or text-only formats. Or you can visit the website and see how it changes throughout the day.

If you only want to receive specific news, use RSS feeds.

RSS (Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

If you only want stories about animal welfare, or norovirus, go to bites.ksu.edu and click on that section. Then click on the RSS symbol, and add to your reader. If you want to receive everything, click on the RSS feed on the homepage for bites.ksu.edu.

I will continue to send out news via the FSnet listserv for the immediate future while you all decide what news you want and how best to receive such news. The old site, foodsafety.ksu.edu, will remain alive as a repository and archives will be archived there, but otherwise will not be updated.
 

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I’m a writer.

And writers write.

I may be a scientist, and my group has produced some decent stuf, but really, I’m just a writer.

And writers write.

Some people shouldn’t write, like Bono of the ridiculously overrated band, U2. Bono is a terrible writer. It’s on display in last Sunday’s N.Y. Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11bono.html?ref=opinion

I started FSnet, the food safety news, shortly after the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak in Jan. 1993. Sure, Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet, but those of us in universities had access, and I started distributing food safety stories.


It all seems sorta quaint now, what with Google alerts and blogs and RSS feeds, but my goal was straightforward: during the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak, a number of spokesthingies said, they didn’t know E. coli O157:H7 was a risk, they didn’t know that Washington State had raised its recommended final cooking temperature for ground beef, they didn’t know what was going on.

 So FSnet was conceived and made widely available so that no one could legitimately say, they didn’t know.

But times have changed. You’ve probably all missed my annual PBS-like funding plea. I’m grateful for the donations, but I can sense the funding model needs to change. Last year, Seattle lawyer Bill Marler stepped up – and I’m quite grateful -- and covered the funding shortfall, but I don’t expect that to happen every year.

So, this is what I’m planning to do.

Over the next few weeks, a new web site, bites.ksu.edu will consolidate the existing food safety information resources of the International Food Safety Network – news listservs, blogs, infosheets, videos and others – and we’ll strive to become the pre-eminent daily international electronic food safety publication or portal with text, audio, video, blogs, and RSS feeds. And we’re going to sell advertizing. The bites.ksu.edu not-for-profit environment will additionally:

• provide research, educational and journalistic opportunities for secondary, undergraduate and graduate students in the multi-media electronic environment of bites.ksu.edu;

• develop, implement and evaluate a variety of food safety messages using various mediums to impact the safe-food behavior of individuals from farm-to-fork;

• provide an infrastructure to produce a series of multilingual public service announcements to further stimulate public interest in food safety and security and to raise awareness about specific emerging issues, especially during a crisis;

• host a dynamic and cross-cultural team of secondary, undergraduate and graduate students to create multilingual and multicultural food safety and security information, including weekly food safety info/tip sheets, podcasts and flash-based Internet animations and videos through bites.ksu.edu;

• provide training through a graduate emphasis in food safety, language, culture and policy (with distance education option); and,

• create employment and training opportunities for secondary, undergraduate and graduate students in conjunction with an international internship program to place students with regulatory authorities and industries who promote a food safety culture.

Should I keep the International Food Safety Network name? It’s a bit ponderous and creates confusion with the posers at the University of Guelph. bites is easier to deal with. What else should I keep or eliminate? I’m going to collapse the four listserves – FSnet, Agnet, AnimalNet and FunctinalFood Net into one daily e-publication. For those who want instant news, it will be provided through RSS feeds in the following categories. For those who can wait, a daily e-publication will be distributed, in html and text format.

The draft categories available for RSS feeds are:

E. coli
Salmonella
Listeria
Norovirus
Hepatitis A
other food safety microorganisms
restaurant inspection
handwashing
thermometers
raw – milk, juice, food
infosheets
Yuck
Food safety communication
Food safety policy
Food allergies
animal disease
plant disease
genetic engineering
functional food
pesticides
new science

I’m open to suggestions. If you feel I’m too much of an asshole to deal with, e-mail Ben at his new North Carolina State gig, benjamin_chapman@ncsu.edu, or Amy at ahubbell@ksu.edu.

For me, it’s more writing.

Cause writers write.
 

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