Baseball, cars, and food: Controlling the risks
"If it provides more safety, then I'm all for it," says the New York Mets' All-Star third baseman, David Wright, of his new Rawlings S100 batting helmet. Wright was clocked with a pitch two weeks ago (see video here) that left him on the disabled list with post-concussion symptoms until tomorrow's opener in Denver, where he hopes to try out the new helmet.
It has a thick Polypropelene liner and an additional composite insert. "We're confident that it will withstand a pitch up to 100 mph," said Mike Thompson, Rawlings senior vice president for sports marketing and business development.
The AP reports that all Minor League Baseball players will be required to use these helmets next season, as beanballs and subsequent concussions are inherent risks to America's pastime.
"It's one of those things that happens," said Scott Rolen of the Cincinnati Reds, who recently landed on the Major League's DL with a concussion. "Nobody's out there trying to throw at guys' heads - that's the idea. We'll go out there and compete. I mean, we drive home every day, too, and that's not real safe."
It's true: people accept risks everyday. But they do so trusting that everyone involved is controlling the risks to the best of their ability - from pitchers to helmet manufacturers, from fellow drivers to auto makers, and from cooks (at home or elsewhere) to food producers.
When eating, it's the culture of food safety of everyone from farm to fork that will determine the level of risk an individual is accepting. They should all adopt the attitude: "If it provides more safety, then I'm all for it."
Antenna in your mocha latte?
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) maintains a list of Food Action Defect Levels in the Code of Federal Regulations "to establish maximum levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods for human use that present no health hazard." 
A local news station in Michigan got hold of this list and started asking people on the street how they felt about the number of bug parts allowed in their coffee and the amount of rodent "excreta" tolerated in their chocolate.
My local news station in Wichita, Kansas, broadcast their story Tuesday while I shook my head and chuckled. There were a lot of interesting faces as people looked from their cup to the list and back again.
In the end, I got the impression that the public is okay with a few bug parts (and laugh about getting the extra protein), but won't stand for the poop.
We here at barfblog.com continually advocate keeping as much poop out of food as possible, and proudly wear our t-shirts that declare, "don't eat poop" with a message about handwashing on the back.
But I'm not crazy. I realize, like the FDA (not the USDA, as asserted in the story, which primarily regulates only meat and poultry products), that it's virtually impossible to keep the entire (non-meat and -poultry) food supply 100% poop-free. Therefore, I'm glad there are regulations in place to reduce the microbial risks associated with that poop. (The poop that got into the peanuts at the Peanut Corp. of America plant violated those regs.)
I'm just saying... some poop happens. Risks that cannot be eliminated can, and should, be controlled. Responsible, informed producers and consumers do this every day with tools like the FDA Defect Action Level Handbook and tip-sensitive digital meat thermometers.
Do your part: wash your hands and stick it in.
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When worlds collide: engineering and food safety
After breakfast in the morning, my husband and I go our separate ways until dinner. Bret, .jpg)
who studied agricultural engineering in college, designs turf equipment. That’s him at right on an old prototype mower managing the turf in our backyard.
As you all know, I studied food science and industry. With the help of Doug and Phebus, I found my way to writing about food safety.
Our worlds collided this morning when I pulled his engineering magazine out of the pile of mail in the kitchen and saw the words “food safety” staring back at me.
The cover article was by another ag engineer, Nathan Anderson, who works with the FDA’s National Center for Food Safety and Technology in Illinois.
In the article, Anderson points out that,
“Increased concern over microbiological safety in terms of public health and international trade has led to a shift in how microbial risks are assessed and controlled.”
In order to have fewer sick people and more world trade, governments are adopting new risk-based approaches to food safety management and ditching the old prescriptive control measures.
Anderson’s article describes the Food Safety Objective (FSO) approach to risk management, which sets as a goal a maximum population for a certain microbe in the food being processed.
Processors must then control the levels of the microbe on/in incoming product initially, reduce levels if necessary, and prevent any increases.
This, of course, can be expressed by a mathematical equation (since it’s an engineering concept). But I won’t do that here.
Developing processes based upon known risks—as opposed to long-standing beliefs—is a smart way to do business. Engineers just say it differently than food safety writers.
Engineer:
burger + E. coli + food thermometer > burger + E. coli + color-based estimate
Food safety writer:
Powell: Irish government did the right thing recalling dioxin-laden pork products
Friday we took baby Sorenne to her first pediatrician’s appointment. Everything was cool, we went and got some groceries, and on the way home a reporter from the Times of London rang me up. He wanted to chat about dioxin in feed in Ireland and had actually found a technical report me and a couple of students wrote almost a decade ago about dioxin in Belgian feed.
Indeed, I was the same person, oops, hang on a sec, removed the car seat from car, then chatted for about 20 minutes as I trugged the groceries up the hill.
The stories are running Sunday morning in London and my quotes are an excellent example of baby brain: some of the right words are there, but much of what I said comes across as gibberish. Nevertheless, the stories provide an excellent overview of the dioxin-in-Irish-feed crisis.
In the central science laboratory in York last Saturday, scientist Martin Rose stared in disbelief at his dioxin detector. He had injected a sample of Irish animal feed into the machine, and the results had gone off the scale. The level of toxic contamination was at least 5,000 times the legal limit.
Rose knew there was some urgency about the analysis. The Irish authorities had asked the laboratory team to work over the weekend to get test results in a few days; normally it would take four weeks.
At 3.40pm on Saturday last, Alan Reilly, deputy chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), was given the bad news. He called Brian Cowen and outlined the grim scenario. While only 8% of Irish pork was contaminated, it could not be isolated quickly.
Every minute that the taoiseach dallied, consumers were eating dioxin-laden Irish meat. How much damage that might be doing to people’s health was not known. Nevertheless, Cowen made his decision almost immediately. Aware of the damage it would do to Ireland’s pork industry, he ordered a full recall of all pork products from September 1.
“I actually can’t believe this decision is even being questioned,” said the FSAI’s Reilly. “I’m astonished by the people saying that we shouldn’t have ordered a recall. If we had left that meat on the shelves, leaving people to eat contaminated product, we would have been lambasted for being irresponsible, and in all probability we’d be out of our jobs.
Doug Powell, scientific director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University, said off-the-scale readings from the feed justified the action.
“When you get those kind of numbers the response should be ‘let’s pull everything.’ If the public perceive that the authorities knew there was a risk and didn’t do anything, then they’d be crucified. From a crisis-management point of view it’s clear they did the right thing. Compare that with [the similar contamination crisis in] Belgium and we see the mess that came out of that.” …
The International Food Safety Network’s Powell believes that the government’s policy of annual testing is insufficient. “One test a year is only a snapshot. How do you know what they are doing the other 364 days?” he said. “We talk ‘farm to fork’ food safety all the time, but are the guys making the feed taking it seriously? We need to get a culture where the manufacturer is saying ‘we can’t mess this up’ rather than waiting for somebody to catch you. Everybody needs to have a culture of food safety. The marketplace can be brutal but that’s why we need to change attitudes.” …
According to Powell, the way forward is to change the culture that led to the crisis. “There will be a stigma associated with the product for a while,” he said. “The marketplace is going to demand better. Supermarkets will want to know what is going into the feed of their pigs. The producers and the processors can’t just say they have testing in place; they’ve got to prove it.”
Below is the abstract from the technical report we produced on the dioxin in Belgian feed crisis of 1999. The entire report is available at http://www.foodsafety.ksu.edu/en/articledetails.php?a=3&c=9&sc=64&id=316
In the spring of 1999, dioxin was introduced into the Belgian food supply, including exports, via contaminated animal fat used in animal feeds supplied to Belgian, French and Dutch farms. Hens, pigs and cattle ate the contaminated feed and high levels of dioxin were found in meat products as well as eggs. What followed was yet another European food safety scandal filled with drama and public outcry. There were government investigations, the removal and destruction of tons of eggs and meat products and huge economic losses. The case study of this incident reported here illustrates how the crisis unfolded, and evaluates how the Belgian government managed and communicated this crisis, based on publicly available documentation. The government's major error, based on the unfolding public discussion of the events, was a perceived failure to publicly acknowledge the crisis, resulting in accusations of a self-serving cover-up. The government's poor crisis management and communication strategy became the focus of intense public and media criticism and blame. Moreover, the significant issue of poor quality control in the food and feed industries was pushed to the sideline. Not only was the reputation of the food supply tarnished but public confidence in the government was damaged, leading to the resignations of two cabinet ministers and the ousting of the ruling party in a national election. This study confirms the basic components required to manage food-related stigma:
• effective and rapid surveillance systems;
• effective communication about the nature of risk;
• a credible, open and responsive regulatory system;
• demonstrable efforts to reduce levels of uncertainty and risk; and,
• evidence that actions match words.
