Don't drink infected pig blood
Reuters reported yesterday that new information from the World Health Organization suggested pigs sickened with H1N1 swine flu should not be consumed, despite earlier insistence that fully cooked pork is perfectly safe.
The story states,
"The WHO comments appear more cautious than those from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), which said import bans are not required to safeguard public health because the disease is not food-borne and has not been identified in dead animal tissue.
The WHO however said it was possible for flu viruses to survive the freezing process and be present in thawed meat, as well as in blood."
Well, who in their right mind drinks raw pig blood thinking it won't possibly make them sick?
I didn't find any statements on the WHO website that mentioned the ability of viruses to survive freezing--or its pertinence to the consumption of fully cooked pork--but I discovered that the WHO, FAO, and OIE have reissued their joint statement from April 30 today to address misunderstanding of the consumption of meat from H1N1 infected pigs. The statement reads, in part,
"Authorities and consumers should ensure that meat from sick pigs or pigs found dead are not processed or used for human consumption under any circumstances."
Sick or dead animals should never be slaughtered, regardless of the cause of illness or death. This reduces the risk for cross-contamination. The statement reassures,
"Heat treatments commonly used in cooking meat (e.g. 70°C/160°F core temperature) will readily inactivate any viruses potentially present in raw meat products.
Pork and pork products, handled in accordance with good hygienic practices recommended by the WHO, Codex Alimentarius Commission and the OIE, will not be a source of infection."
But I shouldn't be spelling this stuff out--the WHO should. And they should address the bit about viruses surviving freezing and how that impacts food handlers.
Authorities should communicate the risks and how they're being managed (or can be managed) in a way the public can understand and the media can't mess up. It's their responsibility to a concerned public.
Save Lives: Clean Your Hands
Megan Hardigree, a research associate at Kansas State University working on hand hygiene, writes that this year, Cinco de Mayo wasn’t just a holiday to celebrate the Mexican army’s victory over the 
French in the Battle of Puebla (yesterday) or a song by the band, Cake. It was also a day to celebrate the launch of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) newest hand hygiene campaign: Save Lives: Clean Your Hands.
The aim of Save Lives: Clean Your Hands is to stop the spread of infection by increasing hand hygiene of healthcare workers. This is said to be the next step of the original, Clean Care is Safer Care, from 2005. The initiative persuades individuals to join the movement with gain-framed messages (they apparently encourage positive behavior) such as “Help stop hospital acquired infections in your country” and “Make patient safety your number one priority.”
To help support this initiative, WHO has accompanied the promotion with a variety of tools and resources to aid healthcare facilities in promoting and enforcing better hand hygiene. These tools include: tools for system change, tools for training and education, tools for evaluation and feedback, tools as reminders in the workplace, and tools for institutional safety climate. My personal favorite, mostly because of the fun diagram, is in the “tools as reminders in the workplace” which includes “My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene:”
• before touching a patient;
• before clean/aseptic procedures;
• after body fluid exposure/risk;
• after touching a patient; and,
• after touching patient surroundings.
“Be a part of a global movement to improve hand hygiene, “ says WHO.
Now to evaluate whether any of these messages actually compel people to wash their hands.
Egypt kills pigs to stop a virus that moves person-to-person
Egypt began culling its roughly 300,000 pigs on Wednesday and, Reuters reported,
“The move is not expected to block the H1N1 virus from striking, as the illness is spread by people and not present in Egyptian swine. But acting against pigs, largely viewed as unclean in conservative Muslim Egypt, could help quell a panic.”
The next day, according to the Associated Press, the World Organization for Animal Health said, "there is no evidence of infection in pigs, nor of humans acquiring infection directly from pigs," and the World Health Organization announced, "Rather than calling this swine flu ... we're going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A."
These organizations recognized that Egyptians aren’t getting the whole story.
The World Health Organization has raised the alert on the H1N1 flu virus to phase 5, which assistant director-general Dr. Keiji Fukuda said is reserved for situations in which the likelihood of a pandemic “is very high or inevitable.” The move reflects the need for countries to take the virus seriously, and Egyptian leaders appear to be doing just that. However, costly culls that act against current evidence are sending inaccurate messages to the public about the risks present and the ways in which they can be effectively controlled.
Egyptian pig farmers are outraged. The remaining citizens feel a bit safer now. But they will all feel terribly betrayed when the H1N1 flu infiltrates their borders in the form of an infected human.
Food safety has to be farm-to-fork: WHO
That’s what we’ve always said – safe food, from farm-to-fork.
Jorgen Schlundt, director of food safety at WHO, told Reuters today,
“The notion that you can deal with it at the end of the food chain is clearly wrong.”
Yet there continues to be an outpouring of advice for consumers – the end of the food chain. But more about that later.
Schlundt also said today that the number of foodborne diseases seems to be on the rise in both wealthy and poor nations.
Previously, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that up to 30 per cent of individuals in developed countries acquire illnesses from the food and water they consume each year. U.S., Canadian and Australian authorities support this estimate as accurate (Majowicz et al., 2006; Mead et al., 1999; OzFoodNet Working Group, 2003) through estimations from available data and adjustments for underreporting. WHO has identified five factors of food handling that contribute to these illnesses: improper cooking procedures; temperature abuse during storage; lack of hygiene and sanitation by food handlers; cross-contamination between raw and fresh ready to eat foods; and, acquiring food from unsafe sources.
Oh, and that logo (upper right) is going to be retired in January when we relaunch everything.
Majowicz, S.E., McNab, W.B., Sockett, P., Henson, S., Dore, K., Edge, V.L., Buffett, M.C., Fazil, A., Read, S. McEwen, S., Stacey, D. and Wilson, J.B. (2006), “Burden and cost of gastroenteritis in a Canadian community”, Journal of Food Protection, Vol. 69, pp. 651-659.
Mead, P.S., Slutsjer, L., Dietz, V., McCaig, L.F., Breeses, J.S., Shapiro, C., Griffin, P.M. and Tauxe, R.V. (1999), “Food-related illness and death in the United States”, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol. 5, pp. 607-625.
OzFoodNet Working Group. (2003), “Foodborne disease in Australia: Incidence, notifications and outbreaks: Annual report of the OzFoodNet Network, 2002”, Communicable Diseases Intelligence, Vol. 27, pp. 209-243.
