The North Central District Health Department said seven cases were confirmed.
All of them required the patients to be hospitalized, according to the department.
Health officials said five of them were mild cases, but two were a severe form of the bacterial infection known as Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, or HUS.
They said the people with the mild cases have already been released, but one of the two with HUS remains in the hospital.
The source of the E. coli has not been found.
President Obama escaped the White HouseCoupe Burger.menu with 5 young people and they hit up a very cool, neighborhood burger joint, according to TMZ, with almost no advanced notice. The 5 young people are all working on the Affordable Care Act.
At the time we posted this, they were all still at The Coupe in Columbia Heights.
We’re told Obama is enjoying a Coupe Burger — “Our classic with fried onion rings, sauteed mushrooms and sharp cheddar. And get this … we were told fries, but turns out the side is spinach.
A Kamloops, B.C., restaurant linked to a norovirus outbreak has reopened after a thorough scrubbing.
Interior Health environmental health officer Kevin Touchet says inspectors have verified intensive cleaning at Dorian Greek House has removed all traces of the virus, which 
causes vomiting and diarrhea.
Dorian was closed Monday after dozens of people in two separate groups became ill, with about 36 doctors, nurses and medical staff affected in the first outbreak, prompting cancellation of more than two dozen elective surgeries at Royal Inland Hospital last week.
Brad A. Johnson of the Orange County Register in California was planning to review a restaurant in Newport Beach this week. Instead, he got food poisoning there. Everyone at his table got sick. Unspeakably sick. For days. It was awful.
As the sickness intensified, Johnson went online and looked up health inspection reports for the restaurant. Inspections are a matter of public record, but nobody ever looks at 
them. This place has received a serious violation on every one of its inspections since opening two years ago. Coincidence?
Johnson writes, If this restaurant had opened in Los Angeles instead of Newport Beach, it would have to display a letter grade of C, or possibly B, in the front window – and I never would have dined there. But because it is in Orange County, there’s no indication whatsoever that this place has been cited repeatedly for problems that pose very serious and immediate health risks to its customers.
It’s time to restart the debate about letter grades for restaurant health inspections in Orange County.
I’ve been reviewing restaurants in Orange County for a little more than a year now, and I’ve been poisoned on four separate occasions. This most recent case was by far the worst.
I worked as a restaurant critic in Los Angeles for 10 years. I always made a point of not reviewing restaurants with a grade lower than A. And I got sick only twice. Another coincidence?
Restaurants in Orange County are allowed to repeatedly fail their inspections without any consequences. They can “fix” the problem – but not the underlying behavior or lackadaisical mentality – and be back in business in a matter of minutes. Even in instances where the health department shuts down a restaurant and revokes its permit, the restaurant can go buy a new one and be right back in business, sometimes the same day.
The placards currently displayed in restaurant windows in Orange County are useless. A restaurant might pass inspection by the skin of its teeth, with serious repeat violations, yet it gets the exact same placard as a restaurant that receives a near-perfect score. That’s messed up. That’s why I got sick.
In 2008, Orange County came close to adapting a letter-grade system similar to the ones used effectively in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Riverside, New York, Philadelphia and many other places. The Orange County Grand Jury looked into the matter and, after hearing extensive testimony from consumers and restaurateurs, strongly 
recommended adapting a letter-grade or color-coded system that would give consumers a clearer picture of every restaurant’s health score. County health inspectors backed the idea. This paper wrote extensively about the process and determined that if Orange County were to institute a letter-grade system, roughly 40 percent of the restaurants here would fail to score an A.
Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, the Allegheny County Health Department soon will roll out the A, B, C and Ds of a new restaurant grading program, officials said.
Critics, though, worry that a letter grade could misinform diners and unfairly hurt businesses.
Lucas Whitelegg is finally ready to embrace the world with both arms after spending 10 months with his entire body paralysed by botulism.
Three days after celebrating his first birthday, Lucas will on Friday wave goodbye to the Monash Children’s Hospital staff who helped him through 241 days in intensive care and the gradual return of his movement from the pure form of Botox. For Lucas’ mother Bree 
Bailey it will mark the end of nightmare that began when he was 8 1/2 weeks old and ingested a spore that sprouted botulism in his belly, which then spread through his bloodstream and paralysed his entire body.
One of only 13 cases of botulism in Victoria in the last five years, doctors had to retrieve a $100,000 antitoxin from the US to save Lucas and then wait for the paralysis to wear off.
It was weeks before Lucas could even open his eyes, three months before his fingers and toes wiggled, and eight months before his lungs and diaphragm freed up allowing him to breath without a ventilator.
Ashley Chaifetz, a PhD student studying public policy at UNC-Chapel Hill writes,
Kale has become the food that apparently does everything: cancer protection, lower cholesterol, provides antioxidant vitamins A, C, and K and minerals iron and potassium, and in the improvement of eye health. Repeatedly called a “superfood” (a quick Google search will reveal over a million hits), kale is often consumed cooked, much like collard, mustard, and turnip greens.
Yet, I’ve been regularly seeing it served raw—in restaurant dishes, recipes in cooking magazines, in friends’ homes, and even in bagged salads at the grocery store. While it is delicious, I think a lot about how it was grown, processed, and packaged. Microbial food safety might not be number one for kale producers as they might reason that consumers and restaurants traditionally cook the greens and reducing pathogen risk in the process. The control point, historically was in the kitchen.
A couple of years ago, I’d think that raw kale was an anomaly, but given it’s popularity (see: 50 Shades of Kale cookbook, the fact that kale has had a 400% increase in menu appearances over the last 4 years, and even celebrities love it), it seems poised to stick around.
Now that there’s been such a shift to raw consumption, I trust that the industry has addressed the production, harvesting and packing related risks. As a shopper and eater, trust is about all I have since no one is talking about whether growers have taken the appropriate precautions so that it won’t make me sick.
With 416 sick from Salmonella that has been going on for months, the feds finally decided to close a Foster Farms plant in California.
For cockroaches.
I told Beth Weise of USA Today, “It’s probably that USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) was getting bad PR so it needed a reason to shut them down. Cockroaches are never 
good; but neither are 416 sick people.”
Finding roaches in a processing plant isn’t unexpected, said International Association for Food Protection president, Rutgers University food extension guru and beard aficionado Donald Schaffner, “The key question is how many other plants have this frequency of roach noncompliance and were not shut down?”
Federal inspectors on Wednesday suspended processing at a poultry plant in California found to have been infested with cockroaches four times over the last five months.
The on-going outbreak has sickened a total of 416 people in 23 states according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
However according to the letter sent to Foster Farms CEO Ron Foster on Wednesday, USDA Food Safety Inspection Service staff documented four cases of live cockroach contamination in the plant, on Sept. 14, Nov. 4, Dec. 28 and finally on Jan. 7. The letter was first reported by Lynne Terry of The Oregonian newspaper.
“These recent findings of egregious insanitary conditions related to a cockroach infestation in your facility indicate that your establishment is not being operated and maintained in sanitary condition,” the letter said.
In a statement provided by spokeswoman Karmina Zafiro, Foster Farms said it was first notified of the infestations on Jan. 8 and “closed the Livingston facility immediately for sanitization and treatment.”
No other Foster Farms facilities were affected, according to the statement. “No products are affected. Product production has been transferred to the company’s other facilities.”
Seattle food safety lawyer Bill Marler found it odd that USDA “has the power to shut a plant down when they found cockroaches but doesn’t have the power to shut them down when they poison hundreds of people with antibiotic-resistant salmonella.”
I decided despite my undergraduate degree in molecular biology and genetics to stop writing about genetically engineered foods 12 years ago.
I still do now and then, but the public discussion doesn’t go anywhere; it’s not a food safety issue and I don’t have much to add.
So while N.Y. Times columnists and other foodies get all expansive about GE food, like the story about how Cheerios is going GE free (I’d prefer GE Cheerios for my kids, if that’s what they were going to eat while daddy was asleep) or how some lawmaker in Hawaii discovered there’s not much to this GE story, I focus on people who barf and sometimes die.
That’s microbial food safety.
But, just when I thought I was out, they suck me back in.
Powell, D.A. 2014. Surveys suck: Consumer preferences when purchasing genetically engineered foods. GM Crops and Food 4 (3): 195-201
Many studies have attempted to gauge consumers’ acceptance of genetically engineered or modified (GM) foods. Surveys, asking people about attitudes and intentions, are easy-to-collect proxies of consumer behavior. However, participants tend to respond as citizens of society, not discrete individuals, thereby inaccurately portraying their potential behavior. The Theory of Planned Behavior improved the accuracy of self-reported information, but its limited capacity to account for intention variance has been attributed to the hypothetical scenarios to which survey participants must respond. Valuation methods, asking how much consumers may be willing to pay or accept for GM foods, have revealed that consumers are usually willing to accept them at some price, or in some cases willing to pay a premium. Ultimately, it’s consumers’ actual—not intended—behavior that is of most interest to policy makers and business decision-makers. Real choice experiments offer the best avenue for revealing consumers’ food choices in normal life.
“Gutter oil” is, according to Time, one of the most revolting substances in the culinary pantheon. It sprang from the ingenuity of Chinese entrepreneurs, who fished out used cooking oil from drains, sewers and trash cans, decanted it into fresh bottles and sold it to an unsuspecting public.
On Jan. 7, the Jinan Intermediate People’s Court in eastern China handed out a suspended death sentence to a mastermind of one of the largest gutter-oil schemes ever 
recorded, worth more than $8 million in illicit sales. (A suspended death sentence usually means the convict escapes execution if no further crimes are committed.)
Seven others were sentenced to between five and 15 years in jail for the cooking-oil deception, according to state newswire Xinhua. In China’s lively microblog sphere, a slim consensus felt that the gutter-oil judgment was not harsh enough. Wrote one outraged person: “Criminals involved in food-safety issues should be sentenced to death and immediately executed.”
Just this week, abattoir workers in southern China were nabbed for injecting up to 6 kg of filthy pond water into each lamb carcass in order to bulk up its weight — and therefore price — at market. Last week, Walmart admitted that five-spiced donkey-meat treats sold in some of its Chinese stores were tainted by the addition of fox flesh. (Donkey is a common enough protein in northern China, but fox is not widely consumed.) Last fall, aficionados of skewered meat in Shanghai discovered the lamb they were savoring was actually rat.
The latest gutter-oil plot sprang from the minds of three brothers in eastern Shandong province, according to Xinhua. Beginning in 2006, the trio began selling dirty cooking oil to 17 dealers in two highly populated provinces. In October, in eastern Jiangsu province, a man was condemned to life imprisonment for using inedible animal fat, along with chicken feathers and fox fur, among other unusual substances, to bulk out the cooking oil he sold to more than 100 companies.
Two heavily pregnant women were among at least 21 people believed to have fallen ill after a salmonella outbreak at a popular Vietnamese restaurant in Melbourne’s inner west.
Authorities confirmed the outbreak at Hao Phong on Hopkins St in Footscray has forced at least three people to admit themselves to hospital.
Department of Health spokesman Graeme Walker said a further 18 people were 
suspected to have been affected by the outbreak, which occurred in late December.
Mr Walker said one of the confirmed victims spent “several hours” in hospital under observation before being released.
Two others presented at hospital where they were assessed and released.
Pregnant Anny Egan, 33, told the Herald Sun she and her daughter Summer, 2, became violently ill after eating at the restaurant during the contamination period between December 27 to 31.
Her husband Craig, 33, also got sick after the family visited Hao Phong – one of their favourite restaurants.
The Yarraville woman, who is due to give birth tomorrow, said she was “terrified” of going into labour while she was sick.
“It was hell,” she said.
“I thought it was gastro. I thought, is my husband gonna be able to hold the baby? Is my daughter going to be able to meet the baby?”
Mark Maltar said he, his partner who is eight months pregnant, and his in-laws became violently ill after ordering takeaway from Hao Phong during the contamination period between December 27 to 31.
His partner has been to hospital twice in the past week for tests to make sure their baby wasn’t harmed.
“We were pretty concerned about the baby,” Mr Maltar said.
“The advice we’ve been given is that it’s highly unlikely the baby has been contaminated, but we have to wait and see.”
Workers inside the restaurant this morning would not speak to the Herald Sun.
Signs taped to the restaurant’s front door told customers: “We are temporary closed today due to the exhausted fan and store are out of order.
“Sorry for any inconvenience.”