This study was undertaken to investigate the possible transmission of diarrheagenic E. coli from consumption of duck meat and giblets. Additionally, expression of some virulence-associated genes in the isolated E. coli serotypes was examined using polymerase chain reaction. Finally, antibiogram of the identified E. coli serotypes was also investigated.
E. coli could be isolated from the examined duck meat and giblets. Five serogroups could be identified, including E. coli O86, O127, O114, O26 and O78. Liver harbored the highest incidence of E. coli followed by gizzard, heart, spleen and muscle. Isolated E. coli serogroups harbored different virulent factors responsible for diarrhea and hemorrhage. Additionally, isolated E. coli serogroups showed marked low sensitivity or even resistance to the most common used antibiotics in Egypt.
Prevalence, molecular characterization and antibiotic susceptibility of Escherichia Coli isolated from duck meat and giblets
Journal of Food Safety [ahead of print]
Darwish, W. S., Eldin, W. F. S. and Eldesoky, K. I.
Last week I spent some time with an old friend who owns a funeral home. Fifteen years ago we spent our time and extra money in the local pub drinking pints and talking trash. As we’ve gotten older our taste has changed; we discussed our chosen professions over a bottle of wine.
As we chatted food safety and death he wanted to know how the disease detectives connected the dots in an outbreak. I gave him a rudimentary explanation of PFGE, genome sequencing, Pulsenet and told him about Bill Keene’s contribution to foodborne epidemiology. He was genuinely interested in learning about how epi folks do their magic, or it may have been the wine.
Here’s today’s example of a cluster of illnesses linked to a restaurant, without a smoking gun, that is garnering further investigation (via the Idaho Statesman).
Five people have reported getting sick from Salmonella poisoning since late February after eating at a Boise restaurant, according to the Central District Health Department.
The agency did not publicly name the eatery Monday, but the owner of Pho Tam on North Orchard Street confirmed to the Idaho Statesman that her Vietnamese restaurant is the one in question.
“I don’t know what happened,” owner Long Doan said. “We try to be careful.”
The most recent sickness took place in mid-March, but wasn’t reported to health officials until Thursday, Health Department spokeswoman Christine Myron said.
Health inspectors last week tested food at the restaurant and did not find any traces of Salmonella or other harmful bacteria, Myron said.
“The cultures that they grew did not come back with any Salmonella, so they’ve not determined a definite source for the Salmonella,” Myron said. “We don’t know exactly how it may have gotten into the food at this point.”
I gave up on the conference thing about 10 years ago.
And started videoconferencing talks that people, I guess, really wanted me to do.
It’s a long way from Kansas or Australia to, anywhere.
Kerala University of Health Sciences Vice-Chancellor M K C Nair told The Indian Express, it is time to go beyond discussions and talks.
“It is time to act. We just listen to the suggestions during discussions and seminars. But we don’t take any pain to implement it. In the case of foodborne diseases, it seems that people, including myself, are yet to stop consuming unhealthy food. It is something related to our mindset. If people still consume chemical-infected vegetables despite the news reports about its adverse affects it is because they are yet to take the issue seriously.”
That’s a nice sentiment, but Nair also suggested that the only way to avoid consumption of contaminated vegetables is to raise a vegetable garden in every house (and no doubt use night soil).
A visit to a farm and the chance to see and handle animals is an exciting time for young children.
However, it is vitally important to remember that farm animals can carry harmful bacteria such as E. coli, which can be transferred to children through contact with the animal or its faeces. If the child then goes on to eat, drink, or put their hands near their mouth, without washing their hands, there is a real risk of serious infection.
Urging everyone to follow simple hygiene steps to avoid spoiling anyone’s fun, Malcolm Downey who heads HSENI’s farm safety team said: “Anti-bacterial gels and wipes alone are not a substitute for properly washing your hands.”
Sorry Malcolm, it’s not that simple.
Our paper on human-animal interactions published in Zoonoses and Public Health, includes a 2-page checklist for parents, and the teachers who book these events.
Gonzalo Erdozain, Kate KuKanich, Chapman and I have all seen microbiologically terrible practices at petting zoos or in homes, and read about them from around the world, so we thought, maybe we should try and provide some guidance.
The uniting factor is we all have kids, and in my case, grandkids, and keep adding more.
In Brisbane, they have the Ekka, something like the Texas State Fair. The petting zoo was absolute madness, and after living in Brisbane and hanging out with micro-types I got the message, don’t go to the Ekka, you’ll get sick. We didn’t go in 2013: 49 people, primarily kids, got sick from E. coli O157 (and in typical Queensland style, the outbreak has never been written up, there has been no follow-up, nothing; guess it would be bad for agriculture).
North Carolina has had repeated and terrible outbreaks.
As a father of five daughters, I’ve had many requests over 20 years to go on a school trip to see the animals. As a food safety type, I’ve been routinely concerned about best practices. The other parents may dislike microbiology, but I’m concerned with the health and safety of the children involved.
Best practices for planning events encouraging human-animal interations
Zoonoses and Public Health 62:90-99
Erdozain , K. KuKanich , B. Chapman and D. Powell, 2015
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/zph.12117/abstract?deniedAccess Educational events encouraging human–animal interaction include the risk of zoonotic disease transmission. ‘It is estimated that 14% of all disease in the USA caused by Campylobacter spp., Cryptosporidium spp., Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O157, non-O157 STECs, Listeria monocytogenes, nontyphoidal Salmonella enterica and Yersinia enterocolitica were attributable to animal contact. This article reviews best practices for organizing events where human–animal interactions are encouraged, with the objective of lowering the risk of zoonotic disease transmission.
During my brief time at IEH Laboratories (short for Institute for Environmental Health, it wasn’t a good fit for me), Mansour Samadpour asked me what the biggest food safety issue was, as we strolled through an antique shop.
Ferrières provides extensive documentation of the rules, regulations and penalties that emerged in the Mediterranean between the 12th and 16th centuries.
But rules are only as good as the enforcement that backs them up.
And increasingly, that falls to the private sector (as it should; they make the profits).
Craig Wilson, Costco’s vice president for quality assurance and food safety, told the N.Y. Times he uses government guidelines “as a minimum standard, and I always try to go above and beyond that.”
According to the Times article, Samadpour makes his way through the supermarket like a detective working a crime scene, slow, watchful, up one aisle and down the next. A clerk mistakenly assumes that he needs help, but Mr. Samadpour brushes him off. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
He buys organic raspberries that might test positive for pesticides and a fillet of wild-caught fish that might be neither wild nor the species listed on the label. He buys beef and pork ground fresh at the market. He is disappointed that there is no caviar, which might turn out to be something cheaper than sturgeon roe. That’s an easy case to crack.
On this visit, he is shopping for goods he can test at his labs to demonstrate to a reporter that what you see on market shelves may not be what you get.
While he’s out of the office, he receives a call and dispatches a team on a more pressing expedition: They need to buy various products that contain cumin, because a client just found possible evidence of peanuts, a powerful allergen, in a cumin-based spice mix. The client wants a definitive answer before someone gets sick.
Suppliers, manufacturers and markets depend on Mr. Samadpour’s network of labs to test food for inadvertent contamination and deliberate fraud, or to verify if a product is organic or free of genetically modified organisms. Consumers, the last link in the chain, bet their very health on responsible practices along the way.
Mr. Samadpour, who opened IEH’s first lab in 2001 with six employees, now employs over 1,500 people at 116 labs in the United States and Europe. He refers to his company, one of the largest of its kind in the country, as “a privately financed public health organization.”
“Ten years ago, it would have taken millions of dollars to sequence a genome,” Mr. Samadpour says. “Now it takes $100. We do thousands a year.”
Business is booming — partly because IEH clients consider testing to be a gatekeeper defense in a multitiered food economy without borders. “We’re a lot more concerned about imports,” Mr. Samadpour says, because of “lack of accountability, lack of infrastructure, lack of a culture of food safety.”
While the lab focuses primarily on safety issues like the cumin-and-peanut inquiry, there are enough fraud calls to support specialties among the lab technicians, like Kirthi Kutumbaka, referred to by his colleagues as “the emperor of fish” for his work on a seafood identification project. Once a fish is filleted, genetic testing is the only way to confirm its identity, making it a popular category for fraud.
IEH’s clients are primarily vendors who supply retailers and manufacturers, and they generally prefer to remain anonymous for fear of indicating to consumers that they have a specific worry about safety.
Costco is one of the retailers that use IEH’s services, and the company doesn’t mind talking about it.
“We have to inspect what we expect,” says Wilson, meaning that products have to live up to their labels, particularly items in Costco’s own Kirkland Signature line.
Costco has a smaller margin of error than most food retailers; the company stocks only about 3,500 so-called S.K.U.s, or stock keeping units, while most retailers offer as many as 150,000. A single misstep is a far greater percentage of the whole. That’s why, in addition to retaining IEH, it operates its own 20-person testing lab.
“We’re not typical,” Mr. Wilson says. “We have one ketchup, one mayonnaise, one can of olives, Kirkland Signature olive oils and a couple of others.” Since 2003, the United States Department of Agriculture has required the testing of beef used for ground beef, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in cases of E. coli traced to beef consumption. Costco, which processes 600,000 to 700,000 pounds of ground beef daily, does extensive micro-sampling of the meat at its California facility, Mr. Wilson says.
The company expects its suppliers to absorb testing costs and gets no resistance, given the size of the resulting orders. Costco sells 157,000 rotisserie chickens a day. As Mr. Wilson put it: “If vendors get a bill for a couple hundred bucks on a $1 million order, who cares? They don’t.”
The sheer volume also enables Costco to demand action when there is a problem. After a 2006 outbreak of E. coli tied to Earthbound Farm’s ready-to-eat bagged spinach, in which three people died and more than 200 became ill, Mr. Wilson, one of Earthbound’s customers, instituted what he calls a “bag and hold” program for all of Costco’s fresh greens suppliers. He required the suppliers to test their produce and not ship it until they had the results of the tests.
Earthbound responded to the outbreak with a “multihurdle program that places as many barriers to food-borne illness as we can,” says Gary Thomas, the company’s senior vice president for integrated supply chain. Earthbound now conducts 200,000 tests annually on its ready-to-eat greens.
Not everyone was as quick to embrace change; some growers were concerned about losing shelf life while they waited for results. Mr. Wilson was unmoved by that argument. “If you can test and verify microbial safety, what do I care if I lose shelf life?” he says.
About five years ago, Mr. Wilson decided it was time to send an employee to Tuscany to collect leaves from Tuscan olive trees. Costco now has an index of DNA information on “all the cultivars of Tuscan olive oil, about 16 different ones,” he says. “When they harvest and press, we do our DNA testing.”
Mr. Samadpour says that in multi-ingredient products, the source of trickery is usually hidden further down the food chain than the name on the package. “It’s not the top people who get involved in economic adulteration,” he says. “It’s someone lower down who sees a way to save a penny here or there. Maybe it’s 2 or 3 cents, but if you sell a million units, that’s $20,000 to $30,000.”
David Gombas, senior vice president for food safety and technology at the 111-year-old United Fresh Produce Association, echoes the position of the Food and Drug Administration: Testing is not a sufficient answer for his members, who include anyone engaged in the fresh produce industry, “from guys who come up with seeds to growers, shippers, fresh-cut processors, restaurants and grocery stores, everyone from beginning to end,” from small organic farms to Monsanto.
Their common ground, he says, is a commitment to food safety — but members disagree on how to achieve it, including Mr. Gombas and Mr. Samadpour, who are both microbiologists. “Microbiological testing provides a false sense of security,” Mr. Gombas says. “They can find one dead salmonella cell on a watermelon, but what does that tell you about the rest of the watermelon in the field? Nothing.”
Testing has its place, he says, but as backup for “good practices and environmental monitoring,” which includes things as diverse as employee hygiene and site visits. “I’m a fan of testing,” he says, “if something funny’s going on.” Otherwise, he has taken on the role of contrarian. “People think testing means something. When I say it doesn’t, they smile, nod and keep testing.”
Mr. Samadpour says sampling “can reduce the risk tremendously but can never 100 percent eliminate it,” but he will take a tremendous reduction over a food crisis any day. The government’s “indirect” stance, which mandates safety but does not require testing, allows companies to interpret safe practices on “a spectrum,” he says, “from bare minimum to sophisticated programs,” and he worries about safety at the low end of that range.
He says consumer vigilance is the best defense against the selling of groceries under bare minimum standards.
That’s all nice, but consumers have heard this before, only to be eventually disappointed. Over time, or bad economics, or both, someone will cut corners. The best producers should be marketing the authenticity of their products and make the testing to validate those claims available for public review.
Market food safety and authenticity at retail. The technology is apparently there.
The Each Day Times in Farmington reports the tribal company mentioned Thursday that bleached, all-objective flour labeled with an expiration date of March 16, 2016 must not be applied.
NAPI initially put out a recall of extra than 42,000 pounds of flour from customers in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Utah.
The flour is sold below the company’s Navajo Pride label. It comes in five-pound, 25-pound and 50-pound cloth bags.
Among the 150 products tested were cakes, eggs, ice cream, sausages and poultry.
Of the samples, 27 were found to be unsatisfactory, including 12 ready-made prepared dishes.
Three samples were found to contain unsatisfactory levels of Coliforms – a general indication of fecal contamination and three more contained Entero which indicated poor general hygiene at the premises being checked out.
Of 14 samples taken from local takeaways, three were found to be unsatisfactory.
Trevor Laming, assistant director for technical and environment services at North Lincolnshire Council, said: “Examples of poor practices include undercooking, cross contamination, poor cleaning or poor temperature control and time control.
“One sample identified unacceptable levels of Baccilus species which is associated with poorly stored cooked foods and may cause diarrhea and vomiting if bacteria are present in sufficient numbers.”
Mr Laming said the aim was to raise standards rather than increase prosecutions.
The Auckland Regional Public Health Service said 12 students were treated in the Auckland City Hospital’s emergency department.
The outbreak happened at the 442-bed University hall of residence, while some additional cases have been reported from Grafton, Whitaker Halls, and the student apartments.
Highway to Hell, one of the West’s most popular wedding songs, took on added meaning when at least 22 guests were stricken with Salmonella at a winery in Arizona.
Pinal County’s Public Health Services District say they’re investigating the outbreak that’s linked to a March 19 wedding at the Windmill Winery.
The district received a call from a participant of the wedding who reported that at least four attendees needed to be hospitalized.
County public health officials began an investigation into the winery’s food practices and found the operators had exceeded their legally allowable level of food preparation and used a non-permitted caterer.
This study was undertaken to investigate the possible transmission of diarrheagenic E. coli from consumption of duck meat and giblets. Additionally, expression of some virulence-associated genes in the isolated E. coli serotypes was examined using polymerase chain reaction. Finally, antibiogram of the identified E. coli serotypes was also investigated.
