Cucumbers don’t often show up on the food safety radar, unless they’re imported from Mexico, which has been linked to outbreaks of E. coli O157 and Salmonella.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in August 2014, PulseNet, the national molecular subtyping network for foodborne disease surveillance, detected a multistate cluster of Salmonella enterica serotype Newport infections with an indistinguishable pulse-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) pattern (XbaI PFGE pattern JJPX01.0061).
Outbreaks of illnesses associated with this PFGE pattern have previously been linked to consumption of tomatoes harvested from Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the Delmarva region and have not been linked to cucumbers or other produce items.
To identify the contaminated food and find the source of the contamination, CDC, state and local health and agriculture departments and laboratories, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted epidemiologic, traceback, and laboratory investigations. A total of 275 patients in 29 states and the District of Columbia were identified, with illness onsets occurring during May 20–September 30, 2014.
Whole genome sequencing (WGS), a highly discriminating subtyping method, was used to further characterize PFGE pattern JJPX01.0061 isolates. Epidemiologic, microbiologic, and product traceback evidence suggests that cucumbers were a source of Salmonella Newport infections in this outbreak. The epidemiologic link to a novel outbreak vehicle suggests an environmental reservoir for Salmonella in the Delmarva region that should be identified and mitigated to prevent future outbreaks.
Outbreak of Salmonella Newport infections linked to cucumbers — United States, 2014
CDC MMWR 64(06);144-147
Kristina M. Angelo, Alvina Chu, Madhu Anand, Thai-An Nguyen, Lyndsay Bottichio, Matthew Wise, Ian Williams, Sharon Seelman, Rebecca Bell, Marianne Fatica, Susan Lance, Deanna Baldwin, Kyle Shannon, Hannah Lee, Eija Trees, Errol Strain, Laura Gieraltowski,
I didn’t really know Colin Gill, but would run into him at meetings and he was always irascible Scottish.
He also devoted his research life to E. coli O157 and other STECs.
Sorry for the delay in notification, but I just got this yesterday.
Doctor Colin Ogilvie Gill died on the 13th of December 2014, at his home in Lacombe following a sudden illness. Dr. Gill is survived by his wife Carol; his sons Alexander, Edmund and Benjamin; his grandchildren Kate, Beatrice and Matthew.
Dr. Gill was born in Forfar, Scotland in 1943. He was educated at the Universities of Leicester and Hull. In 1973 he emigrated with his wife and children to New Zealand where he conducted scientific research for the Meat Research Institute of New Zealand. Dr. Gill’s work on the microbiological safety and shelf life of meats in New Zealand was internationally recognized and he was recruited in 1990 as a Research Scientist by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, where he was employed at the Lacombe Research Station, until his death.
Over his career Dr. Gill published over 250 scientific publications and 4 patents. The impact of his work was internationally recognized and he was regularly consulted by foreign governments and domestic and international industry.
Dr. Gill’s work was recognized by the Commemorative Medal for the 125th Anniversary of Canadian Confederation (1994), Agcellence Award (1996), the Canadian Meat Council Science and Technology Award (1999) and the Golden Harvest Award for Excellence in Science (2008).
I went to Woolies in Annerley, Queensland (that’s in Australia), after taking my daughter to school on Monday, and was shocked to find Nanna’s berries – those linked to a growing hepatitis A outbreak — on the frozen shelves.
I asked the woman at checkout, weren’t those berries recalled?
She said, only the mixed ones.
I said, the raspberries and blueberries you’re selling are coming from the same source.
She shrugged and said, not in the recall.
They are Tuesday.
With at least 14 Australians now confirmed ill with hepatitis A from frozen berries apparently grown in China, the case presents a microcosm of intersecting interests of global food, vaccination fears, poor handwashing and xenophobia (which Australians are particularly good at; as John Oliver said, “Australia is one of the most comfortably racist places I’ve ever been in. They’ve really settled into their intolerance like an old resentful slipper”).
The complacency of Australian regulators is astounding when compared to other Western-style food safety agencies.
There was limited notice of the recall from state and federal food safety agencies until they all turned up for work on Monday: people eat seven days a week.
The company involved, Patties Foods in Bairnsdale in regional Victoria, repacks frozen berries grown who knows where (China and Chile in this case, apparently).
They said on Saturday they were going to run adverts in the papers on Monday, and were actually praised on Brekky TV for being proactive.
No, they weren’t. proactive. If it were the U.S., the company would be sued into bankruptcy for negligence.
Even worse is the media coverage and ridiculous statements from groups that should know better.
Australians have health types saying, throw the berries out (which I can understand for a public health perspective), and lawyers saying, don’t, keep them frozen for evidence to get in on the inevitable lawsuit.
The news programs are filled with reports about, buy Aussie, avoid the foreign berries, but keep food prices low.
For those worried about Hepatitis A:
Get vaccinated. It’s been mandatory in Canada and several U.S. states for five years. It was mandatory for us to emigrate to Australia four years ago. It should be mandatory for locals. If I ran a restaurant, I’d want everyone to be vaccinated.
Wash your hands. Hepatitis A is one of the few foodborne diseases that is only spread human-to-human. And, like most foodborne illness, it’s fecal-oral. The typical U.S. scenario is a 20-something goes to Mexico or the Dominican for a friends wedding (and where hep A is endemic), comes back and is serving salad to a few thousand people at their part-time job. But it’s not just the person is positive: The same person also failed to adequately wash their hands after having a poop, and ended up making your lunch. And was not vaccinated.
Cook frozen berries. The science is complicated but the best guess is, boil the berries; cooking however, won’t deal with cross-contamination.
Know your suppliers. I’ve talked with a lot of parents at my daughter’s school in the past few days and they are all concerned. But usually for the wrong reasons. It is incumbent on the supplier – and the retailers who market this crap – to provide safe food. They’re the ones who make money.
Food porn is everywhere, but microbiology involves some basics: that’s why there’s vaccines, that’s why milk is pasteurized; that’s why we don’t eat poop (and if we do, make sure it’s cooked).
That’s why I have a bunch of tip-sensitive digital thermometers for my daughter’s school.
Dr. Douglas Powell is a former professor of food safety at the University of Guelph in Canada and Kansas State University in the U.S., who shops, cooks and ferments from his home in Brisbane, Australia.
Salmonella sucks. In complex full service restaurants there are lots of possibilities for contamination. Sometimes the source is improper cooking procedures. Sometimes illnesses are linked to asymptomatic food handlers. Often the actual source is never identified.
According to myhighplains.com, 30 patrons of a Dalhart, TX restaurant, X-10 Woodfire Steakhouse have salmonellosis. That’s about all the info that’s out there.
The Texas Department of State Health Services tells KAMR Local 4 News the X-10 Woodfire Steakhouse in Dalhart has been connected to the salmonella cases.
Last week, that restaurant voluntarily closed.
Officials say since then, the restaurant was cleaned and sanitized and has been cleared for reopening.
Officials say they have not identified the original source inside the restaurant.
All environmental and food samples tested negative for salmonella.
My experiments in the 1980s involved tomato plants, Verticillium resistance, using a midwife to deliver our children, and saying no to the pertussis vaccine.
My ex-wife and I prided ourselves on our evidence-based approach to things, but as pertussis vaccine safety improved, so has my advice to the two oldest kids who have kids of their own: (or are about to): get vaccinated.
A couple of weeks after U.S. Senator Bozo declared that handwashing in food service places like Starbucks could be voluntary, I’ve contemplated that position and concluded sure: with a couple of conditions.
What I have always said is this: government inspections are a minimal standard but necessary to hucksters accountable. The best will always go above and beyond what is expected.
Consumers should seek out those who market microbial food safety and steer clear of hucksterism.
But retailers are reluctant to market food safety.
And it’s the retailers who are the burden in this food safety stuff: they preach but they don’t practice.
In addition to the personal tragedies, every outbreak raises questions about risk and personal choice.
It’s true that choice is a good thing. People make risk-benefit decisions daily by smoking, drinking, driving, and especially in Brisbane, cycling.
But information is hard to come by.
I went to a supermarket in Brisbane, after taking my daughter to school, and was shocked to find Nanna’s berries – those linked to a growing hepatitis A outbreak — on the frozen shelves.
I asked the woman at checkout, weren’t those berries recalled?
She said, only the mixed ones.
I said, the raspberries and blueberries you’re selling are coming from the same source.
She shrugged and said, not in the recall.
They were recalled the next day.
With at least 14 Australians now confirmed ill with hepatitis A from frozen berries apparently grown in China, the case presents a microcosm of intersecting interests of global food, vaccination fears, poor handwashing and xenophobia (which Australians are particularly good at; as John Oliver said, “Australia is one of the most comfortably racist places I’ve ever been in. They’ve really settled into their intolerance like an old resentful slipper”).
The complacency of Australian regulators is astounding when compared to other Western-style food safety agencies.
There was limited notice of the recall from state and federal food safety agencies until they all turned up for work on Monday: people eat seven days a week.
The company involved, Patties Foods in Bairnsdale in regional Victoria, repacks frozen berries grown who knows where (China and Chile in this case, apparently).
For those worried about Hepatitis A:
Get vaccinated. It’s been mandatory in Canada and several U.S. states for five years. It was mandatory for us to emigrate to Australia four years ago. It should be mandatory for locals. If I ran a restaurant, I’d want everyone to be vaccinated.
Wash your hands. Hepatitis A is one of the few foodborne diseases that is only spread human-to-human. And, like most foodborne illness, it’s fecal-oral. The typical U.S. scenario is a 20-something goes to Mexico or the Dominican for a friends wedding (and where hep A is endemic), comes back and is serving salad to a few thousand people at their part-time job. But it’s not just the person is positive: The same person also failed to adequately wash their hands after having a poop, and ended up making your lunch. And was not vaccinated.
Know your suppliers. I’ve talked with a lot of parents at my daughter’s school in the past few days and they are all concerned. But usually for the wrong reasons. It is incumbent on the supplier – and the retailers who market this crap – to provide safe food. They’re the ones who make money.
Food porn is everywhere, but microbiology involves some basics: that’s why there’s vaccines, that’s why milk is pasteurized; that’s why we don’t eat poop (and if we do, make sure it’s cooked).
That’s why I have a bunch of tip-sensitive digital thermometers for my daughter’s school.
If someone wants to promote public disclosure of handwashing compliance and is able to prove it, great.
Otherwise, you’re just a talker, not a doer.
Dr. Douglas Powell is a former professor of food safety at the University of Guelph in Canada and Kansas State University in the U.S., who shops, cooks and ferments from his home in Brisbane, Australia.
As companies and consumers check their freezers, past menus and, receipts, health officials anticipate that confirmed cases will continue to grow (The Age):
The number of cases of Hepatitis A linked to the consumption of frozen berries imported from China has climbed to at least 14.
Thirty-four government schools have advised the Victorian Education Department that some of their students have consumed berries that have been recalled because of the hepatitis A imported frozen berry outbreak.
The number of schools affected suggests that potentially hundreds of students ate berries from one of four lines of frozen berries before they were recalled in recent days by Bairnsdale-based food company Patties Foods.
Another example of questioning the world of epidemiology; gotta be tough to be an epi (Business Insider Australia):
On its website, Patties Foods says “The link between our products and the reported illnesses has not yet been confirmed,” in response to its own question about meeting medical costs.
“This makes it too early to comment,” the company said.
The local-food-is-safer contingent is out – without data (Sunshine Coast Daily):
Long-time Chevallum strawberry farmer Rick Twist, co-owner of Twist Brothers, said he could not understand why people continued to risk purchasing overseas products to save a few dollars when the integrity of local produce was so much higher.
“Why the hell do people buy this stuff from those countries when their standards are so low and ours are so high?” Mr Twist said.
“Australian berries… our regulations are so tight and so strong, I think they’re the best in the world.”
The Tigers confirmed on Tuesday that three senior players had approached club management on Monday with concerns that berries they ate may have been contaminated.
Captain Robbie Farah and veteran winger Pat Richards were later named in news reports as two players who underwent precautionary blood tests for the virus.
[Coach Jason] Taylor declined to name the trio of players but said they had shown no symptoms and the club had no confirmed cases of infection.
“It’s really simple. A couple of guys have eaten some of the berries that have been recalled, and that’s the end of the story,” Taylor said.
“We’re not overly concerned about it. We’re just being really cautious. It’s a smart move to make sure we are ticking all the boxes and all the guys are OK.
“We don’t feel that is going to come to that point (of infection) but we are doing due diligence on it.”
Some good amateur medical assessment there, Coach Taylor.
Last fall a neighbor told me about a how he was making kimchi, a fermented cabbage, carrot and onion concoction, in his kitchen. He wanted to pickle vegetables for health reasons and remembered what his grandmother had done.
His steps were fairly rudimentary, and a recipe for botulism: he put some vegetables into a mason jar, added some water, put the lid on it and tightened it as hard as it could go. Then he left it on the counter for a week.
According to AzerNews, home canned food has been linked to a death a handful of illnesses.
We are accustomed to hear about food poisoning in summertime and may neglect winter’s main danger – botulism -which may strike us down.
In the first month of this year, 64 cases of food poisoning were registered in Azerbaijan. The total number of victims of these poisoning cases reaches 92 people, said Imran Abdullayev, Head of Hygiene and Epidemiology Center Department of the Health Ministry.
Moreover, six cases of botulism were registered last month, which harmed nine people leaving one dead. The poisoning was due to homemade pickled tomatoes.
Everyone and especially those who love homemade pickles should remember storage precautions in winter.
The Centre of Hygiene and Epidemiology urges people to follow hygiene rules at home and buy food from reliable catering outlets and grocery stores to avoid food poisoning. Special attention should be paid to children’s’ nutrition.
To avoid food poisoning, one must simply follow hygiene rules at home and buy food in reliable catering outlets and grocery stores.
Prevention of botulism is simple: combining a refrigeration temperature with salt content and acidic conditions. This combination stops the growth of the bacteria and toxin.
Commercial canned goods are made by food business that require recipes to be evaluated for safety and receive inspections from food safety folks. Ingredients, acidity and canning processing procedures can all impact the safety of the final product.
Home canned are amongst the riskiest foods for botulism. In addition to botulism, acid tolerant pathogens such as E. coli O157 can persist in canned foods and lead to illnesses if the products aren’t processed correctly. The good folks at the National Center for Home Food Preservation has a massive database of recipes and processing times at http://nchfp.uga.edu.
Pathogens being pumped throughout a city into cups, food and showers make water system outbreaks scary in scope and outcome. In 1993 an estimated 400,000+ people in Milwaukee had cryptosporidiosis after oocysts made it through the city’s water treatment filtration system. In 2000, seven deaths and 2,300 illnesses were linked to a negligently-managed water system in Walkerton, Ontario (that’s in Canada).
Winnipeg, Manitoba (that’s also in Canada) had a boil water advisory for a couple of days last month that was blamed on a set of samples that falsely showed the water was positive for E. coli. Canadian food micro guru Rick Holley said a couple of weeks ago questioned the water folk’s explanation saying,
“I still had concerns at that time and still do that the false positives might not be scientifically discredited,” said Holley. “It’s all too easy to continue testing until you get the results you want and any results you don’t want you discard as being false. That’s inappropriate.”
Holley said the only way to be sure Winnipeg water is safe is to understand what caused the positive results earlier this week.
“Why were those six samples positive? There has to be a reason why and that has to be established,” said Holley.
The Manitoba government has ordered an investigation into the susceptibility of Winnipeg’s drinking water after a false E. coli result prompted a boil-water advisory last month for the capital’s 700,000 residents.
City staff say they are confident the water system was not contaminated with bacteria, but the waste and water director says the province has ordered a further assessment.
“It’s a vulnerability assessment,” Diane Sacher told a city council committee Wednesday. “It’s to look at whether our system is vulnerable to possible contamination.”
The report is due at the end of April, Sacher said. The city is also waiting on an independent audit of how water samples are taken and analyzed so as to be sure last month’s results were due to a lab or sampling error.
The province has also amended the city’s licence so water samples are no longer all collected on the same day, but rather spread over a week, she added. It has also requested the city come up with a better plan to notify potentially vulnerable people rather than relying on the media.
There’s a new form of entertainment in our house – reading random posts from a closed Facebook page, Wake Forest Community Information. Between crazy requests (‘Is there such a device in case the power goes out, that you can heat your home’ which garnered ‘fire’ an answer) and crowdsourcing medical information (‘Any dentists on here? What is this?’ with a picture of an abscess) are food safety related posts.
Weekly someone posts about getting sick at a local restaurant or getting some physical hazard in their food. And then there are I-make-food-at-home-and-want-to-sell-it posts.
In October, KCRA 3 revealed how people were selling lumpia and cheesecakes from homes and street corners. There were even tamales being sold that had been cooked in a garage.
Three months later, there are more users than ever. The “916 Food Spot” group alone has doubled to more than 2,200 members.
They’ve added more entrees to their menus, including ham and cheese dishes.
“It’s like a fast-food restaurant and you go online,” said Linda Harris, at the UC Davis Food Safety Facility.
Harris said many of the offered items don’t fall under the state’s cottage food laws, which allow some nonperishable foods to be sold from home.
Harris said selling foods on Facebook is a lot different than cooking for your husband and kids.
“When you’re cooking food in your home for your family, that’s one thing,” Harris told KCRA 3. “When you’re taking money in exchange for that food, I believe you have a much higher level of responsibility.”
KCRA 3 brought the Facebook food groups to the attention of the environmental health departments in Sacramento and San Joaquin counties.
San Joaquin County officials have asked their district attorney’s office to help them look into the cases — because they don’t have the staff to do it themselves.
Food inspectors said they still haven’t received a single complaint of a food-borne illness from someone who bought a dish through Facebook.
Baylen Linnekin is an activist who has been pushing to ensure people have freedom to eat the foods they want.
“They are not making a million dollars,” Linnekin said. “It’s not like they are suddenly becoming this baron of underground food in California. They are making a little bit here and a little bit there.”
But Harris said there are legitimate reasons the food safety laws were enacted in the first place.
“Almost every one of our food laws is a response to one or more outbreaks where there was public outcry — actual pushback on the regulators to say, ‘Why aren’t we doing more?'” Harris said.
When I talk with my older four daughters, I increasingly find myself quoting my father: I don’t care if you go to university, but be really good at something.
The cost-benefit simply isn’t worth it.
And university presidents are increasingly cheerleaders in charge.
Like Kirk Shultz at Kansas State;
“It is not snowing in Australia! @mikestanton14: .@kstate_pres a snow day tomorrow would be a pretty great way to celebrate President’s Day”
See my four-part series, Dear Dr. Provost, and the ridiculous lows universities have succumbed to.
Now the U.S. has its own homegrown outbreak of Salmonella on cucumbers, and maybe we missed something, but this is the first public notification.
Outbreaks of illnesses associated with this PFGE pattern have previously been linked to consumption of tomatoes harvested from Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the Delmarva region and have not been linked to cucumbers or other produce items.
Whole genome sequencing (WGS), a highly discriminating subtyping method, was used to further characterize PFGE pattern JJPX01.0061 isolates. Epidemiologic, microbiologic, and product traceback evidence suggests that cucumbers were a source of Salmonella Newport infections in this outbreak. The epidemiologic link to a novel outbreak vehicle suggests an environmental reservoir for Salmonella in the Delmarva region that should be identified and mitigated to prevent future outbreaks.
