Yearly Archives: 2015

Campy hasn’t stabilized in Ireland

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Within Ireland, the Food Safety Authority (FSAI) today stated that campylobacteriosis continues to be the most commonly reported foodborne illness in Ireland with 10 times more cases of campylobacteriosis being reported than salmonellosis. 

campy.chickenSome 2,288 cases of food poisoning due to Campylobacter were recorded in 2013, compared to over 2,600 in 2014.* The FSAI noted the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) annual figures for foodborne illness published today which suggests that the campylobacteriosis figures across Europe have stabilised, but that is not the experience in Ireland. 

The FSAI states that the figures recorded by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre in Ireland are the highest since campylobacteriosis became legally notifiable in 2004 and requires cross industry and consumer responses to be undertaken to tackle the problem.  The FSAI would support setting a microbiological hygiene standard for poultry meat at European level.  This would create a maximum tolerance level for Campylobacter in poultry which could be reviewed over time.  A similar approach was adopted as part of European controls for Salmonella which proved successful.

According to Dr Wayne Anderson, Director of Food Science and Standards, FSAI, salmonellosis was a major issue in Ireland 15 years ago, but due to the efforts of the Irish industry to control and reduce Salmonella contamination in eggs and poultry there has been a radical decrease in its incidence and impact on public health.

 “A similar effort is now required to reduce Campylobacter infections which can be serious and life threatening in vulnerable people. For Salmonella control, regulations were put in place which set a maximum tolerance for Salmonella in raw poultry amongst other controls. There is a need to set similar tolerance levels for Campylobacter and this would drive new control measures throughout the food chain to reduce its occurrence,” he says. “If the industry from producer right through to retailer comes together to put in specific measures to reduce the level of Campylobacter on poultry like it did for Salmonella, it would have a positive impact on the number of people becoming sick,” he said.

Washington firm recalls boneless beef trim product due to possible E. coli O157:H7 contamination

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Washington Beef, LLC, a Toppenish, Wash., establishment, is recalling 1,620 pounds of boneless  beef trim product that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.

Beef-Trimmings-85-15The following boneless beef product produced on Nov. 28, 2012, is subject to recall:

  • 60 lb. bulk packs of “TRIM 65/35 (FZN)”        

The product subject to recall bears the establishment number “EST. 235” inside the USDA mark of inspection.

The problem was discovered during an internal records audit by the company, which notified FSIS. Product was shipped for further processing to a single grinding facility, then on for use in hotels, restaurants and institutions in Oregon and Washington.         

FSIS and the company have received no reports of illnesses associated with consumption of this product.

But what does it really mean? Campylobacteriosis cases stable, listeriosis cases continue to rise in EU

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Campylobacteriosis infections reported in humans have now stabilised, after several years of an increasing trend, but it is still the most commonly reported foodborne disease in the EU. Listeriosis and VTEC infections in humans have increased, while reported salmonellosis and yersiniosis cases have decreased. These are some of the key findings of the European Union Summary Report on Trends and Sources of Zoonoses, Zoonotic Agents and Foodborne Outbreaks in 2013.

surveillance“The stabilisation of campylobacteriosis cases and the continuing downward trend of salmonellosis is good news, but we should not lower our guard as reporting of other diseases such as listeriosis and VTEC infections is going up,” says Marta Hugas, Head of Department of EFSA’s Risk Assessment and Scientific Assistance Department, who stresses the importance of monitoring foodborne illnesses in Europe.

Last year’s report showed that human cases of campylobacteriosis decreased slightly for the first time in five years. The 2013 figures have stabilised to the levels reported in 2012. Nevertheless, with  214,779  cases, campylobacteriosis remains the most commonly reported foodborne disease in the EU. In food , the causative agent, Campylobacter, is mostly found in chicken meat.

Listeriosis cases increased by 8.6 percent between 2012 and 2013 and have been increasing over the pastfive years. Although the number of confirmed cases is relatively low at 1,763, these are of particular concern as the reported Listeria infections are mostly severe, invasive forms of the disease with higher death rates than for the other foodborne diseases.  “The rise of reported invasive listeriosis cases is of great concern as the infection is acquired mostly from ready-to-eat food and it may lead to death, particularly among the increasing population of elderly people and patients with weakened immunity in Europe”, says Mike Catchpole, the Chief Scientist at ECDC. Despite the rise of listeriosis cases reported in humans, Listeria monocytogenes, the bacterium that causes listeriosis in humans and animals, was seldom detected above the legal safety limits in ready-to-eat foods.

Reported cases of verocytotoxin-producing E. coli (VTEC) infection rose by 5.9 percent – possibly an effect of increased awareness in Member States following the outbreak in 2011, which translated into better testing and reporting. No trends were observed on the presence of VTEC in food and animals.  

Salmonellosis cases fell for the eighth year in a row, with 82,694 cases –a 7.9 percent decrease in the notification rate compared with 2012. The report attributes the decrease to Salmonella control programmes in poultry and notes that most Member States met their reduction goals for prevalence in poultry for 2013. In fresh poultry meat, compliance with EU Salmonella criteria increased – a signal that Member States’ investments in control measures are working. 

Yersiniosis, the third most commonly reported zoonotic disease in the EU with 6,471 cases, has been decreasing over the past five years and declined by 2.8 percent compared with 2012.  

The EFSA-ECDC report covers 16 zoonoses and foodborne outbreaks. It is based on data collected by 32 European countries (28 Member States and four non-Member States) and helps the European Commission and EU Member States to monitor, control and prevent zoonotic diseases.

Should I stay or should I go? California deli being sued over Salmonella outbreak

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A lawsuit was filed this week on behalf of an Oxnard woman alleging she and at least seven others contracted Salmonella poisoning after eating last year at Brent’s Deli in Thousand Oaks.

The suit, filed Monday in Ventura County Superior Court, indicates as many as 21 people might have been victims of the outbreak, including two employees of Brent’s. Yet Ventura County and state health officials never issued a public warning.

Trevor Quirk, a Ventura attorney representing the woman, Stephanie Wehr, said the owners of Brent’s knew there was a problem with Salmonella contamination at the restaurant when his client ate there Aug. 2.

“They had numerous chances to deal with the problem but they failed to do so,” Quirk said.

Marc Hernandez, a managing partner with Brent’s, would not comment on the lawsuit, saying he had yet to see it. But he said “the health and safety of our customers and employees is of the absolute importance.”

“Our focus has always been customer satisfaction and providing a high-quality experience to the thousands of loyal customers who visit our restaurants,” he said in an email.

Victorian eateries (the Australian ones) with poor hygiene have been named, shamed, fined $450K

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Dozens of restaurants, cafes and other eateries in Victoria have copped about $450,000 in fines for breaches of food safety rules.

rest.inspection.victoria.jan.15Most of the culprits were Asian food venues, which were prosecuted for offences ranging from failure to protect food from contamination by pests to knowingly handling food in an unhealthy manner.

Offenders caught by council health inspectors are “named and shamed” on a state Health Department website for a year.

About 30 businesses are listed for convictions recorded over the past 18 months.

Former Southbank restaurant Olla Messa was fined $90,000 in April last year for poor storage of food and failing to keep out pests.

A court was told the City of Melbourne temporarily shut down the eatery after two patrons complained of an infestation of cockroaches.

An inspection of the restaurant found an unsealed grease trap and live and dead cockroaches “throughout the premises.”

Food safety’s gotta rule: Uni student says my fridge is your fridge – until the health department shows up

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Ernst Bertone and two fellow University of California, Davis graduate students began their experiment last fall with a simple idea: Build a closer community and reduce food waste by sharing food with their neighbors. They placed a community refrigerator on their lawn, called the project “free.go” and watched it take off.

free.goNeighbors and fellow students picked up and dropped off dozens of food items at the front yard fridge, following free.go’s mantra: “Take what you need. Leave what you don’t.” More than 100 items were exchanged in a month’s time outside Bertone and Eric Yen’s Douglas Avenue home last September.

By the end of the month, neighbors were sharing books, too, and another exchange was born.

“It worked exactly as it was supposed to. … People took (the food) and it worked. People took it and used it,” said Bertone, a graduate teaching assistant in UC Davis’ agriculture and resource economics department.

But the food sharing project quickly ran afoul of state health and safety codes and was unplugged late last year by Yolo County health officials amid food safety concerns. Bertone and friends, however, refuse to call free.go a failed experiment. Rather, they hope it will launch a broader conversation on the notion of food sharing in the city, including other “fridge sharing mechanisms,” as Bertone calls them, and its connection to an emerging “sharing economy.”

Bertone, Yen and Ali Hill, another UC Davis graduate student, plan to lobby Davis city leaders. They want to plead their case for food sharing and community refrigerators at a future City Council meeting. The idea has already spawned lively debate in community websites such as People’s Vanguard of Davis and drawn about 130 signers to an online petition that the trio plan to submit to the city.

“The fridge is a great idea even aside from (reducing) food waste,” Hill said. “It encourages a great sense of community that’s lacking in most communities. This is kind of a cool way to encourage it.”

But there are practical concerns, with food safety at the top of the list.

“I think the spirit is in the right place and the thought of not wasting food is good, but with the (health) issue, you balance progressive thinking with the fact there’s no control over it,” said neighbor Robert Weidenfeld. He suggested working with local food banks and other relief groups.

“I had no problem with it being out there and they’ll probably say that it’s a good idea, but maybe their energies would be best put toward groups that are shown to be effective,” he added.

Yolo County health officials who red-tagged the refrigerator as an illegal food facility back in November determined that because the free.go refrigerator was an unregulated food exchange, Bertone could not guarantee the food inside was safe to eat.

“He’s started a food business. The food’s not from an approved source. He can’t guarantee its safety. There are so many unknowns that there is a high risk to the public,” said April Meneghetti, a Yolo County environmental health specialist.

Meneghetti said the potential health risks are many: contamination; exposure to foodborne illnesses; unintentional exposure to those with food allergies and compromised immune systems; and the risk of eating recalled foods.

“It may not be anything malicious, but the food code is based on potential risk,” Meneghetti said. “If it’s completely unregulated, it’s too risky. There’s no way to trace back the food if someone got sick.”

Willy Wonka would be proud: Microbiological Safety of Low Water Activity Foods and Spices

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Chapman has written about his obsession with low moisture foods and how he terrifies his children about Salmonella in chocolate.

Now he has a month worth of bedtime reading: The Microbiological Safety of Low Water Activity Foods and Spices

Gurtler, Joshua B., Doyle, Michael P., Kornacki, Jeffrey L. (Eds.)

http://www.springer.com/food+science/book/978-1-4939-2061-7

willy-wonka-and-the-chocolate-factory-willy-wonka-and-the-chocolate-factory-17594222-640-480Describes the microbial challenges to ensuring the safety of low water activity (aw) food

Gives insight into regulatory issues, and appropriate product sampling and testing methods

Explores the efficacy of industrially-used and potential product decontamination interventions

Low water activity (aw) and dried foods such as dried dairy and meat products, grain-based and dried ready-to-eat cereal products, powdered infant formula, peanut and nut pastes, as well as flours and meals have increasingly been associated with product recalls and foodborne outbreaks due to contamination by pathogens such as Salmonella spp. and enterohemorrhagic E. coli. 

In particular, recent foodborne outbreaks and product recalls related to Salmonella-contaminated spices have raised the level of public health concern for spices as agents of foodborne illnesses.

Presently, most spices are grown outside the U.S., mainly in 8 countries: India, Indonesia, China, Brazil, Peru, Madagascar, Mexico and Vietnam. Many of these countries are under-developed and spices are harvested and stored with little heed to sanitation. The USDA has regulatory oversight of spices in the United States; however, the agency’s control is largely limited to enforcing regulatory compliance through sampling and testing only after imported foodstuffs have crossed the U.S. border. Unfortunately, statistical sampling plans are inefficient tools for ensuring total food safety. As a result, the development and use of decontamination treatments is key. 

Willy_Wonka_by_lovelookalikeThis book provides an understanding of the microbial challenges to the safety of low aw foods, and a historic backdrop to the paradigm shift now highlighting low aw foods as vehicles for foodborne pathogens.  Up-to-date facts and figures of foodborne illness outbreaks and product recalls are included.  Special attention is given to the uncanny ability of Salmonella to persist under dry conditions in food processing plants and foods.  A section is dedicated specifically to processing plant investigations, providing practical approaches to determining sources of persistent bacterial strains in the industrial food processing environment.  Readers are guided through dry cleaning, wet cleaning and alternatives to processing plant hygiene and sanitation.  Separate chapters are devoted to low aw food commodities of interest including spices, dried dairy-based products, low aw meat products, dried ready-to-eat cereal products, powdered infant formula, nuts and nut pastes, flours and meals, chocolate and confectionary, dried teas and herbs, and pet foods. 

The book provides regulatory testing guidelines and recommendations as well as guidance through methodological and sampling challenges to testing spices and low aw foods for the presence of foodborne pathogens.  Chapters also address decontamination processes for low aw foods, including heat, steam, irradiation, microwave, and alternative energy-based treatments.

Perishable food: China’s cold chain is improving

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Though China’s lack of cold-chain facilities and logistics for perishable products has been its Achilles heel, improvements are expected within the next five years, says Keith Hu, Northwest Cherry Growers representative.

china.cold.chainMelissa Hansen of Good Fruit Grower writes that China is recognized as one of the hottest markets in the world due to its large population and potential for consumption. Many U.S. agricultural commodity groups, including apple growers, anticipate more open trading in the near future after trade talks in mid-January between the two countries. But is China ready to handle the influx of perishable produce?

Hu visited China last year to better understand China’s cold-chain challenges for cherries and other fresh produce.

China’s lack of cold storage facilities, refrigerated trucks, and retail refrigeration results in food contamination, food waste, and spoilage that limits the reach of most U.S. food products to the coastal cities, he reported during a Washington State Fruit Commission board meeting in December.

Hu noted that food safety is a growing problem in China, and numerous food safety incidents go unreported.

However, cold-chain improvements are being made. Government regulations effective in 2015 will require that 20 percent of fresh fruits and vegetables, 50 percent of meat, and 65 percent of seafood be handled through cold-chain channels, according to Hu. “This is a big milestone for them.”

Shopping for safety: What is consumer food safety education?

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Now that the annual orgy of food safety advice has subsided until the next holiday (that would be the Super Bowl, and all the bad puns), it’s time to ask: are any of these messages effective?

powell.food.safety.edu.jan.15Do they actually reduce the number of people who get sick? Does anyone test these messages in a scientifically credible way?

Cook-clean-chill-separate has become the mantra of food safety types but there is no evidence — regardless of repetition — these messages work.

Instead, people are picking up sound bites like venereal diseases; I thought we’d gotten past that.

Marty had no reason going to the first food safety educators conference in Washington, D.C. in 1997. He was working as a student life advisor or something but, I had gotten in the habit of taking Marty along on road trips from Guelph – got lost once in some New York mountains in the middle of the night and thought we were going to die – for fun and driving chores.

The 1996 Nissan Quest minivan still had the new car smell, and as a new prof with a carload of students, I decided driving all night was better than dishing out non-existent cash for an extra night of hotel rooms.

We arrived in Georgetown about 7:30 a.m., ate at a dive, and found the on-campus conference room. People looked at us like we had just rolled out of a vehicle and been driving all night.

We had.

pink.floyd.educationMost of us went and changed into fresh clothes, while Marty crashed somewhere until the room was available.

The conference started and we were pumped.

I may have fallen asleep.

There were descriptions of many food safety education programs but the evaluation components were either non-existent or sucked.

I remember going out to a Georgetown bar later that night, watching The Truth About Cats and Dogs in the hotel room while Marty farted, and commenting that student Janis looked like Janeane Garofalo. I remember the drive home.

I don’t remember much about the conference.

Which is why I haven’t gone back.

I’m all for providing food safety information in a compelling, creative and critically sound manner. However education is something people do themselves. Lewis Lapham wrote in Harper’s magazine in the mid-1980s about how individuals can choose to educate themselves about all sorts of interesting things, but the idea of educating someone is doomed to failure. And it’s sorta arrogant to state that shoppers need to be educated; to imply that if only you understood the world as I understand the world, we would agree and dissent would be minimized.

These may be subtle semantics – to communicate with rather than to; to inform rather than educate – but they set an important tone.

With outbreaks in pizza, pot pies, pet food, peanut butter, bagged spinach, lettuce, sprouts, carrot juice, lettuce, tomatoes, canned chili sauce, hot peppers, cookie dough, chia seeds, tuna back scrape, and white pepper, I’m not sure what consumers have to do with it.

This is not to discount the role of consumers in protecting or enhancing the safety of the food they eat. Rather, consumers should be engaged as partners in the management of the farm-to-fork food continuum, and not unduly blamed for failing to recognize and correct errors that other players in this continuum have made.

Forget the blame; focus on shared responsibility; share information. Help people make better decisions. Tell them why what they do is important (if not yourself, try not to make your kids or friends barf).

The World Health Organization recognized this back in 2001 and included a fifth key to safer food: use safe water and raw materials, or, source food from safe sources (http://www.who.int/foodsafety/consumer/5keys/en/index.html).

I’m not sure what consumers are supposed to do about Listeria in caramel apples, but that’s another story.

Dr. Douglas Powell is a former professor of food safety who shops, cooks and ferments from his home in Brisbane, Australia.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the original creator and do not necessarily represent that of the Texas A&M Center for Food Safety or Texas A&M University.

Roaches, mold, slime found at routine Georgia restaurant inspection

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Laura Berrios of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a Fulton County health inspector found live roaches in the facility of a Philly & Wings Plus in southwest Atlanta. The routine inspection also turned up slime, mold and food debris in the ice machine.

Philly & Wings PlusPhilly & Wings Plus, 1722 Campbellton Road, Atlanta, scored a 41/U, the second failing routine inspection for the restaurant.

The inspector said management needed retraining in food safety because there was a lack of awareness in key areas of risk control.

For example, points were taken off because employees were not washing their hands properly.