A farmer has made headlines after bringing his two cows to a city and selling fresh milk straight from the udder in Zhangye, Gansu Province over the weekend.
The man realized city dwellers have a taste for raw milk, reported the Chinese language China News Service.
People have been queuing in the streets to purchase the milk, which is often in short supply as there are so many customers, the seller said.
Memories …
We spent the weekend with some University of Gueph friends who live on the beach in Australia.
None of us miss the Canadian cold.
Two of five daughters. Two grandsons. Genetics at work.
Poop scoopers at the St. Louis Zoo deliver droppings to scientists who study the hormonal health of animals — from fertility to stress levels.
Feces contains hormones that are excreted through the body’s filtering process. Those hormones also pass through blood, saliva, urine and hair, but who wants to take that from a rhinoceros?
“Poop is just the easiest to collect. Keepers are cleaning it up every day,” said Corinne Kozlowski, lead endocrinologist (hormone researcher) at the zoo.
The St. Louis Zoo’s endocrinology lab has tested 42,000 stool samples in 20 years of operation. The samples from 60-plus animal species have come from more than 150 zoos and other organizations around the country. Only two other zoos — the National Zoo in Washington and the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago — accept outside fecal samples for testing.
Kozlowski and her team track mammals’ estrogen, progesterone and testosterone levels as well as cortisol, a stress hormone. Zookeepers follow the ovulation cycles of females so they can encourage (or discourage) the mating process. The lab can make a pregnancy diagnosis, tell if contraception is working or figure out if an animal is infertile. They track hormones during pregnancy so caretakers know when to prepare for an impending birth.
At least AC/DC can say they made their name in Australia (what’s left played in Brisbane the other night) but to this ex-pat, I see too many bands and brands coming here for an easy buck.
Guess it’s no different for raw milk spokesthingies.
We’re all on a highway to hell.
Mark McAfee, who runs runs Organic Pastures Dairy in California, milking 550 cows with his family and supplying 700 stores with products including milk, cream, cheese and butter, and sometimes sickening customers with Campylobacter or E. coli.
It is legal to sell raw milk products for human consumption in California.
Mr McAfee was in Australia last month and during that time he spoke at a pro-raw milk event in Melbourne hosted by the Australian Raw Milk Movement. He also met with dairy industry and regulatory organisations.
Following that meeting he told The Weekly Times he believed there was political will now in Australia to have the debate about the production and consumption of milk and milk products that have not been pasteurised.
It is illegal in Australia to sell unpasteurised milk for human consumption. Earlier this year Food Standards Australia and New Zealand lifted the ban on the sale of some raw milk cheeses in Australia.
Mr McAfee said the move in Victoria from January 1 that required a bittering agent to be added to raw milk if it was sold without pasteurisation wasn’t good for the consumer. The Government introduced the requirement following the death of a toddler who drank raw milk. The coroner’s report into the death is yet to be released.
Mr McAfee said the bittering agent was “ continuing the charade that bath milk is not consumed and people are taking a bath in it”.
“It is upsetting people and pissing them off. I can guarantee you there is unlabelled milk (from farms) getting around at the moment.”
A restaurant is hoping to pre-empt unruly child behavior by giving parents with kids a rule card about proper table manners when they get seated.
Can diners have food safety cards they can hand to staff?
For the last few months, d, a Mexican restaurant located in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, has been handing out illustrated cards to families that come in to dine. The colourful card shows a happy family eating with text below that reads:
“Children at Cuchara don’t run or wander around the restaurant. They stay seated and ask their parents to take sthem to the rest room. They don’t scream, throw tantrums or touch the walls, murals, windows or other patrons. They are respectful!”
According to TV news service KHOU, the restaurant isn’t trying to discourage parents from bringing in their kids but they do want diners to be mindful of how their children behave.
The move comes after the restaurant suffered $1500 in damage six months ago, when a child scratched one of its walls featuring hand painted murals by Mexico City artist Cecilia Beaven.
So far, the restaurant says the reaction to the cards has been overwhelmingly positive.
I never liked Hy-Vee in Manhattan, Kansas.
They were sorta uppity and didn’t seem to know shit about food safety.
An editorial in The Des Moines Register echoes those sentiments:
More than 50 people were sickened by cooked taco meat that was served to the staff at Des Moines’ Roosevelt High School last month.
The cooked meat was purchased from a grocery store shortly before it was served at the school as part of a staff luncheon. Subsequent testing detected a temperature-sensitive bacteria in the meat. The Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals said the food was likely tainted during preparation at the store since the bacteria wouldn’t have had enough time to grow between the time the meat was purchased and the time it was served.
The official public report from the Polk County Department of Public Health said that while a “specific point” in the preparation and handling process couldn’t be identified as the culprit, food-safety and food-handling guidelines were reviewed “with those involved.” The state inspections agency said the store had given assurances the staff was being retrained.
The trouble is, the county and the state chose not to disclose the name of that store. Fortunately, community members stepped forward and identified the business as the Hy-Vee store in Windsor Heights. Had they not done so, the identity of the food supplier might still be unknown.
A Hy-Vee spokeswoman acknowledged the store provided the food, but denied that it was responsible for the food poisoning. She then appeared to cast blame on the store’s own customers, saying, “We can’t control how food is handled after it leaves our stores.”
That statement contrasts sharply with the state’s calming reassurance that the Hy-Vee staff is being retrained, and it only serves to underscore — perhaps unintentionally — the importance of disclosing the names of food suppliers in cases like this.
But public disclosure is traditionally the road less traveled in Iowa, a state where regulations are written largely to protect business and industry — even at the expense of the public welfare.
Our state law says public health reports should be written in a manner that doesn’t identify a business that may be at fault. It goes on to say that “information disclosing the identity of the business may be released to the public when the state epidemiologist or the director of public health determines such a release of information (is) necessary for the protection of the health of the public.”
In the Roosevelt High School case, state health officials say, no public health threat was identified, as only those people who attended the school luncheon were sickened. The logic in that position is hard to fathom, especially when one considers the volume of food a store such as this is capable of dispensing on any given day.
When public health officials identify a supplier of food that is later found to have sickened 50 people, that supplier should be publicly identified. People in the community deserve to know who may have been responsible — not so they can organize a torch-bearing mob, but so they can make fully informed decisions as consumers.
We’ve got a paper that’s going to come out in the next few months (its been peer-reviewed, edited and approved) about going public, but I don’t want to violate my no-PR-before-publication rule.
However, others are getting on the going public bandwagon.
Seattle & King County in Washington state writes in a release that in a typical week, we receive reports of other enteric (intestinal) illnesses including campylobacteriosis, salmonellosis, shigellosis, and norovirus. At the time of this posting, we’re investigating reports of mumps, pertussis, tularemia, varicella, and suspected rabies exposures. We’re continuing to monitor returning travelers from countries impacted by Ebola and have had several returning healthcare workers evaluated for Ebola infection (none have had it). And we’re in the early phases of our annual ritual tracking the upcoming influenza season.
Why have we publicized some investigations but not others?
As the health department, our top priority is to keep the public safe and healthy, including preventing and responding to disease outbreaks. When we hear about possible outbreaks from individuals, healthcare providers, laboratories or businesses that report cases of illness to us, we investigate but we don’t divulge the ill person’s identity, even if it is a communicable disease. Not only are people’s identities protected by state and federal law, breaking confidentiality could discourage people from reporting diseases – putting us all at risk.
Similarly, if we learn from a food business or from its customers that people got sick from eating at the restaurant, we want that food business to work with us to figure out what happened, confident that we will not prematurely place blame before we have done an investigation to evaluate all possible causes, including (but not limited to) restaurant food safety practices that could have contributed, contamination of a commercial food product the restaurant may have received, and other causes unrelated to the restaurant, business or organization.
But if there’s ongoing risk we’re going to tell you about it. We will always make a public announcement (including names of implicated restaurants and commercial entities) when there is an ongoing outbreak or risk that people need to know about in order to protect their health. We’ll provide information on how to avoid illness and what to do if you’ve been exposed. We may also make a public announcement if it will help us solve an ongoing investigation. In addition, we can inspect and close restaurants immediately if we find food safety violations contributing to an outbreak. We post these closures on our website and publicize with Facebook and Twitter.
Health departments, including ours, typically don’t make public announcements about an outbreak when the outbreak is over, there is no ongoing risk to the public and there are no actions or steps for the public to take to protect their health. In addition, just as we seek to avoid stigmatizing people, we avoid public announcements that implicate businesses, organizations or restaurants when we don’t have good evidence about the source or cause of the problem or we don’t have a confirmed link to the commercial facility and there is no ongoing risk. Our public notification practices are consistent with health departments in our region and around the country.
But … we are learning that people want to know more about our outbreak investigations, above and beyond our public alerts when there’s an immediate heath risk, and we respect that interest. This is part of a larger trend toward greater openness from government, which values the public’s right to know. Conversations with local media that also value public access to information, including the Seattle Times, raised issues that helped our Health Officer, Dr. Jeff Duchin to decide in July 2015 to develop a way to routinely provide public information about outbreaks.
Information about the causes of outbreaks is occasionally straightforward, but more often is unclear and/or inconclusive. In order to provide information about the circumstances and possible causes of outbreaks responsibly, we need to provide important context and background. We don’t want readers to confuse associations, (which are relationships between two or more events or other variables that may or not indicate cause and effect), with actual causes. For example, in many investigations we are not able to identify the cause or source with certainty. This typically happens when there is simply not enough epidemiologic and/or laboratory evidence available to draw reliable conclusions.
We will need to present information in a way that would incorporate at minimum the key facts of an outbreak as well our conclusions regarding potential causes and limitations of the available information. We are going to approach this work thoughtfully and seek input from experts in both public health and communications, and hope to have this ready to roll out in January 2016.
In addition, we are currently in the process of expanding how restaurant inspection information is made available to the public – via storefront signs and improved online access. This will be an update to our current practice of posting inspections online – we were one of the very first health departments to do this way back in 2001!
Save the exclamation marks for the truly exclamatory.
New produce safety rules from the government Friday are intended to help prevent the kind of large-scale outbreaks of foodborne illness that occurred over the past decade linked to fresh spinach, cantaloupes, cucumbers and other foods.
Under the rules, the government soon will have new oversight of the farms that grow Americans’ food. That means, for example, making sure workers are trained to wash their hands, irrigation water is monitored for harmful bacteria and animals do not leave droppings in fields.
The regulations are tailored to cover foods and growing methods that pose the greatest risk, and they target produce such as berries, melons, leafy greens and other items usually eaten raw and more prone to contamination. A farm that produces green beans that will be cooked and canned, for example, would not be regulated. There are also exemptions for smaller farms.
The rules require farmers to test irrigation water quality, regularly train workers on the best health and hygiene practices, and monitor wildlife that may intrude on growing fields, among other measures.
Compared with the original proposal, the final rule requires less stringent standards for irrigation water quality and reduces the frequency of testing, in some cases. The organic industry had expressed concerns about the rules, especially because many organic farmers use raw manure as fertilizer and try to treat irrigation water with fewer chemicals.
Advocates for food safety laws have cited the pressing need after several high-profile foodborne illness outbreaks. In 2006, E. coli in fresh spinach was linked to several deaths, including a 2-year-old. A 2011 outbreak of listeria linked to cantaloupes killed 30 people. This year, four people have died in a salmonella outbreak linked to Mexican cucumbers.
Also on Friday, the FDA released new rules to ensure the safety of food imported for the U.S. market.
These rules could help prevent against outbreaks such as the salmonella in Mexican cucumbers or cyclospora illnesses linked to Mexican cilantro. The FDA said the cilantro was grown in fields where American investigators found toilet paper and human feces.
An undercover video taken at one of the nation’s largest pork producers shows pigs being dragged across the floor, beaten with paddles, and sick to the point of immobility. By law, pigs are supposed to be rendered unconscious before being killed, but many are shown writhing in apparent pain while bleeding out, suggesting that they weren’t properly stunned. “That one was definitely alive,” a worker says.
The video also appears to show pigs with puss-filled abscesses being sent down the line. Others are covered in feces.
“If the USDA is around, they could shut us down,” says a worker, wearing a bright yellow apron, standing over the production line.
The graphic video — available on YouTube in an edited form — was covertly filmed by a contracted employee of Compassion Over Killing, a nonprofit animal rights group that claims to have infiltrated an Austin, Minn., facility run by Quality Pork Processors (QPP), a supplier of Hormel Foods, the maker of Spam and other popular processed meats. The group has turned over the 97-minute unedited video to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has raised serious concerns about the conditions at the QPP facility and pledged a thorough investigation. A reporter has also seen the full-length video provided by the group.
“The actions depicted in the video under review are appalling and completely unacceptable, and if we can verify the video’s authenticity, we will aggressively investigate the case and take appropriate action,” said USDA spokesman Adam Tarr, adding that the agency can’t comment definitively in the middle of the probe.
QPP, which has seen both the edited and unedited versions, says the edited film makes it look as though there were violations when, in fact, there were none.
“Early on, there may very well be contamination present in the process, but we have multiple interventions that ensure that it will not only be visually removed, but completely removed,” said Nate Jansen, who is the vice president of human resources and quality services at QPP. “Had it been allowed to show the entire sequence of these events, all of these hogs were all handled appropriately.”
To gain access to the QPP facility, the Compassion Over Killing contractor applied for five months for jobs at meat processing companies and was eventually hired at QPP. Compassion Over Killing requested the person’s name not be disclosed because he still works at QPP, but showed a pay stub indicating employment there. The person did not describe on his job applications his affiliation with the activist group.
“I don’t think you can look at the video along with the USDA guidelines and say that QPP is following the law,” said Ted Genoways, the author of “The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food,” and has seen the video but is not associated with the group. “This plant is the symbol of everything that is wrong with the meat industry.”
In particular, the video shines a light on a government-approved pilot program, known as the HACCP-Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP), which allows processors like QPP to assume more responsibility over the inspection process.
The company is one of five pork processors participating in the HIMP program, which the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) first launched in the late 1990s. As part of the initiative, the government substantially changed the way it oversees meat production, more than doubling the number of safety checks (from 11 to 24) within a facility and reallocating government inspectors to focus more closely on food safety. The goal, as stated on the agency’s Web site, was to “produce a flexible, more efficient, fully integrated” system.
In the HIMP inspection model, three government inspectors are stationed on the production line, compared to the usual seven who oversee the handling of carcasses in the traditional system. In both, an additional offline inspector is free to move around. The reduction in government inspectors dedicated to checking hogs on the line has allowed the government to save money by reducing its inspection force. It has also allowed plants to increase their line speed — on average, participants in the pilot program process roughly 120 extra hogs per hour, according to the USDA.
The USDA speaks highly of the program, which it has repeatedly defended. “Obviously, we believe that the model is an appropriate one,” said Phil Derfler, the deputy administrator at FSIS. “That’s why we went ahead with the rule-making in order to adopt it — it’s an improvement on the traditional system.”
But Lisa Winebarger, who serves as a legal counsel to Compassion Over Killing and helped bring the investigation to the USDA, said QPP is violating those directives.
“I understand that QPP is denying any wrongdoing, but we can assure you that much of what we have documented are serious problems labeled as ‘egregious inhumane treatment’ and ‘egregious noncompliances'” by the government’s directives, she said.
In a recent study funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, University of Georgia researchers found that produce that contained bacteria would contaminate other produce items through the continued use of knives or graters–the bacteria would latch on to the utensils commonly found in consumers’ homes and spread to the next item.
Unfortunately, many consumers are unaware that utensils and other surfaces at home can contribute to the spread of bacteria, said the study’s lead author Marilyn Erickson, an associate professor in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences’ department of food science and technology.
“Just knowing that utensils may lead to cross-contamination is important,” Erickson said. “With that knowledge, consumers are then more likely to make sure they wash them in between uses.”
Erickson has been researching produce for the past 10 years. Her past work has mainly focused on the fate of bacteria on produce when it’s introduced to plants in the field during farming.
In 2013, she was co-author on a study looking at the transfer of norovirus and hepatitis A between produce and common kitchen utensils–finding that cutting and grating increased the number of contaminated produce items when that utensil had first been used to process a contaminated item.
This study, published in Food Microbiology, is similar in that it considers the influence that knives and graters have on the transfer of pathogenic bacteria to and from produce items. She urges consumers to realize that these germs can spread in their kitchens as well.
Researchers have known that poor hygiene and improper food preparation practices in a consumer’s home can lead to foodborne illnesses, but considering what practices in the kitchen are more likely to lead to contamination has not been examined extensively.
“The FDA was interested in getting more accurate numbers as to what level of cross-contamination could occur in the kitchen using standard practices,” Erickson said.
In her recent study, Erickson contaminated many types of fruits and vegetables in her lab–adding certain pathogens that often can be found on these foods, such as salmonella and E. coli.
Using a knife, Erickson would cut into things like tomatoes or cantaloupe and other types of produce to see how easily the bacteria could spread when the knife was continuously used without being cleaned. Because they “were looking at what would be the worst-case scenario,” she said, Erickson and study co-authors did not wash between cutting these different produce items.
Researchers also grated produce, like carrots, to see how easily the pathogens spread to graters. They found that both knives and graters can cause additional cross-contamination in the kitchen and that the pathogens were spread from produce to produce if they hadn’t washed the utensils.
“A lot of the broken up material and particles from the contaminated produce remained on the graters,” said Erickson, who conducts her research at the UGA Center for Food Safety in Griffin. “Then if you were to shred another carrot or something else immediately after that, it gets contaminated, too.”
The study also found that certain fruits and vegetables spread pathogens to knives to different degrees.
“For items like tomatoes, we tended to have a higher contamination of the knives than when we cut strawberries,” Erickson said. “We don’t have a specific answer as to why there are differences between the different produce groups. But we do know that once a pathogen gets on the food, it’s difficult to remove.”
Knives and graters aren’t the only utensils in the kitchen consumers should be worried about. Erickson has also helped study the role brushes and peelers have on the transfer of dangerous kitchen bacteria.
In concurrent studies, Erickson found that scrubbing or peeling produce items–like melons, carrots and celery–did not eliminate contamination on the produce item but led to contamination of the brush or peeler. Even when placed under running water, the utensils still became contaminated; however, the ability to cross-contaminate later produce items depended on the brush type and the pathogenic agent.
These studies combined give researchers a better idea as to how common cross-contamination is in the kitchen–even when just using standard practices.
Erickson explained there is a small chance of buying fruits and vegetables contaminated with bacteria, but the problem can occur–whether the product is store-bought or locally grown.
Additional study co-authors were Qing Wang, a doctoral student at the University of Delaware, and Jean Liao, a research professional; and associate professors Jennifer Cannon and Ynes Ortega with UGA’s Center for Food Safety.
The study, “Contamination of knives and graters by bacterial foodborne pathogens during slicing and grating of produce,” is available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740002015001306.