With six outbreaks now associated with Chipotle since July, the burrito chain is under scrutiny from the public and food safety folks for being heavy on promises to be 20 years ahead of everyone else and light on details. A couple of weeks ago they talked about switching their tomato handling from largely an in-store process to a centralized commissary with controls.
Onions will be dipped in boiling water to kill germs before they’re chopped. Raw chicken will be marinated in re-sealable plastic bags, rather than in bowls. Cilantro will be added to freshly cooked rice so the heat gets rid of microbes in the garnish.
“When you’re given a project like this, you look at the universe of hazards,” said Mansour Samadpour, CEO of IEH Laboratories, which was hired by Chipotle to tighten its procedures.
Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said many of changes will be implemented in coming weeks, but that the company doesn’t expect the taste of its food to suffer. Among the tweaks the company is making:
—Cheese will now arrive in restaurants shredded.
—Ingredients like onions will be macerated with lemon or lime juice to kill germs.
—60 samples of every 2,000 pounds of steak will be tested before it’s sent to stores. A similar testing program will be implemented for chicken in coming weeks. Pork and barbacoa beef are already delivered cooked in sealed bags.
—Tomatoes, cilantro and other ingredients will be chopped in centralized locations, rather than in stores, so they can be tested. Chipotle has said in the past that tomatoes taste better when freshly diced in restaurants. After the outbreak, Chipotle co-CEO Steve Ells changed tunes: “If I’m eating a burrito that had tomatoes that were chopped in a central kitchen in the salsa or one that was chopped in house, I probably couldn’t tell the difference,” he said in an interview on CNBC last week.
Not all chopping will be moved to centralized locations. Onions, for instance, would oxidize and smell bad if they were chopped days in advance, Samadpour said. So they will remain chopped in restaurants, along with lemons, limes and jalapenos. All will now be blanched to kill germs.
These are some good steps, I’d love to see the validation data that shows onions macerated with high-acid juice will take care of pathogens. Salmonella has been shown to be pretty hardy in the ceviche-type setting (resulting in a 1-2 log reduction according to some work done by barfblog friend and podcast buddy Don Schaffner).
I’d love to see the data associated with adding-cilantro-to-hot-rice – sounds like a good idea, but what is the heat transfer like and what does it do to the pathogens?
Sealed bags vs open bowls for marination is good – but those bags still need to be opened and the juices controlled.
Safefood Ireland asks: Want to know the cooking time for your turkey to ensure the best (and safest) results?
This year it’s quick and simple. Just enter the weight of your turkey in the calculator, and it will calculate the correct cooking time to ensure your turkey is cooked to perfection.
Our calculated turkey cooking times are for use in electric fan assisted ovens only. See below for guidance on cooking turkeys using other oven types.
I’ll spare you the convoluted details.
Whoever thought a calculator with all the variables such as oven temp, time, etc. was simpler than sticking it in has probably never cooked a turkey. With a tip-sensitive digital thermometer.
And of course, the piping-hot-no-pink mantra: “As with cooking any poultry, always double check that the turkey is properly cooked before serving. Your turkey should be piping hot all the way through with no pink meat left and the juices should run clear when the thickest part of the thigh and breast are pierced with a clean fork or skewer.”
Curtis Stone from Coles in Australia gets it sorta right when he says, “Baste the turkey and continue roasting uncovered for about 1 hour longer, basting occasionally with more spice butter, or until a meat thermometer reads 75°C when inserted deep into the breast. If you don’t have a thermometer, insert a clean skewer into the thickest part of the thigh and if the juices run clear the turkey is ready.”
He and his wife are conscientious about their food: They eat organic, local produce and ethically raised animals. Collins liked to have a meal at Chipotle once a week. On Friday evening, Oct. 23, he ordered his regular chicken bowl at his usual Chipotle in Lake Oswego. His dinner was made of 21 ingredients, including toasted cumin, sautéed garlic, fresh organic cilantro, finely diced tomatoes, two kinds of onion, romaine lettuce, and kosher salt. It tasted as good as always.
By the next night, Collins’s body was aching and his stomach was upset. Then he began experiencing cramping and diarrhea. His stomach bloated. “Moving gave me excruciating pain,” he says, “and anytime I ate or drank it got worse.” His diarrhea turned bloody. “All I was doing was pooping blood. It was incredibly scary.” After five days, he went to an urgent-care clinic near his home; the nurse sent him to an emergency room. He feared he might have colon cancer.
On Halloween, the ER doctor called him at home: Collins had Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli 026, and he’d likely gotten it from one of those 21 ingredients in his meal at Chipotle. (This was later confirmed by public-health officials.) The doctor warned him that kidney failure was possible; intensive treatment, including dialysis, could be necessary. His kidneys held up, but it took an additional five days for the worst of Collins’s symptoms to ease and nearly six weeks for him to recover. He still doesn’t have as much physical strength as he used to, and he feels emotionally shaky, too. “Before, I was doing the P90X workouts. For a long time after, I couldn’t even walk a few blocks,” he says. “It made me feel old and weak and anxious.” On Nov. 6, Collins sued Chipotle, seeking unspecified damages.
Collins was among 53 people in nine states who were sickened with the same strain of E. coli. “I trusted they were providing me with ‘food with integrity,’ ” Collins says, sarcastically repeating the company motto. “We fell for their branding.” Chipotle’s public stance during the outbreak irritated him, too. The company closed all 43 of its restaurants in Oregon and Washington in early November to try to identify the source of the E. coli and sanitize the spaces. Notices on restaurant doors generally referred to problems with the supply chain or equipment. But local media reported that at least one restaurant in Portland put up a note that said, “Don’t panic … order should be restored to the universe in the very near future.” “That felt so snarky,” Collins says. “People could die from this, and they were so smug.”
For a long time, smug worked pretty well for Chipotle Mexican Grill. It’s grown into a chain of more than 1,900 locations, thanks in part to marketing—including short animated films about the evils of industrial agriculture—that reminds customers that its fresh ingredients and naturally raised meat are better than rivals’ and better for the world. The implication: If you eat Chipotle, you’re doing the right thing, and maybe you’re better, too. It helped the company, charging about $7 for a burrito, reach a market valuation of nearly $24 billion. Its executives seemed to have done the impossible and made a national fast-food chain feel healthy.
Fewer people associate Chipotle with “healthy” now. Three months before Collins was infected with E. coli, five people fell ill eating at a Seattle-area restaurant. By the time local health officials had confirmed a link, the outbreak was over, so no one said anything. In August, 234 customers and employees contracted norovirus at a Chipotle in Simi Valley, Calif., where another worker was infected. Salmonella-tainted tomatoes at 22 outlets in Minnesota sickened 64 people in August and September; nine had to be hospitalized. Norovirus struck again in late November: More than 140 Boston College students picked up the highly contagious virus from a nearby Chipotle, including half of the men’s basketball team. An additional 16 students and three health-care staff picked it up from the victims. The source? A sick worker who wasn’t sent home although Chipotle began offering paid sick leave in June. In the second week of December, when Chipotle should have been on highest alert, a Seattle restaurant had to be briefly shut down after a health inspection found that cooked meat on the takeout line wasn’t being kept at a high enough temperature. And in the most recent case, on Dec. 21, the CDC announced it was investigating an outbreak of what seems to be a different and rare version of E. coli 026 that’s sickened five people in two states who ate at Chipotle in mid-November. The company says it had expected to see additional cases. It still doesn’t know which ingredients made people ill.
Almost 500 people around the country have become sick from Chipotle food since July, according to public-health officials. And those are just the ones who went to a doctor, gave a stool sample, and were properly diagnosed. Food-safety experts say they believe with any outbreak the total number of people affected is at least 10 times the reported number. The CDC estimates that 48 million Americans get sick from contaminated food every year.
At Chipotle, three different pathogens caused the five known outbreaks. That wasn’t inevitable or coincidental. “There’s a problem within the company,” says Michael Doyle, the director of the center for food safety at the University of Georgia. Chipotle has gotten big selling food that’s unprocessed, free of antibiotics and GMOs, sometimes organic, sometimes local. “Blah, blah, blah,” says Doug Powell, a retired (I’m not dead yet) food-safety professor and the publisher of barfblog.com. “They were paying attention to all that stuff, but they weren’t paying attention to microbial safety.” Whatever its provenance, if food is contaminated it can still make us sick—or even kill. Millennials may discriminate when they eat, but bacteria are agnostic.
“Food with integrity,” a promise to Chipotle’s customers and a rebuke to its competitors, has become the source of much schadenfreude among both. Chipotle’s stock has lost about 30 percent of its value since August. Sales at established stores dropped 16 percent in November, and executives expect a decline of 8 percent to 11 percent in comparable-store sales for the last three months of the year. That would be the first quarterly decline for Chipotle as a public company.
Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder and co-chief executive, went on the Today show on Dec. 10, apologized to everyone who’d fallen ill, and announced a comprehensive food-safety program that he said would far exceed industry norms. He didn’t address why a company that had challenged quality standards with such gusto hadn’t taken on safety standards as well.
On Dec. 17, speaking by phone in New York, he’s still on message, describing the Seattle restaurants he visited as clean and organized. “I ate delicious food there,” he says. “Traffic was slow, but we’re ready for people to come back. There is no E. coli in Chipotle. ” To hear Ells tell it, the company is witnessing an outbreak of excitement. He says the chain’s suppliers are excited to participate in the new safety programs; employees at headquarters in Denver are excited to contribute however they can; it’s “a very, very exciting time for us to be pushing the boundaries” on food safety. “We’re embracing this as an opportunity.”
Ells studied art history in college, trained as a chef at the Culinary Institute of America, and opened the first Chipotle in Denver in 1993 with a loan from his father. He set up a model—open kitchen, fresh ingredients, real cooking in the back, and an assembly line in front, allowing customization and speed—that’s become its own industry standard. Chipotle grew from 489 restaurants and revenue of $628 million in 2006, when it went public, to about 1,800 restaurants and $4.1 billion in revenue in 2014. Net profit increased 60 percent from 2012 to 2014. Ells and his co-CEO, Montgomery Moran, together earned more than $140 million in total compensation during that time. And Michael Pollan, the good-food arbiter, said that Chipotle was his favorite fast-food chain and that he didn’t have a second.
The company was influenced in ways it doesn’t always admit by the biggest, most industrialized chain of them all: McDonald’s. The company invested about $340 million in Chipotle from 1998, when it had 13 restaurants in Colorado, until 2006, when the two parted ways. McDonald’s taught Chipotle supply-chain economics. Chipotle often derides fast-food chains and their factory farms, enlisting the likes of Willie Nelson to make plaintive music videos about crop chemicals and steroidal cattle. But Ells respects McDonald’s size. In an interview with Bloomberg in 2014, he said Chipotle could one day be “bigger than McDonald’s in the U.S. I mean, that’s not an unreasonable way to think about this.”
A Sept. 2008 report showed that of the 78 residents of the Canadian province of British Columbia who contracted listeriosis in the past six years, 10 per cent were pregnant women whose infections put them at high risk of miscarriage or stillbirth.
The majority — nearly 60 per cent — of pregnant women diagnosed with listeriosis either miscarry or have stillbirths.
Five years later, the hospital has finally decided to take action.
But not because of bogus advice.
The Hospital for Sick Children has permanently discontinued hair drug and alcohol tests at its embattled Motherisk Drug Testing Laboratory after an internal review “further explored and validated” previous, and as yet undisclosed, “questions and concerns.”
The decision, announced earlier this year, comes amid a Toronto Star investigation and mounting pressure from critics to shutter the lab, whose hair drug and alcohol tests have been used in criminal and child protection cases across the country, typically as evidence of parental substance abuse.
In March, Sick Kids temporarily suspended all non-research operations at Motherisk, after Lang’s review and the hospital’s review revealed new information, pending the results of Lang’s review, which are expected by June 30.
Yesterday, parents who had lost custody of their children or were convicted of crimes as a result of the lab’s results, received some vindication.
Now if they could get their kids back.
According to a Star editorial, a powerful report made public last week by retired judge Susan Lang found the testing program at the Motherisk lab was “inadequate and unreliable.” As a result, the Ontario government is launching an immediate review of all child custody and criminal cases that may have been adversely affected by false results from the lab.
The probe is both overdue and very welcome. In the last 10 years hair samples from more than 16,000 people were requested by child protection agencies and the review found six criminal cases that led to convictions where hair tests from the lab were used. No one knows how many parents may have lost custody of their children or how many may have been convicted of a crime based on faulty lab results.
Still, it didn’t have to take so long to resolve — or indeed occur in the first place.
First, Sick Kids could itself have reviewed procedures at the lab when questions were first raised about the accuracy of Motherisk hair strand testing during an October 2014 court case, which overturned evidence from the lab based on expert testimony that its results were unreliable.
Instead, in the face of an investigative series of articles by the Star’s Rachel Mendleson, the hospital went on the defence.
Then, when it did conduct a “review” it got it wrong. In November of last year, CEO Dr. Michael Apkon and pediatrician-in-chief Dr. Denis Daneman announced that an internal probe of Motherisk’s processes “has reaffirmed that the public can have full confidence in the reliability of Motherisk’s hair testing.”
Thankfully, the public and those who lost custody of their kids or were convicted of a crime based on the lab’s “unreliable” results did not have to depend on these two men’s judgment of the program for justice.
Two days later the Ontario government announced Lang’s independent investigation, which found that the lab’s “flawed hair-testing evidence had serious implications for the fairness of child protection and criminal cases.”
There’s more the hospital could have done to prevent this disaster. As Lang found, the hospital could have headed it off in the first place if it had applied lessons around forensic training and oversight from a 2008 inquiry into the actions of the hospital’s former disgraced pathologist, Dr. Charles Smith.
Smith, who served as head pediatric forensic pathologist at the hospital, made errors in hundreds of autopsies before 2001 that resulted in false convictions of several people for killing small children.
In the end, it isn’t just leadership at the Motherisk lab that is on “trial.” It is the people who run one of the country’s most prestigious hospitals.
Prestigious is an adjective thrown around so people don’t ask questions.
If it’s so prestigious, how did they get the Listeria advice so wrong?
As of yesterday afternoon, two of the ailing monks were still in the hospital in critical condition.
Others had returned to their Koun Klong pagoda of Prey Domrei village in Moung Russey district, where the celebration took place yesterday and the suspected tainted fruit was eaten.
The district police chief, Kith Heang, said: “After questioning, during the celebration that day, some villagers claimed that they bought some watermelons from the market and some bought it from a fruit seller on the street in the village to offer to the monks.
They really had no idea that the watermelons were poisoned.”
After their investigation, police are certain the fruit was poisoned. They urged any villager suffering symptoms to be treated at the hospital.
Who hasn’t been in this situation after so many, uh, blissful years of marriage.
Florida woman Dawn Meikle, 55, was lying in bed with her husband, Donald, just after 3 a.m. on Dec. 11, 2015 when she “elbowed him in the arm” for passing gas between the sheets.
When Donald ignored her pleas to hold the farts in Meikle began to kick him until he eventually got out of bed, according to police records.
But after clearing the air — literally — Donald hopped back into bed. But then the flurry of flatulence continued.
Donald said his wife began another round of kicking and elbowing him, according to the affidavit.
Donald told police he tried to stop Meikle by restraining her “for his own safety.” He received scratches on his chest during the kerfuffle.
Meikle got a split lip but told police her husband “did not punch” her, according to New York Daily News.
“He was restraining me and somehow my lip got split open,” she said.
As the fight escalated, Meikle retreated into the couple’s bathroom and called police, using pepper spray to keep her husband at bay.
Police arrived and arrested Meikle. She was taken to the St Lucie County jail and charged with misdemeanour battery charges.
A new strain of norovirus, the most common cause of sudden intestinal illness, has shown up in Minnesota, and that could mean more norovirus illnesses this winter, state health officials warned today.
The new strain, called GII.17 Kawasaki, caused many outbreaks in Asia last winter before arriving in the U.S. MDH has investigated more than 20 outbreaks caused by norovirus since the beginning of September. The new strain first showed up in sporadic cases in the state earlier this year and the first outbreak caused by the new strain was reported last week. Reports of norovirus-like illnesses in the community have also increased in the past week.
“Every few years, a new strain of norovirus emerges and causes many illnesses. We don’t know yet if this new strain will lead to an increase in the number of outbreaks reported, but it could,” said Amy Saupe, a foodborne disease epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). “If we’re meticulous about washing our hands and handling food properly, we may be able to limit the impact.”
Illness caused by norovirus is often mistakenly called “stomach flu,” which is a confusing term because norovirus is not related to influenza. Influenza is a respiratory illness, with symptoms that include high fever, chills, body aches, sneezing, runny nose, sore throat, and/or coughing. Norovirus is not a respiratory illness, and is not spread through breathing or coughing.
“When people say that they have ‘stomach flu,’ referring to a short illness with diarrhea and/or vomiting, what they generally have is a norovirus infection,” said Saupe.
Norovirus can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, headache, body aches, a general run-down feeling, and a mild fever. Symptoms typically begin 24 to 48 hours after swallowing the virus, and usually last one to two days. The virus passes from one person to another by the fecal-oral route. That means the virus comes from the feces or vomit of people who are sick or were recently sick, and can make someone else sick if they get the virus in their mouth and swallow it. A tiny amount of virus can make someone sick.
d”Fecal-oral transmission sounds gross, but it’s important for people to understand that they may have gotten their norovirus from food, and that they could pass the virus to others by handling food, even after their symptoms are gone,” Saupe said.
Norovirus is the most common cause of food-related illness in Minnesota. In a recent outbreak example, employees who had been sick with diarrhea prepared food items that were eaten by restaurant patrons and at least 25 patrons became ill from norovirus.
The majority of norovirus illnesses and outbreaks can be prevented through good handwashing and appropriate food handling. Always wash your hands well before preparing food, and do not prepare food for others (at home or for your job) at all if you have been sick with vomiting or diarrhea in the last three days. If you are sick with vomiting or diarrhea, wash your hands very carefully after using the restroom. Norovirus can be present in your stool for several days even after you are feeling better, so continue to be extra careful about handwashing.
Always wash your hands before eating. Do not eat food prepared by someone who is ill with vomiting or diarrhea. If someone in your household is sick with vomiting or diarrhea, have them use a separate bathroom, if possible. Clean surfaces with soap and water and sanitize with a bleach solution to kill any norovirus that was spread to bathroom or kitchen surfaces. Launder soiled clothing in hot water promptly. Wash your hands after helping children in the bathroom or touching surfaces that may have vomit or feces on them.
Thorough handwashing includes washing your hands with soap for at least 20 seconds, rinsing under running water, and drying with a towel.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service, and public health officials in several states investigated an outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O157:H7 (STEC O157:H7) infections.
Public health investigators used the PulseNet system to identify illnesses that were part of this outbreak. PulseNet, the national subtyping network of public health and food regulatory agency laboratories, iscoordinated by CDC. DNA fingerprinting is performed on E. coli bacteria isolated from ill people by using a technique called pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, or PFGE. PulseNet manages a national database of these DNA fingerprints to identify possible outbreaks.
One DNA fingerprint (outbreak strain) was included in this investigation. A total of 19 people infected with the outbreak strain of Shiga toxin-producing STEC O157:H7 were reported from seven states. The majority of illnesses were reported from the western United States. The number of ill people reported from each state was as follows: California (1), Colorado (4), Missouri (1), Montana (6), Utah (5), Virginia (1), and Washington (1).
Among people for whom information was available, illnesses started on dates ranging from October 6, 2015 to November 3, 2015. Ill people ranged in age from 5 years to 84, with a median age of 18. Fifty-seven percent of ill people were female. Five (29%) people were hospitalized, and two people developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a type of kidney failure. No deaths were reported.
The epidemiologic evidence collected during this investigation suggested that rotisserie chicken salad made and sold in Costco stores was the likely source of this outbreak.
State and local public health officials interviewed ill people to obtain information about foods they might have eaten and other exposures in the week before their illness started. Fourteen (88%) of 16 people purchased or ate rotisserie chicken salad from Costco.
On November 20, 2015, Costco reported to public health officials that the company had removed all remaining rotisserie chicken salad from all stores in the United States. This voluntary action taken by Costco may have prevented additional illnesses. Costco also worked in collaboration with public health officials during the investigation by providing records and information related to ingredient suppliers to try to determine the source of the outbreak.
The Montana Public Health Laboratory tested a sample of celery and onion diced blend produced by Taylor Farms Pacific, Inc. and collected from a Costco store in Montana. Preliminary results indicated the presence of E. coli O157:H7. This product was used to make the Costco rotisserie chicken salad eaten by ill people in this outbreak. According to the FDA, further laboratory analysis was unable to confirm the presence of E. coli O157:H7 in the sample of celery and onion diced blend.
As a result of the preliminary laboratory results and out of an abundance of caution, on November 26, 2015, Taylor Farms Pacific, Inc. voluntarily recalled the celery and onion diced blend and many other products containing celery because they might be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.
The FDA conducted a traceback investigation of the FDA regulated ingredients used in the chicken salad to try to determine which ingredient was linked to illness. However, the traceback investigation did not identify a common source of contamination.
In this retrospective study, typing ability, discriminatory power, and concordance between typing results obtained on 123 Campylobacter jejuni turkey isolates, collected in 1998, within 14 different farms, applying multilocus sequence typing (MLST), pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), antibiotic resistance profile, and virulence gene pattern, were assessed and compared.
Overall, 33 sequence types, 28 pulsotypes, 10 resistotypes, and 5 pathotypes were identified. MLST and PFGE showed the better discriminatory ability (i.e., Simpson’s diversity index >0.90) as well as unidirectional (i.e., Wallace and adjusted Wallace coefficients >0.86) and bidirectional (i.e., adjusted Rand coefficient >0.60) concordance.
Moreover, both methods showed a good unidirectional and bidirectional concordance with the resistotype. On the contrary, the congruence of both genotyping methods and resistotype with the pathotype seemed due to chance alone. A clonal relationship was identified among 66.7% of the isolates. Furthermore, 59.7% of the investigated isolates were resistant to two or more antimicrobials and 92% to tetracycline.
All the isolates harbored cadF and pldA genes, whereas a flaA gene product and a cdtB gene product were amplified from 85.4% and 79.7% of the isolates, respectively, using the primers designed by Bang et al. (2003).
The results of this study clarify the level of genetic diversity among the C. jejuni originating from turkeys. MLST level of correlation with PFGE, resistotype, and pathotype is assessed. This result supports the selection of type and number of typing methods to use in epidemiological studies. Finally, the identification of clonal complexes (i.e., groups of profiles differing by no more than one gene from at least one other profile of the group using the entire Campylobacter MLST database) shared between turkey and human isolates suggests that turkeys could be a possible source of Campylobacter infection.
Typing of Campylobacter jejuni isolated from turkey by genotypic methods, antimicrobial susceptibility, and virulence gene patterns: a retrospective study
Gerardo Manfreda, Antonio Parisi, Alessandra De Cesare, Domenico Mion, Silvia Piva, and Renato G. Zanoni
