There was this one time, I went to a Cheap Trick concert in Toronto.
We got pulled over by undercover narcs because my girlfriend in the front passenger seat was bragging to everyone around she was smoking a dube in 1979.
The girls cried a lot, and we got off without an infraction.
But Cheap Trick’s nomination to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is as ridiculous as this video from the UK Food Standards Agency on how to cook chicken.
Eight years after Maple Leaf Foods cold cuts laden with Listeria killed 24 Canadians and sickened another 50, the company now announces, with fanfare, it will require all of its protein, ingredient and packaging suppliers to become food safety certified to a Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) standard in 2017.
Audits and inspections are never enough.
Organizations, groups, awards, they’re all designed to blow the insiders.
The families of the victims probably don’t feel they were blown.
Great. Make the data public.
No one cares if you kill people.
Maple Leaf is doing a tap-dance to avoid substantive issues.
Regarding your audit claims, Maple Leaf sucks.
Audits and inspections are never enough: A critique to enhance food safety
30.aug.12
Food Control
D.A. Powell, S. Erdozain, C. Dodd, R. Costa, K. Morley, B.J. Chapman
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956713512004409?v=s5
Abstract
Internal and external food safety audits are conducted to assess the safety and quality of food including on-farm production, manufacturing practices, sanitation, and hygiene. Some auditors are direct stakeholders that are employed by food establishments to conduct internal audits, while other auditors may represent the interests of a second-party purchaser or a third-party auditing agency. Some buyers conduct their own audits or additional testing, while some buyers trust the results of third-party audits or inspections. Third-party auditors, however, use various food safety audit standards and most do not have a vested interest in the products being sold. Audits are conducted under a proprietary standard, while food safety inspections are generally conducted within a legal framework. There have been many foodborne illness outbreaks linked to food processors that have passed third-party audits and inspections, raising questions about the utility of both. Supporters argue third-party audits are a way to ensure food safety in an era of dwindling economic resources. Critics contend that while external audits and inspections can be a valuable tool to help ensure safe food, such activities represent only a snapshot in time. This paper identifies limitations of food safety inspections and audits and provides recommendations for strengthening the system, based on developing a strong food safety culture, including risk-based verification steps, throughout the food safety system.
This is just dumb. Stop whining to your pals and start providing food safety information to tell your story.
Yuma County’s nearly $3 billion agriculture industry is responsible for a large percentage of its total prosperity, and local cities and businesses are working to further expand its influence with agritourism-based attractions and events.
But many industry figures said they’re worried about critical media coverage cutting into consumer demand for Yuma-grown crops at last week’s Southwest Arizona Futures Forum session about preserving the area’s water supplies.
A paragraph near the top of the “plan of action for Yuma” compiled at the end of the all-day meeting attended by more than 100 began with, “the community must directly address negative ads and comments regarding the agriculture industry with positive facts about regarding efficient food production and the importance of food safety.”
Attendees of the conference cited articles such as an August column in The Washington Post, “Why Salad is So Overrated,” by contributor Tamar Haspel, who said the dish which employs so many of the vegetable crops grown in the Yuma area “has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate.”
Caution is the word for now from an Alberta intestinal health research groupe on products claimed to have prebiotic or probiotic activity to promote health benefits for people and livestock.
Use of these products won’t harm cattle or people. The worst that could happen from a production standpoint is that they will increase costs with no benefit to the cattle, says Dr. Doug Inglis, a research scientist at Ag Canada’s Lethbridge Research Centre and adjunct professor with University of Calgary Veterinary Medicine.
He’s not nixing the potential merit of prebiotics and probiotics to provide health benefits. In fact, that’s the very question the research group is studying. It’s just that at this point in time there’s not enough scientific evidence to validate the general claims on most products, let alone make specific claims. That’s largely because our basic understanding of how probiotics and prebiotics impart health benefits is missing.
General claims are usually vague and oftentimes misleading statements about supporting gastrointestinal health. Given that intestinal health has a systemic effect on overall health, some companies extend claims to boosting the immune system, relieving stress and depression, having anti-inflammatory properties, improving glucose tolerance and reducing upper-respiratory tract infections. Products for livestock may claim that they enhance the immune system, improve digestive health, maintain or improve intestinal integrity and barrier function, increase feed efficiency and promote growth.
What you want to see on a product are specific claims — what to expect and why — for instance, the reduction in the number of specific pathogens (salmonella, typhimurium and/or E. coli O157:H7) as a result of having to compete against probiotic bacteria, Inglis explains.
Other modes of action commonly believed but not fully supported by science include directly fighting off harmful bacteria, improving the barrier function of the intestinal wall to bar harmful bacteria, stimulating immune function, reducing inflammation, and producing a growth substance.
“Another concern is that almost all of the science on prebiotics and probiotics has been done in monogastrics so we are really uncertain if there is a health benefit to ruminants,” he adds. Researchers have only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the activity of prebiotics and probiotics in the complex, diverse ruminant digestive system.
One burger joint in Pittsburgh has repeatedly kept raw hamburger meat, lettuce and coleslaw at temperatures that allow bacteria to flourish. A chain restaurant’s worst violations in the past three years were a missing floor tile and a dirty floor drain.
Both restaurants have maintained their approved-to-operate green stickers from the Allegheny County Health Department, but one would’ve earned a ‘C’ and the other an ‘A’ if the county’s attempts to institute a restaurant grading system had passed.
Nearly all of the roughly 4,200 restaurants in the county have a green sticker — no matter whether it had five high-risk health violations in its last inspection or none.
There have been two failed attempts, most recently in May, to pass an A-B-C restaurant grading system that could give consumers more refined health information at a key decision-making point — entering a restaurant.
Although the Allegheny County Health Department supported the change, the county council voted the A-B-C system down 12-1. Everyone who spoke at the meeting opposed the measure. Most were from the restaurant industry.
PublicSource wondered why there was so little support for the measure when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about one in six people get a foodborne-related illness a year.
So, we acquired the criteria for the potential grading system and records of health inspections from July 2014 through April 2015. The result of combining the two is a look at how county restaurants would have scored under the letter grading system.
About three-quarters of nearly 5,000 restaurant inspections in the county would’ve resulted in an ‘A’, according to the PublicSource analysis.
About 18 percent of inspections would’ve earned a ‘B’ and 6 percent would’ve gotten a ‘C’ grade. A ‘C’ grade could include multiple high-risk violations, such as cutting lettuce on the same surface as raw meat, in addition to several medium- and low-risk violations.
The analysis started with July 2014 because that’s when inspectors started assigning a level of severity to each health inspection violation.
The analysis showed there were 57 inspections in that 10-month period that would’ve fallen below a ‘C’ and warranted an alert or closure by the health department.
The health department actually issued just 11 consumer alerts and closed 11 restaurants.
“When we examined the number of violations that were occurring on first inspection and also the number of repeat visits that we were being required to do, it was very apparent that there needed to be changes made” to the inspection system, said Dr. Karen Hacker, head of the Allegheny County Health Department.
But the county council voted the measure down. “The council represents the populace so we must abide by that decision,” Hacker said.
Allegheny County has a green, yellow and red system, which basically operates as a pass or fail method.
Green means a restaurant is permitted to operate; yellow means the health department issued an alert to warn consumers about poor health conditions; and red means the restaurant was ordered to close.
It wasn’t always this way. Pittsburgh had an A-B-C grading system, along with many other cities, after World War II. Allegheny County instituted its current system in 1994.
Kevin Joyce, owner of The Carlton Restaurant, a white-tablecloth restaurant in downtown Pittsburgh, was a chief opponent of the recent proposal to change the system. He said, “I think what a green rating means is that it’s a place that’s safe to eat — that the county’s inspected it and it’s safe to eat.”
However, as PublicSource found, there’s a wide spectrum of cleanliness in the kitchen among restaurants operating with a green sticker.
About 18 percent of inspections would have resulted in a perfect score during the 10-month period studied, while 12 percent had at least two-high risk violations in a single inspection.
The most common high-risk violations include not following cleanliness guidelines and not keeping food hot or cold enough.
Several of the city’s well-known chefs and restaurant owners declined to be interviewed about the grading system.
Consumers might not be aware of problems at restaurants unless they go to the health department’s website to view inspection reports.
John Graf, who owns the Priory Hotel on the North Side and is vice chair of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association board, said the inspection reports provide the best information to consumers.
“How long does it take to go to the county website?” Graf said. “People are on Google or Facebook for hours on end, you know, use your smartphone and look it up. I don’t see that that’s a huge barrier.”
Doug Powell, a former food safety professor at Kansas State University and co-author of the food safety blog BarfBlog, said health information is most effective at the point of sale.
“The value of grading systems at the door is that most people make decisions when they walk up to the restaurant,” Powell said. “They’re not going to look online. Lots of places have tried putting up websites and other things, but most people are going to make decisions when they go to the door.”
As an alternative, the Allegheny County Health Department is exploring the idea of putting QR codes on restaurants, so someone with a smartphone could scan the code and see the restaurant’s health inspections.
The grim hygiene conditions at a town centre all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant where health inspectors found a rodent infestation, live cockroaches and mouse droppings in a bag of rice, can be revealed after one of the operators was found guilty of breaching 19 food hygiene regulations.
Hend Hamude and Mardan Mahmood, the operators of North End’s Babylon Inn, were charged with a host of food hygiene breaches at Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court on September 23.
Hamude, who denied 19 charges, claimed she was not in charge of food hygiene in the buffet, but a District Judge found against her.
Her husband, Mahmood – a doctor who runs a private surgery in Croydon and is based at Lewisham Hospital – earlier pleaded guilty to 19 food safety offences and 36 on behalf of Babylon Inn Ltd, of which he is a director.
The court was told how council officers had inspected the premises five times in the four years it has been trading as Babylon Inn, since its conversion to an Asian buffet restaurant from the Cartwright Inn pub.
They found that the company:
– failed to act on an ‘active’ cockroach infestation in a storage room;
– allowed the cockroach infestation to spread ‘throughout’ the premises;
– did not dispose of food prepared during the infestation;
– failed to effectively clean and disinfect equipment;
– kept cooked meats under an area of flaking ceiling;
– placed pest poison in food preparation areas;
– left high-risk cooked foods at a temperature that might risk health;
– failed to stop someone smoking on the premises;
– failed to put in place adequate procedures to deal with an “active” mouse and rat infestation throughout the basement;
– were caught with mouse droppings in a bag of rice and broken glass near food.
A couple of years ago Sam, the almost-5-year-old yacked all over the backseat of the van on a car trip. The polyester carpeting and cotton fabric-covered seats smelled for weeks. We even tried to hose the van out, leaving the doors open for a couple of days (and then a frog set up shop in there).
It was most likely motion sickness that led to Sam’s vomit event, but people with noro puke on all sorts of surfaces. My friend Angie Fraser and colleagues at Clemson just published what happens when you try to inactivate norovirus surrogates on different surfaces including polyester and glass.
From the discussion: 
Our results indicated that surface and virus type had a significant influence on RE (that’s recovery efficiency – ben). We found that both FCV and MNV exhibited higher RE when inoculated onto glass than either polyester or cotton. In addition, the recovery of both viruses from cotton was significantly lower than that of polyester. Compared with FCV, MNV exhibited a higher recovery from soft porous surfaces; however, it was only significant for cotton. Previous studies have also document- ed the ability of HuNoV surrogates to be recovered with greater efficiency from hard nonporous surfaces than from soft porous surfaces. Viruses may become more tightly bound to soft porous surfaces due to their ability to absorb the virus-containing media and trap viruses in the subsurface.
Recovery and Disinfection of Two Human Norovirus Surrogates, Feline Calicivirus and Murine Norovirus, from Hard Nonporous and Soft Porous Surfaces
Journal of Food Protection, Number 10, October 2015, pp. 1776-1924, pp. 1842-1850(9)
Yeargin, Thomas; Fraser, Angela; Huang, Guohui; Jiang, Xiuping
Abstract:
Human norovirus is a leading cause of foodborne disease and can be transmitted through many routes, including environmental exposure to fomites. In this study, both the recovery and inactivation of two human norovirus surrogates, feline calicivirus (FCV) and murine norovirus (MNV), on hard nonporous surfaces (glass) and soft porous surfaces (polyester and cotton) were evaluated by both plaque assay and reverse transcription quantitative PCR method. Two disinfectants, sodium hypochlorite (8.25%) and accelerated hydrogen peroxide (AHP, at 4.25%) were evaluated for disinfection efficacy. Five coupons per surface type were used to evaluate the recovery of FCV and MNV by sonication and stomaching and the disinfection of each surface type by using 5 ml of disinfectant for a contact time of 5 min. FCV at an initial titer of ca. 7 log PFU/ml was recovered from glass, cotton, and polyester at 6.2, 5.4, and 3.8 log PFU/ml, respectively, compared with 5.5, 5.2, and 4.1 log PFU/ml, respectively, for MNV with an initial titer of ca. 6 log PFU/ml. The use of sodium hypochlorite (5,000 ppm) was able to inactivate both FCV and MNV (3.1 to 5.5 log PFU/ml) below the limit of detection on all three surface types. AHP (2,656 ppm) inactivated FCV (3.1 to 5.5 log PFU/ml) below the limit of detection for all three surface types but achieved minimal inactivation of MNV (0.17 to 1.37 log PFU/ml). Reduction of viral RNA by sodium hypochlorite corresponded to 2.72 to 4.06 log reduction for FCV and 2.07 to 3.04 log reduction for MNV on all three surface types. Reduction of viral RNA by AHP corresponded to 1.89 to 3.4 log reduction for FCV and 0.54 to 0.85 log reduction for MNV. Our results clearly indicate that both virus and surface types significantly influence recovery efficiency and disinfection efficacy. Based on the performance of our proposed testing method, an improvement in virus recovery will be needed to effectively validate virus disinfection of soft porous surfaces.
Food Safety Talk, a bi-weekly podcast for food safety nerds, by food safety nerds. The podcast is hosted by Ben Chapman and barfblog contributor Don Schaffner, Extension Specialist in Food Science and Professor at Rutgers University. Every two weeks or so, Ben and Don get together virtually and talk for about an hour. They talk about what’s on their minds or in the news regarding food safety, and popular culture. They strive to be relevant, funny and informative — sometimes they succeed. You can download the audio recordings right from the website, or subscribe using iTunes.
After a brief discussion about Quadrophenia, the guys thankfully decide to not sing this episode.
Ben mentions that the last video store in the Raleigh area is closing. This led to some discussion about the job security of academic careers where Don stated, ‘prediction is very difficult especially about the future.’
Spurred by Ben’s short visit to Baltimore, the guys then discuss how awesome The Wire is. Don mentions a perspective by David Simon, the Wire’s creator, on the real life situation in Baltimore. Ben was recently in Baltimore for the Food Safety Summit. A nod goes out to Brian Saunders for doing a good job of boots on the ground coverage of what’s going on in Baltimore during the Food Safety Summit.
Don recommends Acorn TV for anyone interested in British TV. This subscription service has British programming not typically shown on US TV. At the Acorn website Ben spotted Time Team an archeology reality series that he thinks his kids would love.
This week Ben talks about media interviews and a focus on multiple food safety stories all hitting at the same time. He talked a cutting boards post on barfblog that garnered some attention. He also fielded inquires regarding the Blue Bell Listeria outbreak . Ben noted that Blue Bell announced they are recalling all the ice cream.
A tragic botulism outbreak linked to a church potluck in Ohio was also a topic in multiple media outlets. The potluck outbreak was linked to home-canned potatoes but the coverage prompted a side conversation about bot and foil-wrapped baked potatoes.
Looking ahead to future food outbreaks Ben mentions that a bill was introduced in North Carolina to legalize raw milk. This bill would allow consumers to legally acquire raw milk via a cow share mechanism. In this article Ben is quoted challenging an inappropriate comparison of raw milk outbreak data by the bill’s sponsor.
In After Dark Don shames Ben for not listening to Roderick on the Line. Again.
– 30 –
Forty-eight workers at an industrial zone in the northern Nam Dinh Province were rushed to a military health centre yesterday afternoon, after they fell ill with food poisoning symptoms.
The workers reportedly showed symptoms of stomach pain, headache, vomiting and diarrhea after they had lunch provided by the Ha Noi-based Tin Phát Company.
Initial investigation showed that Tin Phat Company provided 3,200 lunch portions to Youngor Smart Shirt Ltd. Co workers on October 6. The portions were distributed over two shifts that began at noon.
After having lunch, several workers showed symptoms of food poisoning and were given first-aid by the company’s health staff.
Then they were moved to the military health centre, 300m from the industrial park.
By 6pm yesterday, all affected workers — of Youngor Smart Shirts Viet Nam Ltd Co in My Trung industrial park in My Loc District — had recovered enough to be sent home to convalesce, a doctor at the health centre said.
At 10pm yesterday, an inspection team from Nam Dinh Province’s health and hygiene safety departments questioned Youngor Smart Shirts Ltd. Co staff and took food samples from the company’s canteen for testing.
A food safety manager in an Auckland hospital who was fired after unsafe work practices was not unjustifiably dismissed as she claims.
Former food service manager at North Shore Hospital Padmini Singh was employed by Compass Group from August 2009 until January 2015.
Her employment ended after she was found to have been lacking in a number of areas in food safety and a decision on a demotion for her couldn’t be reached.
Compass Group had already been warned about food safety prior to audits of Singh’s work coming up short.
An outbreak of norovirus at North Shore Hospital in 2012 was found to have most likely originated in the hospital kitchen – though this was never confirmed nor linked to Singh.
During the outbreak there were 59 cases of gastroenteritis with each patient having had the same food.
The Ministry for Primary Industries conducted an investigation and there were indications the culprit may have been a chicken and barley soup served at lunch.
Ultimately, the source of the norovirus was not determined and MPI issued a formal warning to Compass Group that it was at risk of legal action.
Operations manager Raymond Hall said this warning was related to hand hygiene practices, training and food safety documentation.
