A former professor of food safety and the publisher of barfblog.com, Powell is passionate about food, has five daughters, and is an OK goaltender in pickup hockey. Download Doug’s CV here.
Dr. Douglas Powell
editor, barfblog.com
retired professor, food safety
3/289 Annerley Rd
Annerley, Queensland
4103
dpowell29@gmail.com
61478222221
I am based in Brisbane, Australia, 15 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time
The Flagstaff Group Limited T/A Flagstaff Fine Foods is conducting a recall of the products below. The products have been available for sale at Meals on Wheels and community organisations in NSW, ACT, QLD and SA.
Product details:
Chicken Schnitzel with Gravy, 360g, Cardboard container clear film seal, Use By: 17/07/2020, 24/07/2020, 25/07/2020, 05/08/2020, 06/08/2020, 18/08/2020, 13/08/2020, 27/08/2020, 03/09/2020
Honey Mustard Beef, 360g, Cardboard container clear film seal, Use By: 28/07/2020, 25/08/2020
Pork in BBQ Sauce, 360g, Cardboard container clear film seal, Use By: 25/07/2020, 18/08/2020
Apricot and Fig Chicken, 360g, Cardboard container clear film seal, Use By: 15/08/2020
Vienna Schnitizel, 360g, Cardboard container clear film seal, Use By: 22/07/2020, 05/08/2020, 18/08/2020, 29/08/2020, 10/09/2020
Pork Apple and Cranberry Casserole, 360g, Cardboard container clear film seal, Use By: 12/08/2020, 01/09/2020
Roast Beef, 360g, Cardboard container clear film seal, Use By: 21/07/2020, 25/07/2020, 01/08/2020, 06/08/2020, 18/08/2020, 22/08/2020, 29/08/2020, 05/09/2020, 12/09/2020
Problem: The recall is due to a potential microbial (Listeria monocytogenes) contamination.
Food safety hazard: Listeria may cause illness in pregnant women and their unborn babies, the elderly and people with low immune systems.
Country of origin: Australia
What to do: Consumers should not consume this product and should return the product to the place of purchase for a full refund. If you are concerned about your health, you should seek medical advice.
Not enough critical questions answered, coupled with numerical spin.
Jasper Lindell of The Canberra Times reports the number of improvement notices issued to ACT businesses for not complying with food safety requirements more than halved in the last financial year, with ACT Health confident there were fewer serious safety breaches.
Eighty-seven improvement notices were issued in 2018-19, down from 341 in 2017-18. More than 600 were issued in 2015-16, according to figures from ACT Health.
In 2017-18, 2443 inspections were carried out while 2552 inspections were completed in 2018-19.
The targeted amount in both years was 2500 inspections.
The executive branch manager of the ACT Health Protection Service, Conrad Barr, said food businesses in the ACT demonstrated a high level of compliance with safety standards.
“We are focused on protecting the community with our food safety inspectors doing over 2500 inspections every year.
“We also aim to strike the right balance of regulation with our compliance activity, actively working with businesses to rectify any issues that are identified,” he said.
The decline in food safety breaches followed the introduction in 2017 of a model to educate businesses and their staff in food safety requirements, after five years of inspection pass rates falling well below the targets.
ACT Health has collaborated with the Canberra Business Chamber and Access Canberra to run information seminars for food businesses, community groups and event organisers.
Proactive inspections provided a chance for food businesses to discuss food safety issues directly with public health officers, while seminars and self-assessment options were made available to businesses, a spokeswoman for the directorate told the Sunday Canberra Times.
Common food safety issues found in ACT food businesses include a lack of handwashing facilities, poor temperature control and live pests.
Inspectors also identified inadequate cleaning and sanitation, no food-grade thermometer at the time of the inspection, or no nominated food safety supervisor.
That safety is always going off. We won’t get caught. No one got sick yesterday, so there’s a greater chance no one will get sick today.
These basics of the human psyche continue to undermine tragedies from Bhopal to BP to the Challenger and food safety.
But with all the toys and technology, you’ll be found out – so act accordingly, even if decent humanity is not enough against the directive of profit.
What’s going on in Spain is strikingly similar to what happened in New Zealand in 2012. More about that later.
In Aug. 2019, an outbreak of listeriosis in Spain was detected and reported to theWorld Health Organization (WHO) on Aug. 16, 2019. To date, three people have died and more than 200 have been sickened from Listeria linked to chilled roasted pork meat products manufactured in southern Spain by Seville-based Magrudis Company and sold under the brand name La Mechá.
James Warren of EuroWeekly reports today that according to sources from Seville City Council and the Ministry of Health, the Laboratorios Microal sounded the alarm on February 18, 2019 after samples of the shredded meat product were sent to them for evaluation.
Mariano Barroso, the manager of the quality control and research at Microal, said that of the two samples that were submitted, one came back as positive.
A further test to determine the level of contamination was requested by the laboratory but the food manufacturer refused to agree to the tests.
Barrosco went on to clarify that the company did not inform the authorities as “in their line of work it is common to find forms of bacteria. It is the role of the manufacturer to remove the product from its production lines.”
In July 2012, a meat processor, its director and an employee have admitted selling Listeria-contaminated meat to the Hawke’s Bay Hospital in New Zealand and omitting to provide test results showing meat had tested positive.
The Hawke’s Bay District Health Board discovered cold ready to eat meats supplied by the company was contaminated in July 2012, after a number of Listeria cases had been linked to the hospital kitchen.
The outbreak claimed the life of 68-year-old Patricia Hutchinson on June 9 that year, and contributed to the death of an 81-year-old woman on July 9. Two other people were infected.
When the health board discovered a link between the infections and the hospital kitchen it sent 62 unopened plastic pouches of Bay Cuisine meat products to ESR for testing. All the pouches were found to contain Listeria.
A summary of facts complied by the Ministry for Primary Industries said the company had the contract to supply the hospital since 2002.
The summary states that on July 9, 2012 the DHB requested copies of all test results Bay Cuisine had carried out for Listeria. Production manager Christopher Mackie replied by telling the DHB a batch of corned silverside had tested negative for Listeria, when in fact it had tested “presumptive positive”.
The following day an officer from the Ministry, investigating the Listeria cases at the hospital, requested test results. Mackie sent these on July 13 but again omitted reports showing that some products had tested “presumptive positive”.
But analysis of cellphone text messages between MacKie and company director Garth Wise show that on the evening of July 12 Wise had sent a text to Mackie suggesting that he “hold back the presumptive listeria ones [results] as there is only 3 or 4 of them and we just send the good”.
A subsequent search of the Bay Cuisine premises by the Ministry found the company had not provided the original, correct spreadsheet to the Ministry. This spreadsheet showed positive Listeria tests for meat products on June 18 and July 10.
In 2009, the operator of a yakiniku barbecue restaurant chain linked to four deaths and 70 illnesses from E. coli O111 in raw beef in Japan admitted it had not tested raw meat served at its outlets for bacteria, as required by the health ministry.
“We’d never had a positive result [from a bacteria test], not once. So we assumed our meat would always be bacteria-free.”
Kansas State University professor, editor, and food safety expert.
Haven’t been at Kansas State since 2013.
Doug is one of the famous and trending celeb who is popular for being a Teacher. As of 2018 Doug Powell is 55 years old years old. Doug Powell is a member of famous Teacher list (one of you younger folks wanna tell me what the famous teacher list is, and I’d imagine I’m on it for the wrong reasons.
One of the precious celeb listed in Teacher list.
I am precious.
Not Much is known about Doug family and relationships. All information about his private life is concealed. We will update you soon.
Just read barfblog.com, my life is an open book, successes and failures, I own them all.
The American Society for Microbiology says rubbing hands with ethanol-based sanitizers should provide a formidable defense against infection from flu viruses, which can thrive and spread in saliva and mucus. But findings published this week in mSphere challenge that notion — and suggest that there’s room for improvement in this approach to hand hygiene.
The influenza A virus (IAV) remains infectious in wet mucus from infected patients, even after being exposed to an ethanol-based disinfectant (EBD) for two full minutes, report researchers at Kyoto Profectural University of Medicine, in Japan. Fully deactivating the virus, they found, required nearly four minutes of exposure to the EBD.
The secret to the viral survival was the thick consistency of sputum, the researchers found. The substance’s thick hydrogel structure kept the ethanol from reaching and deactivating the IAV.
“The physical properties of mucus protect the virus from inactivation,” said physician and molecular gastroenterologist Ryohei Hirose, Ph.D, MD., who led the study with Takaaki Nakaya, PhD, an infectious disease researcher at the same school. “Until the mucus has completely dried, infectious IAV can remain on the hands and fingers, even after appropriate antiseptic hand rubbing.
The study suggests that a splash of hand sanitizer, quickly applied, isn’t sufficient to stop IAV. Health care providers should be particularly cautious: If they don’t adequately inactivate the virus between patients, they could enable its spread, Hirose said.
The researchers first studied the physical properties of mucus and found — as they predicted — that ethanol spreads more slowly through the viscous substance than it does through saline. Then, in a clinical component, they analyzed sputum that had been collected from IAV-infected patients and dabbed on human fingers. (The goal, said Hirose, was to simulate situations in which medical staff could transmit the virus.) After two minutes of exposure to EBD, the IAV virus remained active in the mucus on the fingertips. By four minutes, however, the virus had been deactivated.
Previous studies have suggested that ethanol-based disinfectants, or EBDs, are effective against IAV. The new work challenges those conclusions. Hirose suspects he knows why: Most studies on EBDs test the disinfectants on mucus that has already dried. When he and his colleagues repeated their experiments using fully dried mucus, they found that hand rubbing inactivated the virus within 30 seconds. In addition, the fingertip test used by Hirose and his colleagues may not exactly replicate the effects of hand rubbing, which through convection might be more effective at spreading the EBD. For flu prevention, both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization recommend hand hygiene practices that include using EBDs for 15-30 seconds. That’s not enough rubbing to prevent IAV transmission, said Hirose. The study wasn’t all bad news: The researchers did identify a hand hygiene strategy that works, also sanctioned by the WHO and CDC. It’s simple: Wash hands, don’t just rub them. Washing hands with an antiseptic soap, they found, deactivated the virus within 30 seconds, regardless of whether the mucus remained wet or had dried.
In Feb. 2019, people started showing up sick with Salmonella at hospitals in Adelaide, South Australia.
Ultimately 58 people were sickened and health types linked the outbreak to a raw egg butter being served with Vietnamese rolls from three bakeries all owned by Angkor Bakery.
Last week, five people connected with the three Angkor Bakery stores, including two of the owners, faced the Elizabeth Magistrates Court in South Australia. They were charged with failing to comply with food standards and providing unsafe food products.
As my colleague Andrew Thomson of Think ST Solutions writes, outbreaks occur due to a systems breakdown: it’s a financial burden on everyone, including the broader food industry; it causes much pain and suffering for those involved and in legal terms a food business at the centre of an outbreak can be liable for injuries caused and prosecuted by health authorities for failing to provide safe food.
One of the bakery owners told awaiting media outside Court last week of the true cost of this incident to the business: lost public confidence and business sales and now the entire business concern is for sale; owners are unable to engage legal representation due to the financial cost; it has fractured the family.
Steve White from global insurance brokerage and risk management firm, Arthur J Gallagher (Australia), says the best way to protect your customers – and to avoid costly lawsuits, penalties and damage to reputation and business interruption – is to know your obligations, maintain food safety standards and have the right insurance.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) an outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) — E. coli O103 and E. coli O121 — linked to ground bison appears to be over.
CDC, several states, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency investigated a multistate outbreak of infections.
On July 16, 2019, Northfork Bison Distributions, Inc., in Saint-Leonard, Quebec, Canada, recalled external icon ground bison produced between February 22, 2019, and April 30, 2019. Recalled ground bison was sold to distributors as ground bison and bison patties, referred to as Bison Burgers and/or Buffalo Burgers. Recalled ground bison was also sold to retailers in 4-ounce burger patties.
Do not eat, sell, or serve recalled Northfork Bison products.
As of September 13, 2019, this outbreak appears to be over.
A total of 33 people infected with the outbreak strain of STEC O103 and STEC O121 were reported from eight states.
Eighteen people were hospitalized. No cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome, a type of kidney failure, were reported. No deaths were reported.
When ordering at a restaurant, ask that ground bison burgers be cooked to an internal temperature of at least 160°F.
Jess Davis of ABC News reports a frozen meringue was key to identifying and outbreak of Salmonella enteritidis (SE), a bacteria that until last year was not found in Australia, that sickened almost 200 people.
People first started getting sick in May 2018 and by July a cluster of cases had appeared in New South Wales. That was when health authorities started investigating.
“Health, through their investigations, were able to look at a number of isolates of Salmonella enteritidis that came from humans, who unfortunately had been ill, and use a technology called whole genome sequencing,” said NSW Food Authority CEO Lisa Szabo.
“So it’s a genetic-based technology that helps us join the dots, shall I say. And this was the first time they could see a group of people with the same whole genome sequence.”
Anyone with a confirmed case of SE was interviewed by investigators and asked for a detailed account of what they’d eaten — to try to find what the different cases had in common.
A few weeks after being interviewed, one of those people remembered they had a frozen meringue cake in their freezer, leftover from a birthday party, around the time they got sick.
Officers went to that person’s home, collected the cake and had it tested.
“We were able to isolate the Salmonella enteritidis and it had that same whole genome sequence. At the same time we could see who manufactured that cake,” Ms Szabo said.
“We could go back to the manufacturer, have a look at their environment, look at how they handle food and where they get their ingredients from, and that’s where we saw the connection to the egg farm.”
It wasn’t until September that the frozen meringue led investigators to a farm on the outskirts of Sydney, but by then the bacteria had slowly started spreading across the industry.
“Once we detected salmonella enteritidis on this particular farm, we then commenced another round of investigations … more from the biosecurity and then the farm side of trying to understand … [whether the] farm had other connections to other properties around the state” Ms Szabo said.
But how the bacteria made its way into Australian eggs in the first place is likely to remain a mystery.
One property in Victoria and 13 in NSW have been affected so far and more than half-a-million birds have been culled at a cost of $10 million.
The spread of SE has been blamed largely on the interconnected nature of the egg industry, with all the infected farms connected in some way.
Egg farmers often trade produce with each other, and equipment and workers also regularly move from farm to farm.
Veterinarian Rod Jenner said SE was difficult to contain because it could survive and multiply without a host and could live in the environment for up to two years.
“It can survive in dust and dirt, in vehicles, and can travel in the wind. Rodents, wild birds, that sort of thing, can carry it on their skin or in their bodies as well,” he said.
“So it has actually been demonstrated to travel vast distances and be contaminated, be deposited on other farms that have previously been free.”
A farmer’s worst nightmareBede Burke’s egg farm at Tamworth in NSW was the 11th property to be infected, with a notification it had tested positive to SE during a routine check just over three months ago.
“Your whole world crashes down around you, you know,” Mr Burke said.
“We just didn’t sleep for a week and that first seven or eight days was really traumatic. We had to learn how to both decontaminate and disinfect the premises.”
When the notification came through on the eve of the federal election, Mr Burke had to withhold his eggs from sale and was faced with the prospect of culling entire flocks.
“But then you’ve got heap of eggs on your premises, you can’t not stop packing eggs, we were still going to pack 90,000 eggs a day,” he said.
“It’s just stress beyond all belief and then start planning for the worst.”
But he was lucky the contamination was picked up early and while a swab of dirt and dust had tested positive, it hadn’t yet spread to his egg or birds.
There have been no confirmed cases of SE since June and the industry hopes that will be the end of it.
But the outbreak has raised serious questions about how biosecurity is managed. Despite the disease becoming a national problem, its enforcement and regulation is state-based.
Philip Szepe, who runs an egg farm at Kinglake in Victoria, tests for all strains of salmonella every three months.
But he’s concerned that not all farmers are as diligent and said biosecurity was too reliant on self-regulation.
“Government’s really good at responding to crisis. It’d be great if the Government had a bit more engagement with the industry around monitoring, surveillance and compliance,” he said.
On Tuesday, Auckland City district commander Superintendent Karyn Malthus said officers were called to an incident where an unknown man was sleeping in a person’s vehicle.
He was taken back to the Avondale Police Station but fled while being taken from the police car into the station.
“Police gave chase however were unable to catch him and he was last seen running down a driveway on Great North Rd,” Malthus said.
On Thursday, police said a man was arrested about midday in connection to the incident.
Salted clams from China and Korea appear to be the common factor in a spate of hepatitis A cases in various countries.
According to the Korea Biomedical Review, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said that it has confirmed that contaminated fermented shellfish was the main culprit behind the hepatitis A outbreak this summer.
The KCDC came to the conclusions after conducting an in-depth epidemiological investigation.
The agency randomly sampled 270 of the 2,178 hepatitis A patients, diagnosed between July 28 and August 24, and surveyed whether they consumed fermented shellfish this summer. It found that 42 percent of the patients had eaten fermented shellfish during the incubation period.
KCDC also found that 80.7 percent of the 26 patients diagnosed with hepatitis A in August also ate fermented shellfish, while discovering Hepatitis A virus genes in 11 batches out of the 18 batches collected after the outbreak.
Notably, five of these genes found in the research showed close relations with the virus detected in hepatitis A patients.
As of now, the disease control agency has confirmed 10 products that have tested positive to the hepatitis A virus. Nine of them were imported from China, and one was made in Korea.
“Out of the total 10 products, weighing 37,094kg, 31,764kg has already been sold to the markets, while the remaining 5,330 kg were recovered and disposed of,” the agency said.
Yesterday, the Australian NSW Food Authority advised that Byul Mi Kim Chi is conducting a recall of Salted clams, due to a possible microbial (Hepatitis A virus) contamination. Further, Koryo Food Co. is conducting a recall of Pickled clams, due to a possible microbial (Hepatitis A virus) contamination.
NSW Food Authority CEO, Lisa Szabo said testing was underway on a number of products but full results may take a number of weeks.
“Although a contamination has not yet been confirmed, we have advised the companies of a potential link to 8 cases of hepatitis A in NSW, and they have both undertaken a recall of the product,” Dr Szabo said.
The NSW Food Authority advises:
