Author Archives: Douglas Powell

About Douglas Powell

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

It’s a cookbook: Swedish behavioral scientist suggests eating humans to ‘save the planet’

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It’s not a novel idea: humans have imposed their will on planet earth. But it is short-sighted in that technology, learning from nature, can create a space for billions.

Paul Joseph Watson of Summit writes that a Swedish behavioral scientist has suggested that it may be necessary to turn to cannibalism and start eating humans in order to save the planet.

Appearing on Swedish television to talk about an event based around the “food of the future,” Magnus Söderlund said he would be holding seminars on the necessity of consuming human flesh in order to stop climate change.

Environmentalists blame the meat and farming industry for a large part of what they claim is the warming of the earth.

According to Söderlund, a potential fix would be the Soylent Green-solution of eating dead bodies instead.,

He told the host of the show that one of the biggest obstacles to the proposal would be the taboo nature of corpses and the fact that many would see it as defiling the deceased.

There are issues with Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease and To Serve Man is really a Soylent Green cookbook, but why would such details matter when a behavioral scientist is gassing on.

Listeria warning after sliced pastrami products affected across South Australia

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Emily Olle of 7 News writes an urgent warning has been issued by SA Health after listeria was detected in sliced pastrami purchased from a variety of Foodlands, IGAs, butchers, continental delis, bakeries, cafes and sandwich bars.

South Australians, particularly pregnant women, the elderly and those with weakened immune systems, are advised not to consume the pastrami.

SA Health’s Acting Director of Food and Controlled Drugs Branch, Joanne Cammans, said as yet there have been no cases of Listeria infection reported to SA Health linked to the product.

Surveys still suck: Did the UK FSA discover that piping hot is a fairytale

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The Food Standards Agency (FSA) have released their biannual findings from the general public attitudes tracker. This tracker highlights the behaviour, thoughts and reputation of food safety aspects throughout the year. Whenever there’s a scandal, a legislation change or a news piece surrounding the FSA’s points of interest, it’s going to have a public reaction. Whether good or bad, these reactions will shape and alter the way in which the public perceives food safety.

The FSA’s findings are based on 2,150 interviews from a representative sample of adults aged 16 and over across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Fieldwork was carried out between 8th and 26th May 2019, as part of the regular TNS Kantar face-to-face-omnibus survey.

Questions cover several topics of interest for the Agency, including:

concern about food safety issues

awareness of food hygiene standards

awareness of the FSA and its responsibilities

trust in the FSA and the food industry

confidence in food labelling.

At wave 18, a new set of questions were added to monitor the public’s trust in the FSA as well as the wider food system.

One of the FSA’s strategic objectives is to ensure consumers have the information and understanding to make informed choices about where and what they eat. To help monitor performance against this objective, respondents were asked about their awareness of hygiene standards when buying food or eating out. At wave 18, 52% of respondents reported always being aware of the hygiene standards in places they eat out at or buy food from, and a further 33% said they were sometimes aware.

It’s fair to say that the public is now taking a greater interest in UK food safety standards, meaning there is less margin for error in the food industry. With nearly 80% of the UK public being aware of food hygiene standards when eating out, it’s imperative that you get your standards right first time. Partnering with a food safety company like ourselves is one of the best ways of ensuring you meet your legal obligations as a food business. Our experts are some of the best in the business are available around the clock to coach, advise, audit and help your business reach the highest level of food hygiene.

Piping hot is not a standard.

Break out the cognac: 100 + sickened by Salmonella in Bosnia

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Salmonella is the cause of massive food poisoning in Tuzla Canton in Bosnia, the Cantonal Institute of Public Health confirmed for Vijesti.ba news portal.

“This morning, we received an official confirmation from the Institute of Microbiology of the University Hospital Tuzla that in the isolate, ie for three hospitalized patients, Salmonella bacteria was found, which was our suspicion,” said Blasko Topalovic, an epidemiologist at the Public Health Institute of Tuzla Canton.

According to the data of this Institute, more than one hundred persons were poisoned by food in Srebrenik. Most were from the area of this municipality but also from Gracanica, Gradacac and Tuzla. Some sought help at municipal health centers and some at UKC in Tuzla.

From the day of the poisoning to the present, a total of 61 people have come to the Infectious Diseases Clinic.

Of these, 13 were withheld from clinical treatment. Five children and eight adults were hospitalized.

Better to burn out than to fade away: Australia is an evolutionary gold mine including these marsupials who drop dead after mating

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Annie Roth of the New York Times writes kalutas live fast and die young — or, at least, the males do. Male kalutas, small mouselike marsupials found in the arid regions of Northwestern Australia, are semelparous, meaning that shortly after they mate, they drop dead.

This extreme reproductive strategy is rare in the animal kingdom. Only a few dozen species are known to reproduce in this fashion, and most of them are invertebrates. Kalutas are dasyurids, the only group of mammals known to contain semelparous species. Only around a fifth of the species in this group of carnivorous marsupials — which includes Tasmanian devils, quolls and pouched mice — are semelparous and, until recently, scientists were not sure if kalutas were among them.

Now there is no doubt that, for male kalutas, sex is suicide.

In a study, published in April in the Journal of Zoology, researchers from the University of Western Australia and the University of Queensland confirmed that kalutas exhibit what is known as obligate male semelparity.

“We found that males only mate during one highly synchronized breeding season and then they all die,” said Genevieve Hayes, a vertebrate ecologist and the lead author of the study.

Dr. Hayes and her colleagues monitored the breeding habits of a population of kalutas in Millstream Chichester National Park in Western Australia during the 2013 and 2014 breeding seasons. In both seasons, the researchers observed a complete die-off of males. Although male kalutas have exhibited semelparity in captivity, this was the first time it had been seen in the wild.

Kalutas evolved independently of other semelparous dasyurids, so the confirmation that male kalutas die after mating suggests that this unorthodox reproductive strategy has evolved not once, but twice in dasyurids.

“It’s really interesting that it would evolve twice in dasyurids because it’s such an extreme mating system,” Dr. Hayes said.

 

It was 20 years ago today

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Maybe not today, but I did talk with my friend Jim, and we didn’t talk about what we did 20 years ago, but instead talked about our kids, grandkids, and medical issues.

We’re getting old, but still out there.

My parents are old (80 and 77), and show no sign of slowing down. Here is my mother and father with Courtlynn (24, youngest of the four Canadian daughters) the other day in Ontario (that’s in Canada).



 

 

 

 

 

 

Elderly Australian woman dies after being pecked by ‘aggressive rooster’ highlighting the danger of varicose veins

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Camron Slessor of ABC reports the woman’s death was studied by University of Adelaide Professor of Pathology Roger Byard, who said researchers hoped to prevent similar deaths in the future by bringing the details to light.

Professor Byard said the woman was collecting eggs from her chicken coop on her rural property in South Australia when the rooster pecked her lower left leg, causing her to haemorrhage and collapse.

An autopsy later revealed two small lacerations on her lower left leg, with her death the result of bleeding varicose veins.

“What we’re trying to do is use these tragic cases to try and prevent similar deaths in the future,” Professor Byard told the ABC.

“[This case] made us realise how vulnerable the elderly are, [varicose veins] are very easy to damage.’

While Professor Byard admitted rooster attacks were rare, he said this case — which had happened recently — raised concerns about the dangers of small domestic animals.

“They are very rare, there have been a couple of cases overseas where children have been pecked by roosters because they have thin skulls and the rooster has actually caused brain damage,” he said.

“There was another fellow in California who was at a rooster fighting pit and a rooster had a knife attached to its leg and stabbed or slashed him.”

He said elderly people with varicose veins needed to understand they may be vulnerable.

“There are a couple of messages, one is never trust a rooster … the second one is if you’ve got varicose veins, get something done about it,” he said.

Duck egg warning after UK man dies of Salmonella

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I don’t like the idea of backyard chickens, or chooks.

They are Salmonella factories.

The latest numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has more than 1,000 Americans sick from backyard chicks and two deaths; 605 have been hospitalized.

In a related twist, duck eggs bought at a UK village fair have been linked to the death of Mr. Tavakoli, of Lindholme, Doncaster.

BBC News reports there has been a second case of salmonella involving someone who also said they ate duck eggs from the same farm – although this has not been confirmed as the source of infection.

The supplier of the eggs believes the salmonella came from elsewhere (magic)

The Food Standards Agency said eggs with the British Lion Mark were virtually free of salmonella, however this only applies to hens’ eggs.

Vulnerable groups are advised to avoid raw or lightly cooked duck eggs (above, right, are duck eggs from my friend and collaborator, Kate the vet, at Kansas State; we did research together but my department chair in firing me said I didn’t play well with others; what an asshole).

And I had to live through disco as a teenager.

Listeria in Spain: 3 miscarriages, almost 200 sick

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Lucy Domachowski of the Daily Star writes that three pregnant women have suffered miscarriages and nearly 200 people hospitalised with listeria as an outbreak of the infection grips Spain’s holiday spots.

A nationwide alert has been sent out after listeria, a bacteria which can cause a type of food poisoning called listeriosis, was suspected in packaged pork.

Two of the miscarriages happened in Seville and the other in Madrid.

One devastated mother lost her baby at 32 weeks, while the others lost their little ones just eight weeks into pregnancy.

Most of the 197 cases have occurred in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia but people have fallen ill across the country, from Madrid to the island of Tenerife.

Spanish authorities have said as many as five pregnant women may have lost their babies to the outbreak, and three people may have died – but stats are yet to be confirmed.

Everyone’s got a camera: Texas mouse jumping into deep fryer at Bastrop Whataburger

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Drew Knight of KVUE reports a video posted Sunday appears to show a mouse jumping into a deep fryer at a Bastrop, Texas, Whataburger restaurant.

Since it was posted just before 1 a.m. on Sunday, it has been shared more than 34,000 times by Facebook users.

According to the poster, Brushawn Lewis, he spotted the mouse himself at the Bastrop fast food joint. The Facebook page for that location, 401 TX 71, provided the following statement in the comments of his post:

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. At Whataburger, cleanliness and food safety are top priorities for us. In this instance, we closed the restaurant out of an abundance of caution and notified pest control. The entire restaurant has since been cleaned and sanitized. We addressed this situation as quickly as possible, reinforcing procedures with our Family Members. While we’ll continue to be very diligent, it’s important to know there was no history of this type incident at this unit and there is no ongoing issue. A member of our team would like to reach out and address any concerns. Can you please share your contact information with us?”

The video was also shared on YouTube.