Author Archives: Ben Chapman

Ben Chapman

About Ben Chapman

Dr. Ben Chapman is a professor and food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University. As a teenager, a Saturday afternoon viewing of the classic cable movie, Outbreak, sparked his interest in pathogens and public health. With the goal of less foodborne illness, his group designs, implements, and evaluates food safety strategies, messages, and media from farm-to-fork. Through reality-based research, Chapman investigates behaviors and creates interventions aimed at amateur and professional food handlers, managers, and organizational decision-makers; the gate keepers of safe food. Ben co-hosts a biweekly podcast called Food Safety Talk and tries to further engage folks online through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and, maybe not surprisingly, Pinterest. Follow on Twitter @benjaminchapman.

It’s called barfblog: Valuable whale vomit found by fishers

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I dunno what the safety concerns might be if waxy whale vomit, known as ambergris, is incorporated as a flavoring for food; the vomit is largely used to create musk fragrances for perfumes. According to Deccan Herald, 80kg of the vomit treasure, worth $2.5 million was found by Omani fishers.

Khalid Al Sinani, who is in his late 30s, found floating “whale vomit” on the shores of Qurayat province last week.513ee279059eb5f958e29ab3238c9fa2

‘Whale vomit’ or Ambergris is a very costly wax that originates as a secretion in the intestines of the sperm whale. It can be found floating in tropical seas and is used in manufacture of perfume.

After 20 years of hand-to-mouth life as a fisherman, Khalid’s childhood dream of winning the sea lottery came true on the morning of October 30 when he, along with two of his friends, saw a mass of ambergris floating on the sea, releasing a nasty smell.

“We used a rope to collect it and carry it inside the boat,” Khalid was quoted as saying by the Times of Oman.

“I was told earlier that ambergris has an icky smell, but after a couple of days it imparts a pleasant scent. We rushed back to the beach with joy and happiness,” he said.

After keeping his valuable harvest in a box, he called some experts to identify the material.

“After we made sure it was ambergris, we started cutting it in order to dry and sell it later,” Khalid said.

“I’ll wait to see how this sale will go and later I’ll think of changing my career and enter the real-estate sector to live a better life,” he said.

Dubai addressing shawarma risks

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I’m on my way back to the US after a few days in Dubai teaching hotel, restaurant and other food business folks about stuff like sous vide food safety and measuring production parameters to reduce risk.

Bobby Krishna (below, left, exactly as shown), always the gracious host, showed me some cool stuff that Dubai is planning on launching as they prepare to host Expo 2020. One of the challenges the Dubai Municipality has tackled over the past decade as they modernize and add resources to their food safety system is balancing the traditional food stall/small business with addressing risks.

According to Gulf News, after a phase-in period, Dubai officials are enforcing new rules to make shawarmas safe again including proper facilities, temperature control and equipment sanitation.cwjw3kxxgaqy-q3

Almost 45 per cent of shawarma stands in Dubai will be closed, with Dubai Municipality enforcing its new rules for the sale of the popular Arabic delicacy in the emirate from November 1.

The six-month deadline given to 572 small and medium food outlets selling shawarma across Dubai to implement the new rules related to space, equipment and storage requirements aimed at enhancing hygiene and safety of the product ended on October 31.

Of these, only 318 have either made or are in the process of making the changes to their existing conditions as per the new guidelines to ensure the health and safety of consumers, the civic body said on Monday.

Sultan Ali Al Taher, head of Food Inspection Section at the Food Safety Department, said 146 establishments (25.5 per cent) among the 572 have completed the implementation of the new requirements before the deadline, 172 establishments (30.07 per cent) have begun the amendments and are still in the process of completing these.

The primary change that consumers can see will be the end of shawarma stands operating in an open area of an outlet. It is mandatory to move the shawarma stands indoors and ensure that they are not exposed to dust, dirt or any other external sources of pollution.

The regulations also make it mandatory to ensure proper refrigeration of raw materials, enough space for the storage of shawarma-making tools, separate facilities for defrosting frozen meat, thorough cleansing of vegetables and proper ways of waste disposal.

About a decade ago shawarma-style foods were linked to three outbreaks of E.coli O157 in Alberta, and I stopped eating them. Outbreak investigators found that traditional cooking practices including a rotating a cone of meat next to a heat source, were problematic, especially when the meat was cooked from frozen. A national committee was created to look at donair risks associated and the group recommended grilling post cone cut-off to ensure pathogen-killing temps.

Chipotle top cheeses make a lot of dough

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According to Motley Fool, top execs at Chipotle made more money than lots of other food CEOs.

Even after their compensations were cut in half last year, its co-CEOs Steve Ells and Monty Moran earned nearly $14 million each.

Ells’ and Moran’s compensation packages are particularly egregious in the wake of its food safety crisis, which began last year with an E. coli outbreak at a number of its restaurants in the Pacific Northwest.ells-moran

To a certain extent, it’s to be expected that a company like Chipotle would have something like this happen at some point in its corporate existence. After all, it’s happened at virtually every other major food company in the United States, be it fast food chains such as McDonalds, Taco Bell, or Jack in the Box or grocery stores such as Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, or Costco.

But what’s important to appreciate is that Chipotle left itself especially vulnerable to food borne illness outbreaks. As Austin Carr points out in an incredibly detailed review of Chiptole’s crisis for Fast Company magazine, while the chain served the equivalent of the population of Philadelphia on a daily basis prior to outbreaks, it had only four people assigned to its quality assurance team, tasked with tracking the quality of ingredients sourced from suppliers.

Over 100 ill with noro at USC

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Norovirus kind of sucks, unless you are a virologist. The perfect human pathogen (a term coined by my NoroCORE colleague and all-around good guy, Aron Hall) is shed at a crazy high rate of virus particles per gram of vomit or feces and sticks around in the environment for a long time. So outbreaks tend to persist and hit college campuses where lots of people live and eat together.

Like USC, where, according to LAist, a lot of students are sick.la-sp-usc-recruiting-update-20141021

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has confirmed that they are currently investigating a norovirus outbreak at the University of Southern California. A representative from the Department of Public Health told LAist that 103 cases have been reported since October 26, which is when the university reached out to the department about the situation. 

The university has asked students to remain home from classes or social events until they’ve been symptom free for at least 24 hours, according to a post on the USC Engemann Student Health Center website. This isn’t the first time the student body has been struck down by the virus—in 2008 hundreds of cases were reported in 2008, and there were a number of outbreaks around the L.A. area last year, as well.

Brae Surgeoner, Doug and I had a paper published in the Journal of Environmental Health about some research we conducted in the Winter of 2006. The study came about because a whole bunch of kids in the University of Guelph’s residence system started puking from an apparent norovirus outbreak. There were lots of handwashing signs up and we wanted to know whether they changed hygiene behavior (especially if kids were using the tools available when entering the cafeteria). Turns out that students weren’t doing as good of a job at hand hygiene as they reported to us.

Online food delivery app to stop selling dog, cat and other meat because food safety

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I’m a fan of apps and the Internet disrupting business models – like Uber and airbnb have – but when it comes to food I like to have folks playing by the same rules. Online food sales can be a bit dicey.

This article from gbtimes has it all: meat of unknown origin. Questionable slaughter practices. Online food sales. Dog meat, cat meat, shark fins and bear pile (something may be lost in translation or is it pie? I can’t find anything on what this is).b27f7898991adeab760adc7b1e47e3df

Chinese food delivery app Ele.me has decided to remove foods containing dog meat and shark fins from its menu options, saying that the move was based on food safety and animal protection considerations.

The Alibaba-backed startup announced on Wednesday that it has removed 294 merchants selling dog meat products and deleted 7,733 meals containing dog meat from its mobile app platform during the last three days.

Ele.me said in a statement published on its Weibo account that it was not taking sides in the debate over whether dog meat was morally acceptable but was concerned about the food safety issues it poses to consumers.

“There are currently no regulations concerning dog meat slaughter and quarantine system in China, so most of the dog meat in the market comes from unknown origins,” the Shanghai-based company said.

“In the absence of quarantine, dog meat can carry parasites, rabies, viruses and other deadly pests, so there is a large food safety risk. This prompted us to make the final decision.”

Ele.me added that following the same logic, the company plans to remove foods containing shark fins, bear paws, bear pile, cat meat, snake meat and other potentially unsafe foods from its platform too.

The public health cost of a hepatitis A outbreak: scallops edition

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A recent twitter exchange about corporate food safety folks really becoming compliance teams highlights that all this food safety stuff is nestled somewhere in a web of risk, cost and benefit. Risk and benefit come down to public health and business risk metrics – which can be fraught with limitations and assumptions.screen-shot-2016-11-04-at-7-11-13-am

Risk-based decision making is the mantra in food safety. Picking out an intervention is a starts with a numbers game: calculating the likelihood of an action (like handwashing) and matching that with the prevalence of a pathogen in the system. This is the stuff that gets the math nerds like Schaffner excited (me too). Businesses are faced with risk, cost and benefit decisions daily.

Food safety teams that focus just on compliance are trusting that the compliance folks got the science and risk correct. Sometimes they do. But lawmaking is slow.

The cost part of the equation somewhat straight forward.

One cost that’s been debated in food service for over twenty years is whether or not employers or public health folks should require food handlers to be vaccinated for hepatitis A. Jacobs and colleagues arrived at the conclusion that the public health benefit of vaccinating for hep A doesn’t equal the costs – but doesn’t factor in all the bad publicity, hassle and incident management costs.

Or costs to the public health system. According to KHON2 300+ cases of hepatitis A is costing hundreds of thousands of public health dollars.

The Hawaii Department of Health says it’s spent approximately $336,100 to investigate and respond to the hepatitis A outbreak.

images-1Here’s how it breaks down: $304,600 were spent on normal staff work hours, and an estimated $19,750 went to pay for 300 hours of overtime work.

The rest went to pay for vaccines and lab specimen shipments to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but the health department tells us that was covered by federal grant funds.

It took a lot of work for health officials just to pinpoint the source of the outbreak, including an online survey, numerous interviews with people, and visits to businesses.

Although officials identified the source — imported frozen scallops — they’re still not done with this outbreak. They’re now looking into a hepatitis-A-related death.

“The woman was in and out of the hospital really since she became ill in July, and so there were times where she needed a liver transplant,” said foodborne illness attorney Bill Marler. “She sort of seemed to rally. She got to go home for a little while, and then she was back in the hospital with complications.”

Food Safety Talk 111: The Meat Spot

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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.slide-image-1

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.

Episode 111 can be found here and on iTunes.

Show notes so you can follow along at home:

Food fraud is a reoccuring problem; expired milk powder resold

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Substituting for cheaper, or expired inputs, or adding supplemental ingredients isn’t new in the food world. As long as there have been food, there has been food fraud.

Melamine in dog food, horse meat in beef lasagne or seagull meat mixed with other protein sources have all garnered attention and research. Food manufacturers in China, a huge and still growing food export market, have been fingered in multiple fraud cases. The latest incident, according to Stuff, centers around reselling expired milk powder.

Chinese police on Monday (NZT) arrested 19 people in Shanghai for selling about 300 tonnes of expired Fonterra milk powder, Shanghai Daily reported.

The suspects were allegedly managing a company, which was packaging expired products of the New Zealand dairy company – one of the most popular brands in China – into smaller packages for resale below market prices, according to media reports.

After a months-long investigation, the police discovered that one of the suspects sold the expired products to another company, who in turn allegedly resold almost 200 tonnes to distributors in Shanghai and in the Jiangsu, Henan and Qinghai provinces, who sold them on e-commerce platforms or in wholesale.

The authorities have seized 100 tonnes of these products and have shut down the websites selling them.

Fonterra spokeswoman Maree Wilson said on Monday night it supported the enforcement steps taken by Chinese officials.

“The Chinese authorities have acted strongly and swiftly to investigate and arrest the people they believe are responsible for this and we fully support their actions.
“Food safety is our top priority and we are committed to providing safe and high quality dairy products.

“We work actively with our direct customers to ensure the integrity of our products. This includes providing guidelines on how to manage expired product in a responsible way.

“In this case there appears to have been criminal activity much further along the supply chain.

“While we believe this is an isolated criminal incident, we are reviewing the case internally.”

Wilson said that, to Fonterra’s knowledge, the milk powder was not being resold with Fonterra packaging.

 

Posting restaurant inspection grades creates a dialogue

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Estimates suggest up to 70% of foodborne illnesses are acquired outside of the home. Every week there is at least one restaurant-related outbreak reported in the news media somewhere. Cross-contamination; lack of handwashing; and, improper cooking or holding temperatures are all common themes. These are the same things Peel Region (that’s in Canada) inspectors are looking for, according to the Mississauga News.barf-o-meter_-dec_-12-216x300

There are 50 health inspectors assigned to monitor conditions in the almost 5,700 food establishments operating in Peel Region.

Depending on what public health staff uncovers, those establishments are issued either green pass signs, yellow conditional passes or red closure orders.

Operators are required to post those colour-coded inspection notices at entrances to their businesses for the public to see.

According to Peel director environmental health Paul Callanan, the person in charge of the region’s health inspector corps, the vast majority of establishments in Peel pass regular inspection and are issued green signs.

“There’s about six per cent of food places that are considered that have a conditional pass or closed sign at any point and time,” he estimated.

In 2015, the region issued 9,656 pass signs, 319 conditional passes and closed 16 premises due to unhealthy conditions, while laying 189 food safety charges under public health protection legislation.

The public is free to view the most recent inspection results for food service establishments in Peel on a website portal maintained by the health department.

Surveying that database, it’s clear most restaurants have Peel Public Health’s approval to conduct business.

The health department’s disclosure website gives the public a window into restaurant kitchens, Callanan suggested.

It empowers the public by allowing them to make more informed choices about the establishments they wish to patronize, he said.

“You can log onto whatever your favourite restaurant is and look at the inspection history and if it varies between a green sign and yellow sign, I would wonder about that kind of establishment,” Callanan said.

I’m a fan of posting grades, regardless of the type of food business. While grades represent a snapshot, and don’t correlate well with outbreaks, they create dialogue and can lead to greater public discussion. There are limitations to a grade system because an inspection only reflects conditions at one point in time; the information collected by environmental health folks, no matter how limited, needs to accessible and clear so the public can make informed decisions.

From the Salmonella-in-low-moisture-foods file: another tahini product recalled

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Although my kids have expanded their food choices beyond pizza, pasta and chicken nuggets, hummus and carrot sticks are still a staple in my house. Salmonella in hummus isn’t a new thing; a Detroit-area grocery store is recalling sesame paste.

A West Bloomfield grocery store has recalled containers of its sesame paste that might be contaminated with salmonella.501930474_cdea9851ac_o

Sinbad Foods, located at 6251 Haggerty Road, said in a Tuesday release that 1-pound and 2-pound containers of its Tahina Telkef with “packed on” dates of Oct. 7, 2016, and “sell by” dates of Dec. 5, 2016, are on the recall list.

The 1-pound containers will have the numbers 0200004506472 and 0200004406413 in the barcode. Two-pound containers will have 0200000406295 in the barcode.

The potential contamination was discovered with the Michigan Department of Agricultural and Rural Development conducted tests on a sample of the product.