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.

The barf museum in Sweden

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Maura Judkis of The Washington Post writes buy a ticket to the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmo, Sweden, and it won’t be printed on a slip of paper.

“Your ticket is a vomit bag with our logo,” said Samuel West, the museum’s founder. It’s a joke, but not really: Somewhere between the exhibit on the world’s stinkiest cheese and the free samples of fermented shark meat, someone’s stomach may turn. But, then again, the noni, an Asian fruit nicknamed the “vomit fruit,” is one of the displays. So visitors will already be acclimated to some pretty terrible smells.

Welcome to the world’s first exhibition devoted to foods that some would call revolting. The museum’s name and its contents are pretty controversial — one culture’s disgusting is another culture’s delicacy. That goes for escamoles, the tree-ant larvae eaten in Mexico, or shirako, the cod sperm eaten in Japan, or bird’s nest soup, a Chinese dish of nests made from bird saliva. The name is meant to grab visitors’ attention, but that’s the point that West says he’s trying to make: Disgust is a cultural construct.

“I want people to question what they find disgusting and realize that disgust is always in the eye of the beholder,” said West. “We usually find things we’re not familiar with disgusting, versus things that we grow up with and are familiar with are not disgusting, regardless of what it is.”

For example: Though the museum is in Sweden, he includes surströmming, an incredibly pungent fermented Swedish herring, and salt licorice, which is found throughout the Nordic nations.

Food Safety Talk 166: Surprising lack of cannibalism questions

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Don and Ben traveled to SUNY Geneseo for a live version of the podcast sponsored by the Center for Integrative Learning, and hosted by the amazing Beth McCoy. The episode title comes from an unrecorded after dark which may or may not have taken place in a bar in Geneseo.

Episode 166 is available on iTunes and here.

Show notes so you can follow along at home.

Judging at the State Fair 2018 edition

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For the past several years I’ve been part of the home food preservation competition at the NC State Fair. Every year, going back decades, people from all over our state bring their pickles, jams and preserves to Raleigh to compete for big prizes – including best in show.

The 2018 competition is tomorrow. A bunch of phenomenal volunteers spent this afternoon looking through recipes and checking processing times. A few products get their pH tested to make sure our judges don’t get botulism.

Last year, Our State covered the completion, and wrote some great stuff. My favorite being,

By 10:30, the hostess cart is operating with smooth efficiency, transporting jars of gherkins and dills, jams and jellies to their appropriate tables. The sugar rush has hit. The bracing smack of brine has loosened tongues. And the atmosphere inside the Education Building has turned bubbly, like a cocktail party. Jar seals are popping (a good sign!), pencils are scribbling (“Let’s make sure we’re thoughtful about giving feedback,” urges Chapman), and entries with rusty lids, stray hairs, or odd-looking weblike things hiding under screw tops are delicately set aside.

3 hep A cases linked to Western NY pizzeria

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A Cheektowaga, NY pizzeria, Doino’s Pizzeria Bar & Grille, has been identified as the source of an outbreak of 3 hepatitis A cases according to the Lancaster Bee. 

Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz and Erie County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein announced Monday that an employee who handles food at Doino’s Pizzeria Bar & Grille, 2709 Harlem Road, Cheektowaga, was identified as being positive for Hepatitis A.

County health officials confirmed the case following an epidemiological investigation that was launched after the Erie County Department of Health received reports of three new Hepatitis A infections among Erie County residents.

The investigation included an inspection of the eatery and interviews of the restaurant owner and staff who work there. The establishment has been notified of the potential exposure, and the owner was advised to send any staff reporting of being ill for immediate Hepatitis A evaluation before returning to work.

Now, the ECDOH is advising anyone who ate food as a dine-in or takeout customer at Doino’s between Aug. 20, 2018, and Sept. 3, 2018, to monitor themselves and their families for symptoms for 50 days since consuming the food and to seek medical evaluation for Hepatitis A if they develop symptoms of this infection.

How does a food employee at a pizzeria pass hepatitis A along to patrons? Poor/no handwashing followed by handling ready-to-eat foods with bare hands is my guess.

 

I do love a good warning letter; here’s the Honey Smacks one

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I love the FDA’s ongoing release of warning letters. This practice gives an insight into what’s happening in food facilities, especially important are the ones that are linked to outbreaks. FDA warning letters and 483 inspection forms have brought gold like us tugging at the dried skin of bearded dragons as well as scratching intergluteal clefts.

As the great Stefon says, the Kerry Inc./Honey Smacks warning letter has everything – pathogens, incomplete hazard analyses and poor sanitation. 

Some highlights:

Your hazard analysis did not identify a known or reasonably foreseeable hazard for each type of food manufactured, processed, packed, or held at your facility to determine whether there are any hazards requiring a preventive control as required by 21 CFR 117.130(a)(1).

Between September 29, 2016 and May 16, 2018, you repeatedly found Salmonella throughout your facility, including in cereal production rooms. During this time period, you had 81 positive Salmonella environmental samples and 32 positive Salmonella vector samples (samples taken in response to finding a positive on routine testing),

Further, you had repeated findings of other Salmonella species in some production lines and rooms used for the manufacture of cereal. These repeated findings of Salmonella in your environment should have resulted in a reanalysis of your food safety plan as required by 21 CFR § 117.170(b)(4) and the identification of contamination of RTE cereal with environmental pathogens as a hazard requiring a preventive control (i.e., sanitation preventive control).

Clean and sanitize your thermometers with the correct compounds

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This one isn’t food safety, but there’s something for the microbiology nerds to learn here. Thermometers moving from person-to-person (or in our world, food-to-food) can move pathogens around.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, a fungal outbreak at a hospital was linked to skin probe thermometers being reused. Fun part is that they were being sanitized between use, just not using the correct compound (in this case they used quat sanitizer) but this was against the manufacturer’s instructions. 

End result: 70 patients with Candida auris over a 2 year period.

A Candida auris Outbreak and Its Control in an Intensive Care Setting

04.Oct.18
New England Journal of Medicine
Eyre DW., Sheppard A., Madder H., Moir I., Moroney R., Quan TP., Griffiths D., GEORGE S., Butcher L., Morgan M., Newnham R., Sunderland M., Clarke T., Foster D., Hoffman P., Borman A., Johnson E., Moore G., Brown C., Walker A., Peto T., Crook D., Jeffery K.
Abstract
BACKGROUND
Candida auris is an emerging and multidrug-resistant pathogen. Here we report the epidemiology of a hospital outbreak of C. auris colonization and infection.
METHODS
After identification of a cluster of C. auris infections in the neurosciences intensive care unit (ICU) of the Oxford University Hospitals, United Kingdom, we instituted an intensive patient and environmental screening program and package of interventions. Multivariable logistic regression was used to identify predictors of C. auris colonization and infection. Isolates from patients and from the environment were analyzed by whole-genome sequencing.
RESULTS
A total of 70 patients were identified as being colonized or infected with C. auris between February 2, 2015, and August 31, 2017; of these patients, 66 (94%) had been admitted to the neurosciences ICU before diagnosis. Invasive C. auris infections developed in 7 patients. When length of stay in the neurosciences ICU and patient vital signs and laboratory results were controlled for, the predictors of C. auris colonization or infection included the use of reusable skin-surface axillary temperature probes (multivariable odds ratio, 6.80; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.96 to 15.63; P<0.001) and systemic fluconazole exposure (multivariable odds ratio, 10.34; 95% CI, 1.64 to 65.18; P=0.01). C. auris was rarely detected in the general environment. However, it was detected in isolates from reusable equipment, including multiple axillary skin-surface temperature probes. Despite a bundle of infection-control interventions, the incidence of new cases was reduced only after removal of the temperature probes. All outbreak sequences formed a single genetic cluster within the C. auris South African clade. The sequenced isolates from reusable equipment were genetically related to isolates from the patients.
CONCLUSIONS
The transmission of C. auris in this hospital outbreak was found to be linked to reusable axillary temperature probes, indicating that this emerging pathogen can persist in the environment and be transmitted in health care settings. (Funded by the National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance at Oxford University and others.)

 

 

Food Safety Talk live in Geneseo, NY

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Don and I are recording a live show tonight at SUNY Geneseo thanks to an invite from Dr. Beth McCoy. Beth has been a listener since close to the beginning. It’s always cool to find out that someone actually listens to the stuff we talk about. As I did some prep for the show, I stumbled upon a local bar and grabbed a Genny Cream Ale. The bartender saw the Food Safety Talk decal I have on my MacBook and we struck up a conversation about what it’s like to work in the back of the house of a restaurant.

My most valuable experience as a food safety person remains washing dishes in a local Guelph bar.

Sex & drugs & rock and roll.

And food safety.

We talked food safety myths, eating leftover pizza, stuff both of us have seen in the kitchen and cleaning up puke (and dragging the mop bucket back into the kitchen).

 

Food Safety Talk 165: Vladimir Poutine

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Don and Ben talk a little bit about their op-sec, stuff their watching (including Star Trek) and Ben’s trip to Québec City. In the ongoing history of Canadian cuisine segment they visit the fantastic Quebecois dish, poutine. They talk Walkerton, the World Equestrian Games and non-potable water. The conversation goes into California’s make-meals-at-home-and-sell-them rules and some feedback about chicken washing. The show ends with a chat on curve fitting tricks, phages and ingredient-linked outbreaks.

Episode 165 is available on iTunes and here.

Show notes so you an follow along at home:

Public health links Salmonella illnesses to Washington Costco deli

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The Patch writes that a bunch of Salmonella illnesses have been linked to eating food from a Costco deli in Issaquah, Washington.

The Patch reports that King County health officials released a bulletin today stating,

Since August 28, 2017, we have learned of seven King County residents who tested positive for Salmonella I,4,[5], 12:i:- infections. DNA fingerprinting was performed on the Salmonella bacteria from the seven people who got sick and was identical for all cases, suggesting a common source of infection. Illness onsets occurred sporadically during August 28, 2017–July 13, 2018, and a common epidemiological link among all cases was not established until August 2018; no single food item prepared by the service deli has been identified as the source of the illnesses.

Salmonella is crazy hardy. Sticking around in a deli location for a year, is notable though. Niches in equipment, floors, utensils could be good harborage spots. Someone sent me an outbreak report a while ago about a restaurant that had a really long Salmonella outbreak linked to drains and the environment (I think, I can’t find the post though).

Also notable is that in 2016 another Washington State Costco was also the source of Salmonella I,4,[5], 12:i:- . That incident was linked to four cases and attributed to rotisserie chicken salad.

Hurricane preparation from a Canadian

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I grew up more that 400 miles away from an ocean. The biggest weather events I had to prepare for were snow and cold.

I’ve lived in NC for almost 10 years, have not been through much more than power outages for a few hours due to storms. Getting ready for #Florence though. Updating prep and recovery stuff at go.ncsu.edu/florencefoodsafety and here over the next few days.