Category Archives: Email

Wiping out scrapie in goats, the genetic way

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More consumers are developing a taste for goat cheese, milk, and meat as they become aware of the high protein and great taste of these products. While U.S. goat producers are enjoying this steady trend, they remain focused on keeping their animals healthy, especially from scrapie—a fatal brain disease that affects goats and sheep.

“The goat industry is one of the fastest growing animal industries in agriculture,” says Stephen White, an Agricultural Research Service (ARS) geneticist. “Not too many years ago, there were only a few hundred thousand goats in the country.” But in January 2018, goats and kids totaled 2.62 million head.

Meat and dairy are the biggest markets, followed by mohair, but goats serve in other unique capacities, says ARS veterinary medical officer David Schneider. Goats are being used to manage weedy areas along highways, get rid of kudzu in the Southeast, and even mow lawns. They’re also used as pack animals to carry supplies through rugged areas.

For any of these businesses, a single outbreak of scrapie could be devastating.

There is no cure or treatment for scrapie, which is in the same family—transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) or prion diseases—as mad cow disease. TSEs are rare degenerative brain disorders characterized by tiny holes that give the brain a “spongy” appearance.

Most often scrapie is transmitted through birth fluids to other goats and sheep, and it can remain infectious in the environment for many years. It was first recognized in sheep in Great Britain and other European countries more than 250 years ago and was first diagnosed in U.S. sheep in 1947 in a Michigan flock.

All animals that get scrapie die. But there is good news from ARS. White and Schneider, who both work at ARS’s Animal Disease Research Unit in Pullman, Washington, are the first to demonstrate by infectious disease challenge that goats with the S146 allele (a different form of a gene) are less susceptible to scrapie over a usual goat lifetime. They also tested the K222 allele in goats. Their research shows that goats with one copy of either the S146 or K222 allele did not develop scrapie after being challenged with infection at birth. The study was published in The Veterinary Journal in 2018.

“Commercial goats raised for either meat or milk age out of herd participation as milkers, dams of commercial offspring, or as sires by around 6 years of age,” White says. In this ongoing ARS research, goats with the resistance alleles have lived beyond this commercial lifetime—up to 7½ years—with no clinical disease and without getting sick.

The only countries considered to be scrapie free are Australia and New Zealand. Currently, if one goat is diagnosed with scrapie on a U.S. farm, all goats are quarantined for life or euthanized. “You couldn’t restock your operation with any susceptible animal,” White says. “The farmer’s operation would be over.”

This research is good news for both goat and sheep producers because it could help with eradication efforts. Before U.S. producers can take advantage of import and export markets, scrapie must be eradicated from the United States and meet the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) criteria for disease freedom.

Origins of mad cow disease

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Aristos Georgiou of News Week reports an international team of scientists has said that they may have identified the origin of mad cow disease. Known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the neurodegenerative disease destroys the brain and spinal cord in cattle, causing death.

Since BSE first appeared in the 1980s in the United Kingdom, scientists have tried to identify how the disease emerged, however, no one hypothesis has been confirmed.

For a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team of scientists investigated the origins of BSE by injecting a particular variant of scrapie disease into mice which have been genetically modified with bovine DNA.

The researchers say that, unexpectedly, the injection of the scrapie strain into the genetically modified mice resulted in the propagation of classical mad cow disease prions. These prions are present in natural form in the scrapie variant.

This observation indicates that the illness could be transmitted between different species and that the modified mice could develop mad cow disease, according to the study.

Olivier Andreoletti, an author of the paper from the French National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA,) told AFP that the modified mice are “a very good model, which works well in terms of knowing what would happen if one exposed cows to those prions.”

He noted that the results provide, for the first time, and “experimentally underpinned explanation” for the appearance of mad cow disease in the U.K. in the 1980s.

After emerging, the disease spread in cattle across Europe, North America and other regions of the globe. This process was exacerbated by the fact that cows were being given feed which contained tissue from other cows infected with the disease.

They still suck: After years of bashing agriculture and GMOs, Chipotle reverses course

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I started bashing Chipotle about 2006, when driving through Kansas City with a trailer full of stuff as I moved to Manhattan, Kansas, to follow a girl, and cited this billboard.

Any company focused on this stuff usually meant they were somewhat oblivios to basic food safety.

Unfortunately for all the thousands of sick people over the next 14 years, I was right.

I tried to call them out for the food safety amateurs they were.

Even worse, when Amy was pregnant with Sorenne, she would get Chipotle cravings and I would dutifully comply, because she was doing the heavy lifting in pregnancy.

Now I have an entire book chapter I’m working on, devoted to Chipotle.

Kevin Folta of the Genetic Literacy Project writes that after years of attacking conventional agriculture and crop biotechnology, Chipotle now seems to have found a love for the American farmer that is as warm and inviting as the gooey core of a steak burrito. With the launch of its “Cultivate the Future of Farming” campaign, the company seeks to raise awareness about the hardships facing American agriculture and offer some recommendations and seed grants to address the problems. According to the campaign website:

It’s time to take real steps to give the next generation of farmers a bright future. Through our purpose to Cultivate a Better World, we’re putting programs in place that make a real impact, including seed grants, education and scholarships, and 3-year contracts. Our vision is bold, but we’re starting with a mission to cultivate the future of farming by focusing on pork, beef, and dairy.

It is good to see a company raising awareness about these issues. But given Chipotle’s past cozy relationship with organic food marketers, this seems more like a marketing stunt to woo consumers who are growing increasingly concerned about the status of American farms, and less like a genuine example of philanthropy.

Chipotle is absolutely correct about one thing. The crisis in agriculture is real. Farmers are facing low prices for their products, astronomical costs, and strangling regulation.  Farms, from commodity crops to dairies, are going out of business daily. Farmer suicides are a barometer of how severe the problem is.

From Chipotle’s website- The “challenge is real” and “It’s a hard living.”

However, Chipotle’s new ag-vertisment seems too little, too late. The threats to farmers and the public’s negative perception of agriculture didn’t seem to bother the company just a few years ago. For example, it’s 2014 video Farmed and Dangerous was an assault on large-scale animal agriculture, the industry that produces the ingredients that go into Chipotle’s burritos. Farmed and Dangerous was not the restaurant chain’s first effort, either.  The video short The Scarecrow falsely depicted a sad, dystopian world of dairy production in which forlorn cows are locked in stacked metal boxes as milk is extracted by an extensive network of plumbing.

And of course, Chipotle’s penetrating campaign against genetic engineering (GE) sought to capitalize on the momentum of several failed GMO labeling efforts, which were designed to demonize crop biotechnology by suggesting to consumers that GE seeds were dangerous—an allegation known to be false.

Let’s get real. Chipotle’s decisions to criticize agriculture and then embrace it were not born of altruism.  Public-facing corporate positions are spawned from focus groups and surveys. As a multinational, billion-dollar food empire, Chipotle is no different. The company’s ad campaigns aim to reinforce consumers’ perceptions and identity, showing that Big Burrito shares their values. That is what we see in this latest pro-farm campaign. The public is becoming increasingly aware of the fragile state of US agriculture and the crisis that has hit rural North America hard, and Chipotle is responding.

So is “Cultivate the Future of Farming” just an ag-washing ornament to exploit farmer hardship, or is this a genuine change of heart?

If it is indeed the latter, it needs to start with an apology—an honest one. Chipotle needs to publicly reject its anti-science positions and profound misrepresentation of agriculture. In the six years since the fast food chain’s anti-farming efforts hit a feverish pace, public perception has changed. The fear-based misinformation campaigns are failing, and time has not treated such efforts well. Chipotle’s videos are a shameful reminder of the rhetoric that was so prevalent just a short time ago.

Imagine where we’d be today if in 2014 Chipotle and other brands  invested heavily in research, rural mental health, or resources to bring precision agriculture to farmers. I think the perception of Chipotle and the perception of crop and animal production would be very different.

Perhaps the most important takeaway is that you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds in the first place. Targeting farmers who produce the products you sell is bad business—and it threatens a critical industry we all depend on.

Where does it come from? Salmonella in macadamia nuts in Queensland

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Salmonella enterica is a common contaminant of macadamia nut kernels in the subtropical state of Queensland (QLD), Australia. We hypothesized that nonhuman sources in the plantation environment contaminate macadamia nuts.

We applied a modified Hald source attribution model to attribute Salmonella serovars and phage types detected on macadamia nuts from 1998 to 2017 to specific animal and environmental sources. Potential sources were represented by Salmonella types isolated from avian, companion animal, biosolids-soil-compost, equine, porcine, poultry, reptile, ruminant, and wildlife samples by the QLD Health reference laboratory. Two attribution models were applied: model 1 merged data across 1998–2017, whereas model 2 pooled data into 5-year time intervals. Model 1 attributed 47% (credible interval, CrI: 33.6–60.8) of all Salmonella detections on macadamia nuts to biosolids-soil-compost. Wildlife and companion animals were found to be the second and third most important contamination sources, respectively. Results from model 2 showed that the importance of the different sources varied between the different time periods; for example, Salmonella contamination from biosolids-soil-compost varied from 4.4% (CrI: 0.2–11.7) in 1998–2002 to 19.3% (CrI: 4.6–39.4) in 2003–2007, and the proportion attributed to poultry varied from 4.8% (CrI: 1–11) in 2008–2012 to 24% (CrI: 11.3–40.7) in 2013–2017.

Findings suggest that macadamia nuts were contaminated by direct transmission from animals with access to the plantations (e.g., wildlife and companion animals) or from indirect transmission from animal reservoirs through biosolids-soil-compost. The findings from this study can be used to guide environmental and wildlife sampling and analysis to further investigate routes of Salmonella contamination of macadamia nuts and propose control options to reduce potential risk of human salmonellosis.

Source attribution of salmonella in macadamia nuts to animal and environmental reservoirs in Queensland, Australia,

04 December 2019

Foodborne Pathogens and Disease

Nanna Munck, James Smith, John Bates, Kathryn Glass, Tine Hald, and Martyn D. Kirk

https://doi.org/10.1089/fpd.2019.2706

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/fpd.2019.2706?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=FPD%20OA%20Dec%206%202019&d=12/6/2019&mcid=386543234

White Castle frozen food division announces voluntary recall of a limited production of frozen sandwiches due to Listeria monocytogenes

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Any excuse to write about White Castle means I get to recall the great movie, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.

I had a hockey friend over for lunch one day, we ate steak and watched Harold and Kumar, and it was one of the best times ever.

White Castle has initiated a voluntary recall of a limited number of frozen 6 pack cheeseburgers, frozen 6 pack hamburgers, frozen 6 pack jalapeno cheeseburgers, and 16 pack hamburgers, 16 pack cheeseburgers for the possible presence of Listeria monocytogenes. 

The voluntary recall will impact product on shelves at select retailers with best by dates ranging from 04 Aug 2020 to 17 Aug 2020. Any product with these dates on shelves is presently being removed. Any product with a best by date before or after these best by dates is not included in the voluntary recall.

To date, public health officials have not reported any illness associated with these products.

“Our number one focus is the safety of our customers and our team members, and as a family owned business, we want to hold ourselves to the absolute highest standards of accountability in all aspects of our business – and especially food safety,” said White Castle Vice President, Jamie Richardson.

Uh huh.

‘No biggie’: 11 gastro cases at Australian aged care home

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An aged care home criticised for its handling of an influenza outbreak which killed 10 people has suffered a gastro outbreak.

A staff member, who asked to remain anonymous, raised concerns about the way the situation had been handled.

A Department of Health and Human Services spokesman said the first case was identified last Thursday with eight residents and three staff affected, with the department notified on Tuesday (that in early Dec.).

Respect Aged Care chief operating officer Brett Menzie said it wasn’t a major outbreak.

The dates and number of infected people differed to those provided to DHHS, with Mr Menzie stating five residents and three staff members were infected.

Mr McKenzie said a resident first showed signs of gastro on Sunday, with an outbreak – which occurs when three people show symptoms – declared on Monday.

He said the Health Department had been notified and infection control procedures enacted.

“St John’s Retirement Village Nursing Home did not implement a coordinated and timely infection control program that was effective in identifying and containing infection during the influenza and respiratory outbreak of August and September 2017,” a report found.

Faith-based food safety: Unlicensed California food service fined after illnesses

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AP News reports an unlicensed food delivery service in the Sacramento area has been fined more than $100,000 after several customers were sickened.

The owner of Anna’s Kitchen “repeatedly delivered hundreds of meals that had not been kept properly hot or cold for extended periods of time, increasing the likelihood of foodborne illness,” the Yolo County district attorney’s office said in a statement Monday.

The business used the popular Chinese app WeChat to market its homemade Chinese food to Chinese foreign exchange students at the University of California, Davis, authorities said.

A health investigation began after several students reported becoming sick.

The business owner, Xin Jiang, agreed to settle a civil enforcement action by paying nearly $107,000 in costs and penalties. The agreement was approved by a judge last month.

Jiang admitted wrongdoing and is no longer operating Anna’s Kitchen but he could face another $90,000 in penalties if he reopens it or is found selling any type of food without a valid county permit, the DA’s office said.

Salmonella splashing on produce

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Nearly one-half of foodborne illnesses in the United States can be attributed to fresh produce consumption. The preharvest stage of production presents a critical opportunity to prevent produce contamination in the field from contaminating postharvest operations and exposing consumers to foodborne pathogens. One produce-contamination route that is not often explored is the transfer of pathogens in the soil to edible portions of crops via splash water.

We report here on the results from multiple field and microcosm experiments examining the potential for Salmonella contamination of produce crops via splash water, and the effect of soil moisture content on Salmonella survival in soil and concentration in splash water. In field and microcosm experiments, we detected Salmonella for up to 8 to 10 days after inoculation in soil and on produce. Salmonella and suspended solids were detected in splash water at heights of up to 80 cm from the soil surface. Soil-moisture conditions before the splash event influenced the detection of Salmonella on crops after the splash events—Salmonella concentrations on produce after rainfall were significantly higher in wet plots than in dry plots (geometric mean difference = 0.43 CFU/g; P = 0.03). Similarly, concentrations of Salmonella in splash water in wet plots trended higher than concentrations from dry plots (geometric mean difference = 0.67 CFU/100 mL; P = 0.04).

These results indicate that splash transfer of Salmonella from soil onto crops can occur and that antecedent soil-moisture content may mediate the efficiency of microbial transfer. Splash transfer of Salmonella may, therefore, pose a hazard to produce safety. The potential for the risk of splash should be further explored in agricultural regions in which Salmonella and other pathogens are present in soil. These results will help inform the assessment of produce safety risk and the development of management practices for the mitigation of produce contamination.

Salmonella survival in soil and transfer onto produce via splash events

December 2019

Journal of Food Protection vol. 82 no. 12

DEBBIE LEE,1 MOUKARAM TERTULIANO,2 CASEY HARRIS,2† GEORGE VELLIDIS,2 KAREN LEVY,1* and TIMOTHY COOLONG3

https://doi.org/10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-19-066

https://jfoodprotection.org/doi/abs/10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-19-066?af=R

Lamb mince as a source of toxo in Australia

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Objective: Toxoplasmosis may follow consumption of undercooked meat containing Toxoplasma gondii cysts. Lamb is considered to pose the highest risk for contamination across meats. Red meat is often served undercooked, yet there are no current data on T. gondii contamination of Australian sourced and retailed lamb. We sought to address this gap in public health knowledge.

Methods: Lamb mincemeat was purchased at the supermarket counter three times weekly for six months. T. gondii was detected by real‐time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of DNA extracted from the meat following homogenisation. Purchases were also tested for common foodborne bacterial pathogens.

Results: Conservative interpretation of PCR testing (i.e. parasite DNA detected in three of four tests) gave a probability of 43% (95% confidence interval, 32%–54%) that lamb mincemeat was contaminated with T. gondii. None of the purchases were contaminated with Campylobacter jejuni, Salmonella species or S. enterica serovar Typhimurium, indicating sanitary meat processing.

Conclusions: Australian lamb is commonly contaminated with T. gondii. Future studies should be directed at testing a range of red meats and meat cuts.

Implications for public health: Consuming undercooked Australian lamb has potential to result in toxoplasmosis. There may be value in health education around this risk.

Lamb as a potential source of toxoplasma gondii infection for Australians

December 2019

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health

Abby C. Dawson, Liam M. Ashander, Binoy Appukuttan, Richard J. Woodman, Jitender P. Dubey, Harriet Whiley, Justine R. Smith

https://doi.org/10.1111/1753-6405.12955

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1753-6405.12955

First reported case of Shewanella haliotis in the region of the Americas—New York, December 2018

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that on December 18, 2018, a man aged 87 years was evaluated in a hospital emergency department in Flushing, New York, for right lower abdominal quadrant pain. Evaluation included a computed tomography scan, which showed acute appendicitis with multiple abscesses measuring ≤3 cm. The patient was admitted, a percutaneous drain was placed, and 5 mL of an opaque jelly-like substance was aspirated and sent for culture and testing for antimicrobial sensitivities.

Gram stain of the culture revealed gram-negative rods, and culture revealed monomicrobial 1–2-mm yellowish-brown mucoid colonies.† Sequencing of the isolate’s 16S ribosomal RNA revealed >99.8% homology with Shewanella haliotis strain DW01 in the GenBank database. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing indicated that the isolate was susceptible to aminoglycosides, fluoroquinolones, certain penicillins, and broad-spectrum cephalosporins. Biochemical tests were performed to characterize isolate.

Phylogenetic analysis indicates that S. haliotis strain DW01 is the most recent ancestor of this clinical isolate. This is the first documented case of a S. haliotis appendix infection.

S. haliotis is an emerging human pathogen, first isolated from abalone gut microflora in 2007 (1). The geographic distribution of human infections caused by S. haliotis is concentrated in Asia, with most reports coming from China, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand (2). No cases of S. haliotis human infections had been reported in the World Health Organization’s Region of the Americas.

The patient was treated empirically with intravenous piperacillin-tazobactam while in the hospital and was discharged with a prescription for oral amoxicillin-clavulanic acid. At a follow-up visit 13 days later, he was recovering well. Empiric treatment of Shewanella spp. can be challenging; limited and varying antibiotic susceptibility profiles have been reported (2,3). This patient’s isolate was susceptible to several classes of antimicrobials, but resistance to certain antibiotics has been observed in this isolate and others (2). In a case series of 16 patients from Martinique, Shewanella spp. sensitivities to piperacillin-tazobactam and amoxicillin-clavulanic acid were reported to be 98% and 75%, respectively (3).

Risk factors for or potential vectors of Shewanella spp. infections are unidentified in up to 40%–50% of cases (4). S. haliotis is ecologically distributed in marine environments, including broad contamination of cultivated shellfish. Although infection following consumption of seafood is seldom reported (5), consumption of raw seafood could be an important vehicle for foodborne illnesses and outbreaks. This patient reported consuming raw salmon 10 days before becoming ill but had no other marine exposures or exposure to ill contacts. The time from potential exposure to onset of abdominal pain in this patient is consistent with that reported in the literature on Shewanella spp. (3–49 days). The epidemiologic exposure history supports the link between raw fish consumption and infection.

No other organisms were isolated in this patient; in the Martinique case series of Shewanella spp., one half of infections were monomicrobial as well (3). This case highlights the importance of preventing seafood-associated infections and the need to consider rare human pathogens in elderly or immunocompromised, marine-exposed populations, as well as persons who might consume at-risk food that might have been imported from outside the United States and persons who might have been infected outside the United States when traveling.