One of the proudest things I’ve done is help train U.S. military veterinarians in food safety each year I was at Kansas State University.
I still carry the warrant officer badge in my knapsack.
Steven M. Sellers of BNA writes that Sodexo Inc. is facing a surge of foodborne illness lawsuits over undercooked beef its employees allegedly served at two Marine Corps bases in California.
Tristan Abbott’s Aug. 24 complaint, the most recent of three suits filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, alleges he suffered kidney and brain damage from beef contaminated with a virulent strain of E. coli bacteria.
Sodexo, the food and facilities management giant that serves corporations, schools, and the military, says it provides “quality of life” food and other services at 13,000 sites across the U.S. and Canada. The suits questions whether it lived up to its mission at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot and Camp Pendleton in San Diego.
At least 244 Marine recruits were sickened in the outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli last year. Thirty were hospitalized, 15 with life-threatening kidney failure, according to researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The bacteria, known as E. coli O157:H7, can cause severe abdominal cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, and life-threatening complications in some cases.
Abbott was placed on dialysis and developed neurological symptoms from the infection, for which he received a medical discharge from the Marines in April, he says.
Investigators from the CDC and the Department of Defense found a “statistically significant association” between ill recruits and undercooked ground beef, for which Sodexo employees only intermittently checked temperatures, the complaint states.
“We recommended the Navy and Marine Corps retain lot information, address food handling concerns, and improve hygiene among recruits,” CDC researchers reported at an Epidemic Intelligence Service conference in April. The investigators also noted “poor hygiene practices among recruits.”
Sodexo told Bloomberg Law Aug. 27 that the source the outbreak remains uncertain.
Since early July, the number of cases of ehec infection has increased in Sweden. Analyzes show that the majority are of the same type and cases have been reported from several counties, mainly Uppsala and Västra Götaland. According to the investigation, it is a national ehec outbreak that has one or more common sources of infection.
So far, the ehec infection of some fifty people who fell in July could have been linked by molecular biologic analyzes of the genetic engineering of the bacteria. Another fifty-one people were also suspected of being affected. Among the infected are both children and adults.
Since the current type of ehec, O157: H7, has spread to different parts of the country, it is probably about a foodborne infection. Locally, the infection can also be spread from person to person via bathing water.
– This appears to be one of the biggest outbreaks of ehec we have had in Sweden. The germ strain spread may cause serious disease, especially in children. Together with the affected infected units and municipalities, the Swedish Food Administration and the State Veterinary Office, we are working to investigate the outbreak and, above all, try to identify the source of infection and prevent further spread of infection, “says microbiologist Cecilia Jernberg.
Melia Robinson of ctpost reports that in San Francisco, people call the city’s telephone hotline about 65 times a day to report piles of human feces on streets and sidewalks.
That adds up to 14,597 calls placed to 311 between January 1 and August 13, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Now, city officials are ramping up their response to San Francisco’s poop problem.
The City of San Francisco is preparing to launch a new effort to clean human waste off its streets. A six-person crew will scour targeted neighborhoods looking for human waste.
Starting next month, a team of five employees from the Department of Public Works will take to the streets of San Francisco’s grittiest neighborhood, the Tenderloin, in a vehicle equipped with a steam cleaner. They will ride around the alleys to clean piles of poop before citizens have a chance to complain about them, the Chronicle reported.
The poop problem has become a key issue for new Mayor London Breed, who grew up in public housing in San Francisco.
“I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here,” Breed told NBC in a recent interview. “That is a huge problem, and we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans.”
My friend, who has been canoeing down the Moose River for the last week found this in the restaurant at Moose Factory (you aren’t Canadian unless you know how to make love, or just have sex, in a canoe).
Ashley Preece of Birmingham Live writes the brazen owner of a revolting fast-food joint is facing additional jail time – after an outbreak of salmonella led to eight people being struck down with food poisoning, including one who was critical in hospital.
Muhammed Abdul Moueed Khan, from Walsall , and former owner of Blakenall One Call Peri Peri, has pleaded guilty to six separate offences including selling food unfit for human consumption that included pizzas and doner meat contaminated with salmonella bacteria.
Mr Khan also pleaded guilty to failing to clean and disinfect a doner kebab meat cutter and kitchen utensils appropriately, leading to widespread contamination.
On Thursday, Wolverhampton Magistrates’ Court heard evidence from Walsall Council Environmental Health officers who visited the One Call Peri Peri premises in July 2017 after a number of complaints of alleged food poisoning by members of the public.
As well as formal food samples, swabs were taken from the shop’s donner kebab cutter, chopping board and an electric knife used for cutting chicken.
Samples from a dirty shop sponge were also submitted for laboratory analysis.
Results proved that harmful salmonella bacteria taken from the Blakenall Lane shop and equipment were present in all of the swabs and that the strain of bacteria matched patient and hospital samples.
When we learn that potentially dangerous food products may be available in the U.S. marketplace, we must move quickly and efficiently to remove these food products from the market.
Our teams routinely work with food producers on voluntary recalls, and when necessary and where applicable, mandate recalls in order to keep people from getting sick or being harmed. We recognize that an important part of the recall process is also arming consumers with actionable information that they can use to avoid potentially contaminated food products. We’re committed to providing consumers with more information to take these actions. This is an area where we see more opportunity to improve the FDA’s role in protecting public health. To promote these goals, we’re advancing an important new policy.
When a food recall is initiated, the FDA typically works with companies to publicize labeling information, product descriptions, lot numbers, as well as photographs and geographic or retail-related distribution information. The aim is to enable consumers to identify whether they have the recalled product and take appropriate actions. That often includes discarding the product or returning it to the place of purchase.
The agency has not traditionally released lists of specific retailers where recalled foods may have been purchased. This is because certain supply chain information is confidential between the supplier and retailer. Moreover, in most cases, information publicized by the recalling company is sufficient to allow consumers to identify and avoid recalled product. But there are some cases where additional information about the retailers selling potentially harmful product may be key to protecting consumers such as when the food is not easily identified as being subject to a recall from its retail packaging and the food is likely to be available for consumption. It is particularly important in situations where the product has already been linked to foodborne illness. In these situations, providing retailer information can help consumers more quickly and accurately recognize recalled product and take action to avoid the product or seek assistance if they’ve already been exposed.
We recognize the importance of providing consumers with actionable information related to recalled food products. That’s why today the FDA issued new draft guidance that describes situations when disclosing retail information for products undergoing recalls is appropriate. The draft guidance outlines the circumstances when the FDA intends to make public the retail locations that may have sold or distributed a recalled human or animal food. These circumstances will particularly apply in situations associated with the most serious recalls, where consumption of the food has a reasonable probability of causing serious adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals.
Based on this new policy, moving forward the FDA intends to publicize retail consignee lists for food recalls when the food is not easily identified as being subject to a recall from its retail packaging, or lack thereof, and if the food is likely to be available for consumption. Some examples of this may include foods sold directly to consumers with no universal product code or UPC, or bar code. This might include deli cheese, nuts, rawhide chews, or pet treats sold in bulk and fresh fruits and vegetables sold individually.
The new draft guidance also states that the FDA may disclose retail consignee lists in certain recall situations, including when a recalled food is related to a foodborne illness outbreak and where the information is most useful to consumers. For example, the FDA might release retailer information for a packaged food that was distributed in a particular geographic region or through a particular online retailer if providing that information could help consumers protect their health and wellbeing from a recalled food potentially purchased at one of these establishments.
In recent months, we’ve already begun taking actions that align with this approach.
For example, this summer the agency released detailed retail distribution information by state during a recall of pre-cut melon associated with an outbreak of Salmonella infections so consumers could better identify where the recalled food may have been purchased. The draft guidance released today, provides greater transparency on our intention to regularly use this approach in these and other scenarios.
We believe that providing retailer information for certain recalls will also improve the efficiency of recalls by helping the public to identify and focus on the foods that are recalled. It’s important to note that in sharing this information, the FDA may also not be able to fully verify the accuracy or completeness of the information it receives from recalling companies or distributors, and information may change over time.
Identifying retail locations can be complex. It can involve obtaining information from multiple parts of the supply chain, including the recalling company and intermediate distributors. But we also know this information can be very important to consumers. Knowing where a recalled product was sold during the most dangerous food recalls can be the difference between a consumer going to the hospital or not. While we can’t prevent every illness, we can make sure we provide information to consumers to prevent more people from becoming sick from a recalled or hazardous food product.
Chapman told USA Today that, “We can never become too vigilant when talking about food safety. We’re talking about 48 million cases of food-borne illnesses a year and that estimate being stable over the last 10 years. There are lots of ways for improvement.”
He said he personally shops at numerous grocery stores for his family, so he doesn’t always remember where he buys what, especially unmarked items, such as sweet potatoes and onions.
The FDA plan to cite specific retailers “can trigger that ‘Oh, I did shop at these places. Maybe I need to start looking,’ ” Chapman said.
Nice to see Chapman stepping up to fill the gap I left. But he still needs me to write it up.
Going public: Early disclosure of food risks for the benefit of public health
Mar.17
NEHA, Volume 79.7, Pages 8-14
Benjamin Chapman, Maria Sol Erdozaim, Douglas Powell
Often during an outbreak of foodborne illness, there are health officials who have data indicating that there is a risk prior to notifying the public. During the lag period between the first public health signal and some release of public information, there are decision makers who are weighing evidence with the impacts of going public. Multiple agencies and analysts have lamented that there is not a common playbook or decision tree for how public health agencies determine what information to release and when. Regularly, health authorities suggest that how and when public information is released is evaluated on a case-by-case basis without sharing the steps and criteria used to make decisions. Information provision on its own is not enough. Risk communication, to be effective and grounded in behavior theory, should provide control measure options for risk management decisions. There is no indication in the literature that consumers benefit from paternalistic protection decisions to guard against information overload. A review of the risk communication literature related to outbreaks, as well as case studies of actual incidents, are explored and a blueprint for health authorities to follow is provided.
Crypto, which commonly refers to both the parasite and the diarrheal disease that it causes, cryptosporidiosis, infects humans and animals. It is a serious problem in developing countries, where it is a leading cause of life-threatening diarrhea in children under two. Now cases reported in the U.S. are increasing.
Swallowing one mouthful of crypto-contaminated water can cause illness. While most people recover after a few weeks of significant gastrointestinal upset, young children, the elderly, and the immunosuppressed can face chronic infection, wasting, cognitive impairment, and even death.
No vaccine exists, and the sole FDA-approved drug for crypto is, paradoxically, ineffective in people with weakened immune systems.
A major roadblock to developing drugs is the fact that crypto oocysts—the infectious form of the parasite that thrives in the small intestine—are impossible to cultivate under laboratory conditions, explained Saul Tzipori, distinguished professor of microbiology and infectious diseases at Cummings School, who has made the study of crypto and other intestinal diseases his life’s work.
To produce oocysts for scientific investigation, crypto must therefore be grown in host animals. The process is expensive, time-consuming, and cumbersome.
“To evaluate and optimize prototype vaccines and test them in humans we need to use the same source, age, viability, quality, and quantity of oocysts. This is impossible with available methods, which necessarily involve variation,” said Tzipori, who is also the Agnes Varis Chair in Science and Society and chair of the Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health.
Now Tzipori and his team, in collaboration with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, have developed a way to rapidly freeze crypto oocysts, preserve their infectiousness indefinitely, and thaw them as needed for study. The researchers recently published their discovery, which was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Nature Communications.
For the past forty years, scientists have tried to keep crypto oocysts for later use by freezing them—a process called cryopreservation—using slow cooling, “but those methods didn’t yield infectious oocysts,” explained the paper’s co-first author, Justyna Jaskiewicz, a veterinarian who is pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences as a member of Tzipori’s lab. The group discovered that the oocysts’ impermeable walls kept out cryoprotective agents—chemicals that are typically used to prevent formation of harmful ice crystals by replacing intracellular water. As a result, sharp ice crystals formed, which punctured and damaged the oocysts’ infectious interior.
To help tackle this problem, Tzipori’s team tapped the expertise of Massachusetts General’s Center for Engineering in Medicine, whose co-founder, Mehmet Toner, is widely known for advances in low-temperature biology and tissue stabilization.
The solution turned out to be bleaching the oocysts to make their walls permeable before soaking them in protective chemical agents.
Oocysts in solution were then loaded into cylindrical glass microcapillaries about three inches long and 200 microns in diameter—the diameter of about four human hairs—and plunged into liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees Celsius (about -320 Fahrenheit). Almost immediately, the oocyst solution morphed into a glasslike solid free of ice crystals.
“Unlike standard cryopreservation, where cells are slowly cooled, our technique vitrified the oocysts almost instantaneously. Vitrification is an ice-free method that cools cells so rapidly that crystals don’t form,” said Rebecca Sandlin, an investigator at the Center for Engineering in Medicine and co-first author on the paper.
Oocysts thawed three months later were 50 to 80 percent viable and still infectious in mice. The researchers believe such cryopreservation will last indefinitely. They hope to increase the volume of oocysts frozen and test the methodology with other strains of the parasite.
The discovery is just the latest from Tzipori’s far-ranging research on a host of globally important infectious diseases, from E. coli to dengue fever.
Tzipori believes ultrafast cooling will benefit scientists worldwide in addition to advancing his own work on crypto drug discovery and vaccine development.
“For the first time, we can produce the crypto parasite—including unique or genetically modified strains—in large quantities, without need for constant passage through animals, uniformly cryopreserved, and ship it to other investigators in liquid nitrogen that can be stored indefinitely and used at any time,” he said. “This capability has existed for other pathogens, but never for crypto.”
I still carry the warrant officer badge in my knapsack.
