It’s all about the cross-contamination: But isn’t there a better way to describe how bugs spread and make people puke?

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Ever since Sorenne got diagnosed with a shellfish allergy, the shrimp on the barbie are for when she’s at school.

Woman’s hands cleaning prawns at table

The video clip is exactly what weekly faculty meetings were like at Kansas State University, while they ate raw sprouts on Jimmy John’s subs, with about $2 million in annual salaries sitting around the table, chatting about what to do with a 45K staffer.

This study aimed to qualify the transfer of Vibrio parahaemolyticus during the shrimp peeling process via gloves under 3 different scenarios. The 1st 2 scenarios provided quantitative information for the probability distribution of bacterial transfer rates from (i) contaminated shrimp (6 log CFU/g) to non-contaminated gloves (Scenario 1) and (ii) contaminated gloves (6 log CFU/per pair) to non-contaminated shrimp (Scenario 2). In Scenario 3, bacterial transfer from contaminated shrimp to non-contaminated shrimp in the shrimp peeling process via gloves was investigated to develop a predictive model for describing the successive bacterial transfer.

The range of bacterial transfer rate (%) in Scenarios 1 and 2 was 7% to 91.95% and 0.04% to 12.87%, respectively, indicating that the bacteria can be transferred from shrimp to gloves much easier than that from gloves to shrimp. A Logistic (1.59, 0.14) and Triangle distribution (-1.61, 0.12, 1.32) could be used to describe the bacterial transfer rate in Scenarios 1 and 2, respectively. In Scenario 3, a continuously decay patterning with fluctuations as the peeling progressed has been observed at all inoculation levels of the 1st shrimp (5, 6, and 7 log CFU/g). The bacteria could be transferred easier at 1st few peels, and the decreasing bacterial transfer was found in later phase. Two models (exponential and Weibull) could describe the successive bacterial transfer satisfactorily (pseudo-R2 > 0.84, RMSE < 1.23, SEP < 10.37). The result of this study can provide information regarding cross-contamination events in the seafood factory.

PRACTICAL APPLICATION:This study presented that Vibrio parahaemolyticus cross-contamination could be caused by gloves during the shrimp peeling process. The bacterial transfer rate distribution and predictive model derived from this work could be used in risk assessment of V. parahaemolyticus to ensure peeled shrimp safety.

Modeling transfer of vibrio parahaemolyticus during peeling of raw shrimp

February 2018

Journal of Food Science

Xiao X, Pang H, Wang W, Fang W, Fu Y, Li Y

DOI：10.1111/1750-3841.14064 

http://geenmedical.com/article/29411873

Poop baked into a pizza at a Little Caesars restaurant in Indiana

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Poop, probably not a pizza topping you would order. An Indiana woman noticed what appeared to be mice poop baked into her pizza at a Little Caesars restaurant.

Fox 4 reports

A Little Caesars restaurant near downtown Indianapolis is back open, after health inspectors shut it down Tuesday after receiving a couple’s complaint of rat or mice droppings baked into their pizza, according to WXIN.
Johnathan McNeil said he and his girlfriend bought a pizza at the establishment near the intersection of 22nd St. and Meridian St., but on the way home she noticed something was amiss.
“She looked at the pizza and realized there was, like, doo-doo looking stuff on the pizza,” said McNeil.
McNeil said he returned to the restaurant to demand an explanation.
“All of them were looking at my pizza dumbfounded as if they didn’t know what’s going on,” said McNeil. “I said ‘That’s mouse doo-doo on the bottom of my pizza.’”
McNeil said he called police who arrived on the scene and suggested he contact the Marion County Health Department.

Not sure why the police were called in.

An inspector initiated an emergency inspection, which resulted in the business license being suspended.
“We did find that there were rodent droppings and violations that warranted us doing a license suspension,” said Janelle Kaufman with the Marion County Health Department.
Upon a follow-up inspection the next morning, Kaufman said the problems had been corrected.
“They cooperated with us, they worked with us … they cleaned everything they needed to do,” said Kaufman.
Inspection reports show the restaurant has been doing battle with mice since at least last August. The store was cited four times since then, before being given the all-clear on October 3, 2017. However, the store was never closed.
Health officials said with only seventeen inspectors to cover about 4600 county restaurants, they rely on diners to be their eyes and ears.
“When they call and let us know what they see, it’s so helpful to us,” said Kaufman, “any restaurant can benefit from another inspection.”
McNeil hopes other diners will learn from his experience.
“I just want people to check their food and be very cautious about what they’re eating,” said McNeil.
Managers at the store declined to comment. WXIN reached out for comment from the restaurant’s corporate franchise owner, but did not immediately heard back.
Restaurant inspection reports are not posted until 10 days after they are conducted, however a restaurant’s cumulative inspection history can be found online.

 

Concerns raised about young people’s poor food safety knowledge as the academic year begins, Australian version

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This is not surprising and with the amount of conflicting food safety information disseminated on the web, T.V., what are we to expect? It would be interesting to find out how many educational institutions teach food safety at school. There appears to be a significant push towards eating healthier which is great but is food safety discussed? When I moved out from my parents place, the last thing on my mind was food safety; as long as I had something to eat I was happy and looking back I took risks. I had the privilege of attending some prestigious schools during my youth, yet food safety was never discussed.
The Food Safety Information Council along with their member Cater Care are developing a poster highlighting food safety tips for young adults. I am not confident this will change anything, although I commend them for their efforts. Need to be more compelling and find innovative ways to grasp the attention of a young adult, a poster won’t do.

Scimex reports:

There are peaks of Campylobacter and Salmonella food poisoning cases among those aged between 20 and 25 years old, which is the age that many young people leave home for the first time. Food Safety Information Council consumer research shows young people are likely to have poorer knowledge of food safety basics such as washing hands, correct cooking temperatures, riskier foods and fridge safety. This is of particular concern as one of the part time jobs that young people are likely to take is working as a food handler.
Organisation/s: Food Safety Information Council
Media Release
From: Food Safety Information Council
As the academic year begins, the Food Safety Information Council, together with their member Cater Care, have launched a food safety tips poster for young people leaving home to start university and college.
Council Chair, Rachelle Williams, said that young people are at risk of getting food poisoning.
‘While the highest recorded rates of Campylobacter and Salmonella cases are among small children under 5 years old there is also a peak for those aged between 20 and 25 years old which is the age group that many young people leave home for the first time.
‘Our consumer research shows young people are likely to have poorer knowledge of food safety basics such as washing hands, correct cooking temperatures, riskier foods and fridge safety. This is of particular concern as one of the part time jobs that young people are likely to take is working as a food handler.
‘Students also tend to live in shared accommodation where the hygiene of the communal kitchen and fridge is easily neglected. There are an estimated 4.1 million cases of food poisoning in Australia each year and a case of gastro can seriously ruin the fun of those first few months away from home.
‘By following these five simple tips, you can help ensure that you, and people you cook for, are safe from food poisoning:
CLEAN – wash hands with soap and running water before handling food, wash the dishes regularly and keep the kitchen clean
CHILL – keep the fridge at 5°C or below and clean it out regularly. Bring your takeaway straight home and refrigerate any leftovers within 2 hours and use or freeze them within 3 days
COOK – cook poultry or minced products to 75°C in the centre, be aware of the risk of raw or minimally cooked egg dishes.
SEPARATE – prevent cross contamination especially between raw meat or poultry and other foods that won’t be cooked like salads
DON’T COOK FOR OTHERS IF YOU HAVE GASTRO – you could make them sick too so ask someone else to cook or get a takeaway.
‘The Food Safety Information Council would like to thanks our member Cater Care for developing this poster which can be downloaded here, ’ Ms Williams concluded.

 

Internet: Freedom’s just another word

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Irony can be ironic sometimes.

This morning I was e-mail chatting with a friend, talking about how I took Madelynn, who is now 30-years-old, to a Grateful Dead concert north of Toronto when she was six-weeks -old.

Later today, word came that Dead songwriter and Internet activist John Perry Barlow had passed at the age of 70.

I was fortunate enough to have met Barlow three or four times in the early 1990s, when he was creating a stir about Internet freedom – even before Al Gore had invented it – at the SIGGRAPH annual meetings.

That’s Special Interest Group – Graphics, which now dominate Western media and culture.

I got to hang out with the Pixar execs, knew why shadows from a lamp named Luxo were special, and have a beverage or two with Barlow.

With a broken heart I have to announce that EFF’s founder, visionary, and our ongoing inspiration, passed away quietly in his sleep this morning. We will miss Barlow and his wisdom for decades to come, and he will always be an integral part of EFF.

It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance.

Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity’s problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: “I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.’”

Barlow’s lasting legacy is that he devoted his life to making the Internet into “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth . . . a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

In the days and weeks to come, we will be talking and writing more about what an extraordinary role Barlow played for the Internet and the world. And as always, we will continue the work to fulfill his dream.

Bonhomme Carnival: Pee wee hockey in Quebec

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About 45 years ago, I got to play in the pee wee tournament at the Quebec winter carnival.

In 1974, as a pee wee (ice) hockey goaltender, I boarded a train, with my parents, from Brantford, Ontario to Quebec City.
Today, I’m reading the messages of Australian parents who have sent their Ice Crocs to the same pee wee tournament in Quebec City, as part of the winter carnival, or as the French prof would say, Bonhomme Carnaval, or I would say, Quebec Winter Carnival (and not by train, it would sink).
The pee wee hockey tournament has been a cornerstone of the Quebec Winter Carnival for, forever.

Coming from the town of Gretzky, great expectations were thrust upon the kids from Brantford, and about 10,000 people showed up in the arena where the Nordique used to play (it was probably 500, but great storytelling sometimes requires great imagination).

I let in 4 goals in two periods and was yanked.

My friend Mike (who I used to fear as a better goalie, but now we’re facebook friends) went in for the third and let in two goals.

We lost 6-0.

I have tried to bring these humble homilies to my years of coaching, teaching, and whatever else.

The experience though, was fantastic, hanging out with our host family, walking around in -20C weather, and awestruck by the 30-foot snow piles at the end of driveways.

We lost the game, but learned so much.

This is my way of telling hockey parents — especially the Australian ones —  chill out.

My parents were and are awesome, driving me to the rink, going to Quebec City, getting on a plane when I needed them.

 

Biology is cool: How Salmonella die at low temps

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Using droplet-based electrical sensors she developed while a doctoral student at Purdue University, Aida Ebrahimi, assistant professor of electrical engineering, Penn State, determined that mild heat stress at temperatures around 120 degrees Fahrenheit damages the bacteria’s cell wall without rupturing them.

“We had a hypothesis that the Salmonella bacterium might die due to leakage of the cell wall,” Ebrahimi said. “If you heat them, the lipids that make up the cell wall vibrate. As the cell wall weakens, it can allow small molecules to leak out. Because these small molecules are mostly ionic, we expected a change of the electrical conductance.”

In order to prove their hypothesis, the team developed a sensor that was sensitive to the changes in electrical conductance of the growth medium. As the bacteria’s cell wall lost integrity, charged molecules were ejected from the cells into the solution containing the bacteria, and consequently the electrical conductivity of the solution changed.

The researchers conducted multiple experiments using both wild-type and heat-resistant Salmonella bacteria and correlated the electrical results with fluorescence measurement and standard microbiology protocols. The modified bacteria required higher energy to make the cell membranes permeable enough to leak small molecules. The team also studied heating time and heating method, either a slower ramp-up of heat or a sudden pulse of heat, and found that pulsed heat was more effective at killing bacteria.

The authors of the paper appearing in the current issue of in Biophysical Journal then developed an analytical model based on their experiments that correlated membrane damage, cytoplasmic leakage and cell death. By better understanding the mechanisms of bacterial death at elevated temperatures, these findings can potentially improve food safety strategies and provide more efficient ways to deactivate bacteria using shorter duration of heating at lower temperatures.

“We know how high temperatures kill bacteria,” Ebrahimi said. “But we wanted to find out why Salmonella died at lower temperatures. There are benefits to using lower temperatures, such as saving energy and retaining better nutritional quality, compared to food heated to high temperatures. But more importantly, bacteria can develop resistance to heat shock, so it is important to know how they respond to heat shock.”

Ebrahimi’s coauthors on the paper, “Analyzing Thermal Stability of Cell Membrane of Salmonella using Time-Multiplexed Impedance Sensing,” are Lazlo Csonka and Muhammad Alam, Purdue University.

The National Science Foundation and a Bilsland Fellowship Award supported this work.

Botulism in France, 2013-2016

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Human botulism is a rare but severe neurological disease which is submitted to the French Public Health. The biological diagnosis is performed by the National Reference Center of Anaerobic Bacteria and Botulism (CNR), Institut Pasteur, Paris.

This study carries the status of human botulism in France During the 2013-2016 period based on the epidemiological data of Public Health France and the biological investigation of CNR. episodes

Thirty-nine of confirmed botulism and 3 suspected episodes involving 68 and 4 persons, respectively were Identified: 6 Type A episodes (10 cases), 26 type B episodes (47 boxes), type 2 F episodes (5 cases), and 5 undetermined type episodes (6 boxes). The source of botulism was foodborne in 36 outbreaks (66 cases) and 6 cases were infant botulism. All type A and F botulism cases were severe forms

The incriminated food was identified in 15 of the 36 episodes of foodborne botulism. Homemade preparations of pork meat, especially raw ham, were responsible for 13 type B episodes, including 3 due to imported meat. Homemade pork meat was suspected in 12 other outbreaks. Other included pheasant pie and home canned asparagus. One of the two type F episodes was caused by industrial ground meat contaminated with Clostridium baratii F7 . No food has been identified in infant botulism and environmental contamination has been suspected in three cases. Penicillin and metronidazole resistant C. botulinum A2 strain was isolated from an infant botulism case with relapses.

Human botulism is rare in France. However, botulism surveillance is required for early identification of emerging novel botulinum toxin types, such as in the two C. baratii type F outbreaks in 2014 and 2015. Botulism surveillance also helps addressing recommendations to industrialists and consumers regarding hygiene and food preservation practices. Finally, this surveillance allows to quickly identify contaminated food in order to withdraw it from the market or from family’s homes.

Human botulism in France, 2013-2016

BEH

Christelle Mazuet 1 , Nathalie Jourdan-Da Silva 2 , Christine Legeay 1 , Jean Sautereau 1 , Michel R. Popoff 1

http://invs.santepubliquefrance.fr/beh/2018/3/2018_3_1.html

Norovirus strikes white Olympics

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More than 1,200 security guards have been withdrawn from the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics because of a norovirus outbreak, organisers said on Monday. Out of the group, 41 suffered a sudden onset of vomiting and diarrhoea on Sunday. They were transferred to hospital and most were diagnosed with a norovirus infection.

“The 1,200-odd people were pulled out from their duties,” an official of the Pyeongchang Olympic Organizing Committee was quoted as saying by AFP. “They were replaced by some 900 military soldiers. Health authorities were investigating the origin of the virus,” he said.

Hygiene hypothesis: We’re not smart enough, but go ahead, the importance of infants’ exposure to microorganisms

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In the 25 years I’ve been doing the food safety thing, the most frequent question is, don’t bugs make us stronger? Aren’t we too clean.?

These are referrals to the hygiene hypothesis, that the Western world has become too clean for our infants, a little dirt won’t hurt you, throw knowledge out the window, because nature is true (my grandson announced the impending birth of a sibling this morning on facebook; my daughter does not buy into this shit).

Jane Brody of The New York Times writes that many studies have strongly suggested that the trillions of microorganisms that inhabit the human body influence our current and future health and may account for the rising incidence of several serious medical conditions now plaguing Americans, young and old.

The research indicates that cesarean deliveries and limited breast-feeding can distort the population of microorganisms in a baby’s gut and may explain the unchecked rise of worrisome health problems in children and adults, including asthma, allergies, celiac disease, Type 1 diabetes and obesity. These conditions, among others, are more likely to occur when an infant’s gut has been inadequately populated by health-promoting bacteria.

A growing number of researchers and consumers are now paying more attention to where it all begins, especially how this huge population of microbes in our bodies, called the microbiome, is affected, for good or bad, by how babies are born and nourished.

As this still-evolving information trickles down to prospective mothers, it could — and perhaps should — lead to profound changes in obstetrics, pediatrics and parenting. The two most important would be fewer scheduled cesarean deliveries and more mothers breast-feeding exclusively for six months to enhance the kinds and amounts of bacteria that inhabit an infant’s gut.

(The daughter mentioned above was breast-fed for something ridiculous like 17 months.)

These organisms perform important functions that include digesting unused nutrients, producing vitamins, stimulating normal immune development, countering harmful bacteria and fostering maturation of the gut.

The story and the studies cited have lots of anectodal information – Sorenne and I had a brief chat about the difference between anectode and science over breakfast this a.m. – but do nothing to advance the germs-are-good-for-you-theory, other than it feels right.

Until one of your kids is the genetically susceptible one to succumb.

Science can do better.

It’s just not there yet.