Owner of food company responsible for Spain’s worst ever listeriosis outbreak arrested for manslaughter

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Eva Saiz of El Pais reports the owners of the food company responsible for the worst-ever listeriosis outbreak in Spain were arrested on Wednesday for manslaughter.

Since August, the outbreak has killed three people, caused seven miscarriages, and infected more than 200 people. The source of the bacterial infection was traced to a Seville-based company called Magrudis, which sold a contaminated pork loin product called carne mechada under the brand name La Mechá. Three more products produced by the company also tested positive for Listeria monocytogenes.

The owners of Magrudis, José Antonio Marín Pince and his two children Sandro and Mario, have been accused, to different degrees, of involuntary manslaughter, crimes against health and causing injury to a fetus.

According to investigators, the three men knew in February that some of their products had been contaminated but did nothing to eliminate the bacteria from their facilities. Instead they continued producing and distributing their products.

“When the crisis broke, we reminded the business by email that one of their samples had been contaminated much earlier. Given that they did nothing, we passed on this information to the courts,” José Antonio Borrás, the owner of the Microal Group laboratory, told EL PAÍS.

The laboratory handed a report to the court in early September, and according to sources close to the investigation, the contents prompted Judge Pilar Ordóñez, who is overseeing the case, to take action on Tuesday.

Neither laboratories nor companies are legally obliged to warn the authorities if a product is found to test positive, but a company does have a duty to adopt measures to correct the problem. Investigators want to find out why the owners of Magrudis did not do this, and why, more importantly they hid the positive test results from health inspectors who visited the factory after the alert was raised. In public appearances, both Marín and his son Sandro claimed that the company had successfully passed all sanitary controls.

Traces of listeria were found in tests carried out on the Magrudis production line, including the oven carts used to transport the meat during the preparation process, and the larding needles used to inject the pork with fat before cooking. The crisis was complicated by the fact that the company’s products had been sold on to another firm and prepared for sale as an own-brand product in a supermarket chain without the proper labelling.

FDA Frank: Digital prompts key to changing food safety behavior

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Tom Karst of The Packer writes that teasing the details of a new era of smarter food safety, Food and Drug Administration deputy commissioner for food policy and response Frank Yiannas spoke Sept. 18 at the United Fresh Washington Conference.

Before coming to FDA last December, Yiannas was vice president of food safety at Walmart from 2008 to 2018.

And Disney in Orlando before that.

Yiannas said the FDA’s work on produce safety has been front and central to his work since he joined the agency.

He praised the industry for its contribution to food safety and said the public-private partnership on food safety efforts must strengthen even more in what he called a new era of smarter food safety that is set to begin in 2020.

“I was asked by the Commissioner to continue to lead our efforts on modernization,” Yiannas said. “We’ve come a long way since 2011, but there’s still work to be done.”

Tech-enabled traceability and tech-enabled outbreak response will be one area of focus for the new era of smarter food safety, Yiannas said.

While produce has an impressive safety record overall, he said there are weak points in the supply chain.

“What I have learned over the years, and especially from my vantage point with the world’s largest company, is that I do believe the food system’s Achilles heel is traceability and transparency,” he said.

He noted that in both the spinach-related foodborne illness outbreak in 2006 and the romaine-related outbreak in 2018, traceability was an issue.

“It seems eerily similar almost a decade later,” he said. “And we still are having to do these overly broad consumer advisories.”

Distributed ledger or blockchain technology can be part of the solution, he said, but that isn’t the focus.

“It is not about the technology— it is about solving some of our many public health challenges,” he said.

Helping efforts to create a culture of food safety among growers, food marketers, and consumers is another element of the new era plan, he said.

“What I’ve learned over the years, is that it’s impossible to make progress without changing and influencing behavior,” he said, noting the importance of “digital prompts” to encourage right behavior.

I agree.

168 kindergarteners hit by possible salmonella in China

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Cal Rolston of NCTY News reports 168 children were sent to hospital with possible Salmonella food poisoning in Dongguan, Guangdong Province prompting health authorities to shut down a kindergarten on Monday for two days. 

One hundred and three people, including 99 children, remained in hospitals in the city and neighboring Shenzhen, according to statements released by the Dongguan Health Bureau.

Nobody died or was critically ill as of Sunday midnight, the bureau said.

Just ill enough to go to the hospital.

Labels: 12 students in Philippines fall sick after eating popcorn

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Michael Jaucian of Inquirer.net reports 12 grade 7 students from Polangui General Comprehensive High School were hospitalized on Friday due to food poisoning after mistakenly adding a drying agent they thought was flavoring to popcorn, physicians said Saturday.

Based on diagnosis by the attending physician at Josefina Belmonte Duran Memorial District Hospital in Ligao City where the students were being treated, the patients experienced food poisoning after they ate the popcorn they shared during recess.

Ella Rose Delos Santos, one of the victims, said they mixed what they thought was flavoring with the popcorn their classmate bought from a store in Legazpi City.

“We put some flavor on it. After several minutes eating it, most of us felt bad and started complaining of dizziness and body ache,” Delos Santos said.

Most of the victims felt severe headache, stomachache, and were vomiting after consuming the popcorn.
They were treated and are now in stable condition.

Doctor Ma. Judy Manlangit said the students had mistakenly mixed desiccant with the popcorn.

Cats like (some) people

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I have previously bemoaned the absence of warm-blooded pets in my emotionally crippling childhood.

Growing up in late-1960s suburbia, my parents thought dogs should run on farms like their dogs had, and cats were a nuisance.

So I had a turtle.
Turtles were inexpensive, popular, and low maintenance, with an array of groovy pre-molded plastic housing designs to choose from. Invariably they would escape, only to be found days later behind the couch along with the skeleton of the class bunny my younger sister brought home from kindergarten one weekend.

But eventually, replacement turtles became harder to come by. Reports started surfacing that people with pet turtles were getting sick. In 1975, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned commercial distribution of turtles less than 4 inches in length, and it has been estimated that the FDA ban prevents some 100,000 cases of salmonellosis among children each year.

Maybe I got sick from my turtle.

Maybe I picked up my turtle, rolled around on the carpet with it, pet it a bit, and then stuck my finger in my mouth. Maybe in my emotionally vacant adolescence I kissed my turtle. Who can remember?

Then, one day in 1986, my now ex-wife and at the time veterinary student brought home two kittens from the clinic.

I named them Clark and Kent.

And as I was writing a science column for the university student paper in my spare time, I spent about three months writing about cat behaviour.

I’ve been fortunate to have cats and or dogs ever since.

Rachel Nuwer of the New York Times writes that in the perennial battle over dogs and cats, there’s a clear public relations winner.

Dogs are man’s best friend. They’re sociable, faithful and obedient. Our relationship with cats, on the other hand, is often described as more transactional. Aloof, mysterious and independent, cats are with us only because we feed them.

Or maybe not. On Monday, researchers reported that cats are just as strongly bonded to us as dogs or infants, vindicating cat lovers across the land.

“I get that a lot — ‘Well, I knew that, I know that cats like to interact with me,’” said Kristyn Vitale, an animal behavior scientist at Oregon State University and lead author of the new study, published in Current Biology. “But in science, you don’t know that until you test it.”

Research into cat behavior has lagged that into dogs. Cats are not social animals, many scientists assumed — and not as easy to work with. But recent studies have begun to plumb the depth of cats’ social lives.

“This idea that cats don’t really care about people or respond to them isn’t holding up,” Dr. Vitale said.

In a study in 2017, Dr. Vitale and her colleagues found that the majority of cats prefer interacting with a person over eating or playing with a toy. In a 2019 study, the researchers found that cats adjust their behavior according to how much attention a person gives them.

Other researchers have found that cats are sensitive to human emotion and mood, and that cats know their names.

They recruited owners of 79 kittens and 38 adult cats to participate in a “secure base test,” an experiment commonly used to measure bonds that dogs and primates form with caretakers.

A similar test is also used for human infants. It is based on the theory that infants form an innate bond with caretakers that manifests as a strong desire to be near that person.

In the experiment, which lasted six minutes, cat and kitten owners entered an unfamiliar room with their animals. After two minutes, the owner left the room, leaving the cat or kitten alone — a potentially stressful experience for the animal. When the owner returned two minutes later, the researchers observed the feline’s response.

About two-thirds of cats and kittens came to greet their owners when they returned, and then went back to exploring the room, periodically returning to their owners. These animals, the researchers concluded, were securely attached to their owners, meaning they viewed them as a safe base in an unfamiliar situation.

We have two fluff-balls currently, siblings, one is a service cat that cuddles when she senses you are sad and constantly sleeps with our daughter, and the other is a hormonal mess of male anxiety, hates to be touched and meows constantly beginning at 4 a.m. or really any time.

Shurley not: Food safety education of employees and the public

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Food safety training is like psychotherapy: Sure, I understand the theory, the neural pathways, the addictive brain, but will that change my behavior (shurley not).

But there’s always hope – in place of well-designed studies that measure success, failure, and actual experiments with novel approaches. Most studies get tossed on the rhetorical pile of we-need-more-education crap.

Here’s the abstracts for two recent papers:

Effectiveness of food handler training and education interventions: A systematic review and analysis

Journal of Food Protection vol. 82 no. 10

Ian Young, Judy Greig, Barbara J. Wilhelm, and Lisa A. Waddell

https://doi.org/10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-19-108

https://jfoodprotection.org/doi/abs/10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-19-108

Improper food handling among those working in retail and food service settings is a frequent contributor to foodborne illness outbreaks. Food safety training and education interventions are important strategies to improve the behaviors and behavioral precursors (e.g., knowledge and attitudes) of food handlers in these settings.

We conducted a comprehensive systematic review to identify, characterize, and synthesize global studies in this area to determine the overall effectiveness of these interventions. The review focused on experimental studies with an independent control group. Review methods included structured search strategy, relevance screening of identified abstracts, characterization of relevant articles, risk of bias assessment, data extraction, meta-analysis of intervention effectiveness for four outcome categories (attitudes, knowledge, behavior, and food premise inspection scores), and a quality of evidence assessment.

We identified 18 relevant randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and 29 nonrandomized trials. Among RCTs, 25 (64%) unique outcomes were rated as high risk of bias, primarily owing to concerns about outcome measurement methods, while 45 (98%) nonrandomized trial outcomes were rated as serious risk of bias, primarily because of concerns about confounding bias. High confidence was identified for the effect of training and education interventions to improve food handler knowledge outcomes in eight RCT studies (standardized mean difference = 0.92; 95% confidence interval: 0.03, 1.81; I2 = 86%). For all other outcomes, no significant effect was identified. In contrast, nonrandomized trials identified a statistically significant positive intervention effect for all outcome types, but confidence in these findings was very low due to possible confounding and other biases.

Results indicate that food safety training and education interventions are effective to improve food handler knowledge, but more evidence is needed on strategies to improve behavior change.

Gaps and common misconceptions in public’s food safety knowledge

British Columbia Institute of Technology

Kathy Kim, Helen Heacock

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b78e/7eb080d0fe5a95f95e0b140ca183277c81cb.pdf

Background: Incidence rates of some foodborne illnesses (FBIs) in BC still remain on the rise despite numerous initiatives to prevent FBIs. This rise over the years has been attributed to gaps in the public’s food-safety knowledge and practices. In order to decrease incidence rates and prevent future FBIs, efforts should be made to identify common misconceptions in the public’s food safety knowledge. With a focus on the Metro Vancouver population, common misconceptions in food safety were found and their knowledge level towards the misconceptions was analyzed.

Methods: An in-person survey was conducted in three locations in Metro Vancouver. The survey asked for demographics information, perceived food safety knowledge and food safety misconceptions. ANOVA and Independent Sample T-test were administered to analyze results.

Results: No statistically significant difference in food safety knowledge was found between groups by gender, age, and geographic region. The majority of participants rated their food safety knowledge as moderate but they demonstrated a poor knowledge level in food safety.

Conclusion: The public’s knowledge level should be improved to prevent further rises of FBIs. Initiatives involving the provincial Foodsafe certification program, secondary school curriculums and health authority websites can be utilized to educate the public.

Most sushi producers in Ireland fail to meet food safety standards

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I don’t like sushi and don’t eat it, especially the real kind with raw fish.

Andrew Lowth of Spin 1038 reports that checks have found almost every sushi maker and seller in Ireland has failed to meet food safety standards.

Of eleven manufacturers, restaurants and takeaways inspected, just one hadn’t broken food hygiene laws.

The Food Safety Authority found 76 breaches of food law, including poor parasite control and incorrect defrosting of raw fish.

The audit findings also include:

90% of food businesses audited did not have adequate controls in place relating to sushi production and processing activities

75% of food businesses did not meet the requirements of the legislation for  freezing fish for parasite control

Over 90% of the food businesses did not have adequate operational controls for sushi rice production

“Our audit sought to establish if food safety controls were being followed and the findings are very concerning,” says FSAI CEO Pamela Byrne.

“It showed that over three quarters of the food businesses did not have adequate food safety controls in place for this.”

Everybody has a camera: Colorado restaurant with rat edition

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Evan Kruegel of Fox 31 reports a Denver restaurant with previous food safety violations is once again being inspected after a video surfaced showing a rat inside the restaurant.

Dominic Trujillo says he took the video on Sept.16, while waiting for Mt. Fuji Sushi & Hibachi to open. The video appears to show a rat eating food scraps between the glass and a window shade at the restaurant off of East Sixth Avenue in Capitol Hill.

He posted the video on social media and says a manager sent him a private message, offering a gift card in exchange for taking the video down.

The Denver Department of Public Health and Environment visited the restaurant Wednesday after seeing the video and found no violations.

“Yesterday we had the health department come and they checked everything, inspected everything, and everything looks fine,” said Osa Enebish, with the restaurant. “Our back door — it was left open and we fixed that door, so it might have came through that door, we don’t know.”

In February, the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment found 12 critical health code issues at Mt. Fuji, including rodent droppings found in storage cabinets.

Cherry tomatoes may be lined to Salmonella outbreaks in Sweden

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SVT reports people have been sick with diarrhea between August 29 and September 14 with Salmonella Typhimurium. Anders Enocksson, infection prevention consultant at Region Halland.

In all, 11 counties are affected. Most cases are in Halland together with Dalarna, Jönköping and Västra Götaland, which P4 Halland was the first to tell . The infected are in all age groups, but just over half are 60 years or older. There are slightly more women than men.

The source of infection is not yet known, but there is suspicion of tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes. It is unclear where they come from. The investigation is allowed to show if it is correct, says Anders Enocksson.

North Carolina man dies from Vibrio lined to undercooked seafood

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 The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed man from Cary died from Vibrio vulnificus, apparently linked to raw oysters.

The Center for Disease Control says it is impossible to tell that an oyster is bad by looking at it.

“An oyster that contains harmful bacteria doesn’t look, smell, or even taste different from any other oyster,” the CDC’s website says.

Most Vibrio infections can be prevented by ensuring your seafood is thoroughly cooked, especially oysters.