Tag Archives: Barfblog

Smuggling meat? Wrap it in diapers

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Yahoo news reports that a 21-year-old South Texas women was fined $300, for smuggling chorizo from Mexico. The chorizo was hidden in diapers which appeared to be soiled.

Suspicious of the chunky diapers, inspectors with U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the international bridge in Hidalgo found several links of spicy pork sausage, or chorizo, inside. The diapers had been folded to look soiled, according to a customs agency statement.

Mmm. I don’t think I’d eat sausage that was wrapped in this.

What do you do if someone pukes at your restaurant or event?

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Clean it up.  That’s the easy answer.

Exactly how is another question.  After Amy’s story of one of her students yacking in class, we started tossing around that question and using norovirus outbreaks at Georgetown and USC as hooks. Mayra and I decided to build a food safety infosheet around it.  After reviewing available guidelines from regulators and peer-reviewed research publications, we came up with some steps for cleaning up vomit. 

We based our recommedations on a norovirus-induced vomit (because aerosolized spread of virus particles is likely). 

If you are looking for a cool paper on vomit, check out: Evidence for airborne transmission of Norwalk-like virus (NLV) in a hotel restaurant (Epidemiology and Infection, 2000. 124:481-487), which discusses the spread of post-vomit norovirus (abstract is here).

A pdf of the vomit cleanup food safety infosheet can be found here.

PETA takes on Victorino

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KITV in Honolulu, HI reports that PETA has asked Shane Victorino, the Philadelphia Phillies star Center Fielder, to stop eating Spam. According to the PETA Files blog, Fox announcer Joe Buck, revealed that Victorino’s favourite food is a popular Hawaiian dish, Spam musubi, during a recent telecast. Ever-trusty Wikipedia says that a Spam musubi is composed of a block of salted rice with a slice of Spam (cooked or uncooked) on top, and typically nori (dried seaweed) surrounding it to keep it in shape. Mmmm. I’ve never had Spam, but meat from a can doesn’t really appeal to me.

KITV.com reports:

After finding out Victorino’s favorite food is SPAM musubi, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ Assistant Director Dan Shannon sent him a letter, calling for him to give up SPAM because its maker Hormel is under an animal cruelty investigation.

PETA released video to news organizations from one of its investigator that went undercover at the pig farms. The video showed workers beating the animals.

The PETA representatives said they realize SPAM is popular in Hawaii and that he probably did not realize the conditions the pigs faced.

According to PETA, Investigators documented that workers at the Hormel supplier kicked and injured pigs, beat pigs with metal rods, and shocked pigs with electric prods–sometimes in the face. Workers reportedly killed piglets by slamming their heads against the floor.

The PETA Files also says that:

Phillies’ Citizens Bank Ballpark has been ranked the "Most Vegetarian Friendly Ballpark" two years in a row for its impressive vegetarian offerings, such as Philly faux-steak sandwiches, "crab-free crab cakes," mock-chicken sandwiches, and veggie dogs.

I’ve never been to Citizens Bank Ballpark, but I did have an awesome cheesesteak at a Phillies game at the Vet a few years ago.

Maybe this video clip is a bit predictable…. oh well.

 
 

Listeria basics still missing in Canada

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"Refusing to make listeria test results public, and saying Maple Leaf is doing what CFIA expects of the company, leaves Canadians blindly trusting the two groups under whose watch 20 people died. It’s not particularly reassuring.”

That’s what I said in the Toronto Star this morning in response to Robert Cribb’s story yesterday that four months before the Maple Leaf outbreak started claiming lives, Canada’s food safety agency quietly dropped its rule requiring meat-processing companies to alert the agency about listeria-tainted meat.

Neither Maple Leaf nor the safety agency will release to the public the specifics of the listeria outbreak at the plant, so it is not possible to determine how the reporting rule would have affected the case.

One Toronto inspector said there had been a "trend" in positive listeria tests leading up to the outbreak that was never reported by the plant to federal inspectors. The inspector, and three others across the country, spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear disciplinary action if they spoke publicly. "There’s something wrong, that an inspector isn’t aware of a trend in their own plant," the inspector said.

That does not mean more inspectors. As Karen Selick, a lawyer in Belleville, Ont., wrote in the National Post yesterday, the recent listeriosis outbreak has produced a predictable chorus of accusations from big-government fans attempting to pin the blame on the alleged deregulation of Canada’s food safety system

There was a full-time government inspector on site in every Maple Leaf  plant, but the listeriosis outbreak happened anyhow. Would additional government inspectors have prevented the problem?  Probably not. 

Back to the Toronto Star, where Maple Leaf spokesperson Linda Smith said her company makes all of its paperwork and testing available to inspectors but doesn’t alert them to positive test results.

"As per the regulations, there is no requirement to inform the CFIA about any listeria test result," she said. "The protocol Maple Leaf had in place was if they found a positive, they would sanitize the area and then you’d need to find three negatives in a row to leave that area alone. In (the Maple Leaf plant from which the outbreak was traced), there were occasional positives. … They would sanitize and test three subsequent times and in all of those cases, they did not find another positive in that area."

During the outbreak, Maple Leaf president Michael McCain said the company tests the Toronto plant’s surfaces 3,000 times a year.

"Positive results for listeria inside a food plant are common," he told reporters at the time, adding that "there was nothing out of the norm" leading up to the outbreak.

Asked for the listeria test results leading up to the outbreak, Smith said last week the company would not release them publicly.

Canadian food safety bureaucrats continue to stumble — and more people are sick

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I started FSnet, the food safety news, shortly after the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak in Jan. 1993. Sure, Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet, but those of us in universities had access, and I started distributing food safety stories.

It all seems sorta quaint now, what with Google alerts and blogs and RSS feeds, but my goal was straightforward: during the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak, a number of spokesthingies said, they didn’t know E. coli O157:H7 was a risk, they didn’t know that Washington State had raised its recommended final cooking temperature for ground beef, they didn’t know what was going on.

So FSnet was conceived and made widely available so that no one could legitimately say, they didn’t know.

Yet that’s exactly what federal bureaucrats in Canada said last night when questioned about the delay in warning those in southwestern Ontario that lettuce from Aunt Mid’s in Detroit, implicated in a large Michigan-based E. coli O57:H7 outbreak that has stricken at least 34, had made its way across the border.

And now at least two people in Ontario have tested positive for the same strain of E. coli O57:H7.

David Musyj, president and chief executive officer of the Windsor (Ontario) Regional Hospital, said last night that authorities in Michigan issued a public-health alert about the link to Aunt Mid’s iceberg on Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, but the Canadian Food Inspection Agency didn’t bother notifying Windsor health officials until Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008.

"What happened between Sept. 26 and Oct. 1? Clearly there is a communication gap that occurred. I want an investigation to be launched into this to find out why there was a communication gap, whether it was our CFIA or whether it was the State of Michigan."

Dustin Pike, a spokesman for Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, said in an e-mail yesterday that the Public Health Agency of Canada notified the CFIA of the E. coli outbreak in Michigan potentially linked to the lettuce on Tuesday, and after determining that the product had been imported into Canada, the CFIA contacted Windsor health authorities the following morning. …

Davendra Sharma, a food-safety recall specialist at the CFIA, said the agency acted promptly when it heard of the outbreak to identify who in Canada purchased the product and to notify Windsor officials.

Again, I started FSnet all those years ago so bureaucrats and others couldn’t say, I didn’t know.

The Michigan outbreak was first publicly reported on Sept. 16, 2008. Lettuce was identified as the primary suspect on Friday, Sept. 26 2008. Why it took until Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2008 for someone at Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada or the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to notice there was an outbreak next door in product that could be shipped to Canada is baffling.

Especially because of all the bureaucrats that read FSnet. According to tonight’s numbers, 27 people at PHAC, 149 people at Health Canada, and 316 people at CFIA receive FSnet. That’s almost 500 people, and no one noticed?

Tonight, test results have, unfortunately, revealed that two cases of E. coli O157:H7 in Chatham-Kent, Ontario, are of the same strain identified in 38 cases in the United States. All of the cases are thought to be linked to shredded iceberg lettuce distributed by Aunt Mid’s Produce Company. This product is distributed in five pound industrial bags to institutions such as hospitals and long-term care homes, as well as restaurants in southwestern Ontario.

Musyj of the Windsor hospital captures the failings of CFIA when he says:

"Once something is thought of seriously enough to raise a red flag, then you better call everyone affected by the red flag. You can’t wait for a death to happen to notify everyone."

Although that seems to have been the CFIA policy with listeria: with 20 dead and counting, it’s a bad policy.

CFIA, what is your policy on going public with information that can prevent illness? Is your primary priority to protect public health? If so, can you provide evidence to back such a claim? 

And how can any of you say you didn’t know?

Oh, and for those who see salvation in a single food inspection agency, as is often discussed in the U.S., please notice the dysfunctional mess that is CFIA.
 

Don’t eat poop (like those kids at Georgetown); proper handwashing and proper tools

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I used to steal toilet paper.

As an undergraduate 25 years ago, and once my girlfriend showed me how to get at the theft-proof rolls in the university centre, the supplies of toilet paper in our household became one less student expense.

My hockey bag is still filled with those little soaps and shampoos from hotel rooms around the globe.

I was the kind of student — and apparently I’m not alone — University of Guelph administrators in Canada were worried about when they said that residence students should provide their own handwashing soap.

In 2005, the university switched to sanitizers instead of soap and paper towels in the residence washrooms because soap dispensers, paper towels and garbage cans went missing.

That was before a 2006 norovirus outbreak sickened over 150 students, primarily in one university residence.

The university subsequently returned soap and paper towels to all residences to help control the outbreak.

Students at Georgetown University are now being implored to wash their hands after a norovoirus outbreak linked to the school’s dining hall caused 175 students to vomit their way to the hospital. Said one university official, “Handwashing is going to be our mantra for a very long time around here.”

That’s great. A little late, but better than before. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that up to 25 per cent of the 76 million annual cases of foodborne illness in the U.S. could be eliminated with proper handwashing.

That’s a lot fewer sick people.

But, as Jon Stewart quipped in 2002, “If you think the 10 commandments being posted in a school is going to change behavior of children, then you think ‘Employees Must Wash Hands’ is keeping the piss out of your happy meals. It’s not.”

So why don’t more people wash their hands?

While some practice a Howard Hughes-like paranoia, study after study shows that many are lazy when it comes to handwashing. The proclamations to practice proper handwashing, on restroom posters, in daycare facilities, in media scare stories, will always fail to register with those who are impervious to risk — that bad things happen to someone else, not me.

But as the Guelph example demonstrates, anything that can even slightly encourage proper handwashing and hygiene in general needs to be encouraged — and that means ready availability of soap, water and paper towels.

Once available, the facilities have to actually be used, whether in the workplace, the home, the university residence, or, the farm.

The steps in proper handwashing, as concluded from the preponderance of available evidence, are:

• wet hands with water;
• use enough soap to build a good lather;
• scrub hands vigorously, creating friction and reaching all areas of the fingers and hands for at least 10 seconds to loosen pathogens on the fingers and hands;
• rinse hands with thorough amounts of water while continuing to rub hands; and,
• dry hands with paper towel.

Water temperature is not a critical factor — water hot enough to kill dangerous bacteria and viruses would scald hands — so use whatever is comfortable.

The friction from rubbing hands with paper towels helps remove additional bacteria and viruses.
The next time you visit a bathroom that is missing soap, water or paper towels, let someone in charge know. And next time you see someone skip out on the suds in the bathroom, look at them and say, “Dude, wash your hands!”

Don’t eat poop.
 

New food safety infosheet — Lettuce linked to E. coli O157 outbreak

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Last week, an outbreak of E. coli O157 in Michigan was linked to bagged, industrial-sized packages of iceberg lettuce distributed to institutions and restaurants throughout the state, according to Michigan’s Department of Community Health (MDCH).  34 illnesses in Michigan have been linked to this outbreak, as well as illnesses in IL, OH, NY and OR. MDCH suggests that the outbreak is associated with eating lettuce at a facilities supplied by Aunt Mid’s Produce Company, a Detroit-based wholesale distributor.

In a press release yesterday, Aunt Mid’s Produce Company reported that  they hired an outside laboratory to test products and samples from their facility, and that the results from the tests "prove there is NO CONTAMINATION in Aunt Mid’s products."

Strong words, especially since the outbreak has been linked to products that were consumed between September 8 and 19.

This outbreak is the focus of the newest Food Safety Infosheet, and can be found here.

175 sick with norovirus at Georgetown – but they’re getting Powerade

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Todd A. Olson??????, vice president for student affairs at Georgetown University issued a statement this afternoon identifying norovirus as the cause of the recent gastrointestinal illnesses affecting Georgetown students and outlining a bunch of preventative measures. It was boring, and of course, didn’t say sorry for all the barfing.

However, the reporters at the Georgetown Voice offered a more entertaining presentation of the same information:

“Georgetown just sent out a message saying that the food poisoning is caused by the Norovirus, a contagious virus spread through oral and fecal contact. Georgetown is going to start a big cleaning regimen:

“Immediately, student residence halls are being cleaned with a specific focus on common areas and high contact surfaces such as bathrooms, doorknobs, and handrails. Common gathering areas including Yates Field House, McDonough Arena, the Leavey Center will also be cleaned, as well as bathrooms and high contact surfaces in academic and administrative buildings.

“It’s also spread by hand-to-hand contact. In June, a health inspection found that Leo’s had inadequate handwashing facilities for employees. According to the report, that problem was resolved. Georgetown says it’s going to continue normal operation, with a focus on cleaning. The message also encourages everyone to frequently wash their hands.

UPDATES: Todd Olson says the new number is 175 students. Only 3 in emergency room, 2 in student health center.
    Leo’s is open tonight.
    Any student who has missed class or assignment from being sick will be excused. Get in touch with your dean.
    Georgetown’s setting up a call center for parents. 1-800-208-5167. I guess it’s for calling to complain that your student is sick or could’ve been. For families with sick students: 202-444-3895
    Dr. Timpone is up saying everyone should wash their hands. Norovirus causes all kinds of miserable nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea.
    People whose roommates have the virus and got splashed with vomit can easily get sick. Clean up! Use bleach.
    Degioia’s here! Timpone says don’t be upset if you get sick, the disease will pass in a few days. Just stay hydrated.
    I’m kind of surprised DeGioia’s here, considering how awful students were treated last night at that Grill.
    Question and answer time! Olson says he’s not familiar with the possible Leo’s handwashing connection. No word on whether you get to skip midterms, talk to your dean.
    Someone from Solidarity is asking about employees getting sick, good point. Todd says he doesn’t think any workers got sick.
    Todd says we’re getting lot of Powerade and hand sanitizers!
    Students who have vomit damage in their room  should call work management at 202-687-3432. I guess they’ll help now, unlike yesterday.
    People who have already been infected won’t catch it again.

Telling people to wash their hands is standard. Georgetown students, are there adequate supplies in the bathrooms – soap, water and paper towels – and were there adequate supplies before the outbreak?

Ever notice someone sick and working at Leo’s? That’s how norovirus often spreads, especially through a bunch of foods from one spot.

There are some tips on the infosheet below. Norovirus outbreaks like this are far too common.

Georgetown outbreak: Emergency so backed up there was ‘vomiting in the waiting room’

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Molly Redden of the Georgetown Voice in Washington, D.C. does an excellent job going beyond the soundbites of talking health-heads to capture the impact of foodborne illness, in the case on a bunch of university students who dined at Leo O’Donovan Cafeteria or Leo’s.

At least 96 students were treated by the Georgetown University Hospital or the Student Health Center for gastroenteritis from Tuesday night and Wednesday. …

Neil McGroarty (NHS `12), arrived at the emergency room at around 10:30 p.m., only hours after eating a roast beef sandwich from Grab N’ Go. He said within hours of arriving at the Hospital, the emergency room was backed up to the point that students who weren’t receiving medical attention began vomiting in the waiting room.

“I know that some people in the waiting room had been there for three hours. There was a boy yelling ‘help me, help me!’ but there were no doctors,” Kathrin Verestoun (SFS `11), who accompanied her roommate to the emergency room, said. “They ran out of rooms and set up stretchers in the hall. Some people were so dehydrated that they couldn’t find their veins for IVs. They were just bleeding. [My roommate] bled all over her stretcher.” …

A Food Establishment Inspection Report obtained by the Voice through a Freedom of Information Act request reveals that in June, the D.C. Bureau of Community Hygiene determined that Leo’s’ handwashing facilities were not up to code, although this was “corrected on-site.” According to the report, sinks used for handwashing in the service area lacked handsoap. …

The actual number of students who have fallen ill may be far higher than reported. Interviews have revealed that many students who fell ill did not get medical help, like Katie O’Niell (COL `11), who began to vomit about three hours after eating a burrito at Leo’s.

“I didn’t feel like I could make it any further than from my bed to the bathroom,” she said.

Handwashing rates low in hospitals: report

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In 2002, Jon Stewart quipped while hosting Saturday Night Live,

“If you think the 10 commandments being posted in a school is going to change behavior of children, then you think “Employees Must Wash Hands” is keeping the piss out of your happy meals. It’s not.”

Apparently the signs aren’t working in Ontario hospitals either.

Jim McCarter, the province’s auditor general, said in a report tabled in the provincial legislature that the results of a hand-hygiene program piloted in 10 hospitals revealed personnel were complying with the rules of good hand hygiene only 40 to 75 per cent of the time.

Time for new messages.