Tag Archives: Cheese

2 sick, Michigan cheese recalled for listeria

Posted on by
Reply

Health types in Michigan are investigating two recent cases of human listeriosis that may have had exposure to Green Cedar Dairy products.

So, Green Cedar Dairy of Dearborn, Michigan, announced the recall of All Natural Ackawi Cheese and All Natural Chives Cheese with a sell by date up to July 1, 2012.

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development Laboratory identified Listeria monocytogenes in samples of All Natural Chives Cheese that were collected from Green Cedar Dairy.

Green Cedar Dairy products were distributed to bakeries and retail stores in Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties.

The recalled items are all labeled as Green Cedar Dairy (Plant # 26941) products, All Natural Ackawi and All Natural Chives Cheese. The product is sold in approximately 12-14 oz. squares vacuum sealed in clear plastic packages with a sell by date up to July 1, 2012. The sell by date is marked on a label on the back of the product.

Consumers beware; 1 sick with listeria from Quebec cheese or butter recalled a month ago but still on shelves

Posted on by
Reply

The sick person lede was buried, again, and I didn’t realize from a CFIA press release someone had gotten listerosis from eating Clic brand cheese and/or butter in Canada.

That’s how government types roll.

Worse, the expanded recall issued yesterday was a month after an initial limited recall, yet product was still sitting on shelves.

Canadian Food Safety Inspection Agency (CFIA) recall specialist Garfield Balsom told FoodQualityNews.com, “During a review of the company’s voluntary recall it was discovered that several products had been missed. The manufacturer has ceased production at its facilities and the CFIA working with them to make sure other products manufactured by the company are safe to consume.”

Did the one identified individual get sick from consuming Clic products that were previously recalled? In the original Nov. 11, 2011 recall notice, no one was sick.

The following cheese products, bearing establishment number 1874, and any Best Before dates up to and including those listed below, are affected by this alert:

Brand Product Size UPC Last Best Before date
Clic Moujadalé 300 – 400 g None 11 MAR 2012
Clic Riviera 300 – 400 g None 11 FEB 2012
Clic Tressé 300 – 400 g None 11 NOV 2012
Clic Vachekaval 300 – 400 g None 11 MAR 2012

The following dairy products bear establishment number 1874. These products have a four digit lot code. If the last 2 digits of the lot code are 45 or lower, e.g. xx-45, xx-44, etc, they are affected by this alert:

Brand Product Size UPC
Clic Desi Butter Ghee 454 g (1 lbs) None
Clic Desi Butter Ghee 907 g (2 lbs) None

These products have been distributed in Quebec and Ontario. These products may also have been distributed to other provinces.
 

Mr. (bathtub) Cheese sickens hundreds with salmonella in Utah

Posted on by
Reply

 Food hucksters sell nostalgia. See Michael Pollan on The Colbert Report for a fine example (video only works in the U.S.).

Biking home with Sorenne yesterday from school, a 20-something was walking a Brisbane sidewalk with pallets of strawberries and yelled out, “Want to buy some strawberries?”

“No.”

He then sold a pallet to the owner of a shoe store.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that some 2,100 Utahns – people who live in Utah, I guess — have been sickened with salmonella from homemade queso fresco.

The Salt Lake Valley Health Department has tracked down one source of the outbreak — an unnamed man dubbed "Mr. Cheese" who was making the product with raw milk and selling it to a Salt Lake City restaurant/deli.

The health department has confirmed that 73 people were sickened with the illness that causes diarrhea, fever and abdominal pain. But they estimate that hundreds more were ill and never reported it to the health department.

"They should not be purchasing food products in shopping center parking lots, [from people] distributing it out of their trunks or door to door," said Royal DeLegge, director of environmental health at the health department. "When you go into a retail setting, a deli or a store, you’re looking for labeling on the products."

The cheese probe took three years, involved a criminal investigator and extended to a fast-food franchise where Mr. Cheese’s wife worked.

People began to get sick in 2009 with Salmonella Newport, and the health department warned people not to buy the Mexican-style soft cheese from unapproved sources. Another 22 Newport cases popped up in 2010. The health department couldn’t find a common cause but heard of a woman selling cheese in a parking lot.

By June this year, another 32 people were sick with the strain. They commonly identified four restaurants and a market, where the local and state health department took samples of their queso fresco and samples from preparation areas. It found a positive DNA match from the cheese in the restaurant/deli.

That’s when the police got involved.

The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food had a name of a potential manufacturer of the cheese, who had a criminal past.

A criminal investigator for the county’s District Attorney’s Office put together a photo lineup for the restaurant owner, who identified his queso fresco source and called him "Mr. Cheese."

The health department later learned the man — whom they aren’t naming — made the cheese in his home using raw milk from a Midway dairy that is not authorized to sell raw milk. The man also is not licensed to manufacture cheese.
Food manufacturers are not allowed to produce products in their home because of the risk of contamination from sources such as pets and children.

Mr. Cheese’s wife may have contaminated her workplace with the queso fresco. Four customers and a food handler at four locations of a fast-food chain were sickened this year.

Listeria in Louisiana hog head cheese, 2010; 14 sick, 2 dead

Posted on by
Reply

In Aug. 2010, Veron Foods, LLC of Prairieville, La. recalled approximately 500,000 pounds of “ready to eat” sausage and hog head cheese products that ‘may have been’ contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes.

The problem was discovered through a foodborne illness investigation that resulted in a product sample testing positive for Listeria monocytogenes, but, like crappy food safety agencies here and there, the Louisiana types wouldn’t say how many got sick.

And everyone went back to sleep.

Until today, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control issued its report about an outbreak of listeria associated with eating hog head cheese in Louisiana in 2010.

I’m guessing it was the same outbreak.

During January–June 2010, a total of 14 cases of laboratory-confirmed invasive listeriosis were reported to the Louisiana Office of Public Health (OPH). Isolates of Listeria monocytogenes from the blood samples of eight patients were identified as serotype 1/2a and had pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) pattern combinations that were indistinguishable from one another. …

In-depth epidemiologic and environmental investigations of the cluster were initiated on July 26, including food history interviews of four patients. Three patients reported eating hog head cheese (a meat jelly made from swine heads and feet); the product was purchased at two grocery stores in Louisiana. A traceback investigation determined that a single brand of hog head cheese was common between the two grocery stores. L. monocytogenes serotype 1/2a was cultured from one of three product samples and from two of 16 environmental samples collected by LDAF at the processing establishment; the product and one of the two environmental samples yielded isolates with PFGE pattern combinations that were indistinguishable from the patient isolates. On August 14, LDAF coordinated a voluntary recall of approximately 500,000 pounds of hog head cheese and sausage because of possible contamination with L. monocytogenes.

This is the first published report of an invasive listeriosis outbreak associated with hog head cheese, which is a ready-to-eat (RTE) meat. USDA-FSIS has a "zero tolerance" policy for L. monocytogenes contamination of RTE food products (1), requesting recall of such products at any detectable level of L. monocytogenes contamination. LDAF imposes and enforces equivalent requirements in state-inspected establishments.

Louisiana OPH epidemiologists noted that 14 cases of invasive listeriosis had been reported during January–June 2010, which exceeded the state’s average of five cases reported during each January–June period during the previous 3 years. For this investigation, a cluster-associated case was defined as isolation of L. monocytogenes serotype 1/2a from a normally sterile site (e.g., blood or cerebrospinal fluid) or from placental or fetal tissue (in the setting of miscarriage or stillbirth) since January 1, 2010, and PFGE pattern combination GX6A16.0001 and GX6A12.0001.

Eight patients had illnesses that met the case definition. Their median age was 64 years (range: 38–93 years). Six patients were men; no patients were pregnant. Six patients had one or more underlying medical conditions (i.e., human immunodeficiency virus [HIV] infection, alcohol abuse, cancer, and diabetes mellitus). Illness onsets occurred from February 18 to June 16. Signs and symptoms included fever (n = 6 patients), altered mental status (n = 3), diarrhea (n = 3), vomiting (n = 3), and weakness (n = 2). Seven patients were hospitalized; two patients died. …

The implicated brand of hog head cheese originated from a small, state-inspected processing establishment in Louisiana, which produces approximately 600 pounds of hog head cheese per week. This establishment was under federal inspection until January 2007. Routine FSIS microbiologic testing of products at the establishment detected L. monocytogenes contamination in October and December 2006; the company voluntarily recalled 290 pounds of hog head cheese in January 2007. Four L. monocytogenes isolates from USDA-FSIS samples collected in 2006 did not match the 2010 outbreak-related PFGE pattern combination. In addition, Listeria contamination was not detected in any of the 12 product samples collected by LDAF since 2007; analysis of routine environmental samples collected by the management of the processing establishment during January–July 2010 also did not detect Listeria. However, the outbreak strain was identified in environmental samples collected during the investigation, which was several weeks after the manufacture of the outbreak-associated products (Figure), suggesting that persistent environmental contamination in the processing establishment was responsible for product contamination and resulting illnesses.

Jersey-style raw milk cheese BS

Posted on by
5

What is it with New Jersey?

I’ve got Sopranos on in the background, a Jersey colleague telling me how great The Clash are (they aren’t) and then I get an e-mail from another colleague who snapped this photo at a Jersey retailer.

As the correspondent noted, the sign states as a matter of fact rather than opinion that raw milk cheese tastes better, but alleges that pasteurization does not make cheese safer, kills bacteria that may not be there, and destroys vitamins A and D. Pasteurization was and continues to be a huge benefit to the public health. Vitamin destruction is minimal. Bacterial destruction is real and is necessary, even if some good ones go with the bad. … at the very least you should advise pregnant women, small children, old people, and the immunocompromised to avoid unpasteurized products.

Jersey is the train-wreck that is compelling to watch. Not Snooki.
 

60-day aging rule for raw milk cheese revisited

Posted on by
1

The N.Y. Times reports this morning that federal regulators are considering whether to tighten food safety rules for cheese made with unpasteurized milk — and the possibility has cheesemakers and foodies worried that the result will be cheese that is less tasty and not much safer.

The new proposals, which are expected in the next several months, come after a very tough year for this country’s fast-growing gourmet cheese industry, marked by recalls and two multistate E. coli outbreaks that sickened nearly 50 people.

The debate focuses on a federal rule that requires cheese made from raw milk to be aged for 60 days before it is deemed safe to eat. Raw milk has not been heated to kill harmful bacteria, a process known as pasteurization. So aging allows the chemicals in cheese, acids and salt, time to destroy harmful bacteria.
Scientists have found, however, that 60 days of aging is an overly simplistic guideline, in part because there are so many types of cheese and different ones may require different safeguards.

The Food and Drug Administration began a comprehensive review of the 60-day aging rule in 2009. Officials said the review was done and was awaiting approval before release.

Cheesemakers say pasteurizing milk destroys enzymes and good bacteria that add flavor to cheese. Raw milk cheese, they say, has flavors that derive from the animals and the pastureland that produced the milk, much as wine is said to draw unique flavors from individual vineyards.

Cheese made with pasteurized milk can also present food safety hazards if it becomes contaminated after the pasteurization step — during production or aging, for example. Last year, at least nine domestic cheesemakers issued major recalls. Five used pasteurized milk and four used raw milk.

But two of the raw milk cheese recalls came after the cheese was linked to outbreaks of a highly toxic form of E. coli bacteria.

In one outbreak, 38 people in five states became sick from raw milk gouda made by Bravo Farms of Traver, Calif., and sold through Costco. In another outbreak, eight people in four states were sickened by bacteria traced to soft cheeses made by Sally Jackson, a pioneering cheesemaker in Oroville, Wash.

In Ms. Jackson’s case, investigators documented unsanitary conditions that could have played a role in making the cheese unsafe. And in the Bravo case, investigators charged the company with packaging cheese for sale before the required 60-day aging was complete.

The aging rule was created in the late 1940s in response to outbreaks of typhoid fever linked to cheese.

Scientists knew then that hard cheeses, like cheddar, dried out as they aged, making them less hospitable to bacteria.

So regulators decided that if cheese was not made with pasteurized milk, it should be aged. But the choice of 60 days as the necessary threshold was a fairly arbitrary one, according to Dennis J. D’Amico, senior research scientist of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese of the University of Vermont.

“The 60-day rule wasn’t based on real science,” Dr. D’Amico said. “The pathogens have changed and the cheeses have certainly changed. But the rule has not.”

Dr. D’Amico and Catherine W. Donnelly, co-director of the Vermont institute, published a paper late last year showing that toxic E. coli could survive in cheese for more than a year.

Another study, which they published in 2008, showed that listeria levels increased in soft cheeses, like brie, as they aged, making them potentially more dangerous. Those cheeses have a higher moisture content and become less acidic as they age, conditions that can favor bacterial growth.

Dr. D’Amico said that aging could be effective as a safeguard in hard cheeses if it were combined with careful control of milk quality, improved sanitation and testing in cheese plants.
 

Blessed are the cheesemakers: feds arrest cheese that sickened 38

Posted on by
Reply

An outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 first became public in Nov. 2010, and would eventually sicken at least 38 people in several U.S. states. Investigators believe the source was Dutch Style Gouda Cheese produced by Bravo Farms of Traver, California from raw milk and sold primarily at Costco and Whole Foods Market stores.

The artisan cheese maker temporarily shut down.

Bravo was forced to quarantined stockpiles of cheese, and — no real surprise – of the 24 unpasteurized cheese samples investigators took, 15 tested positive for listeria and one tested positive for E. coli O157:H7.

According to the L.A. Times today, state and federal investigators found at least 50 live flies flitting around a processing area at Bravo. They also reported that a rabbit hopped out of a storage room, and a dairy worker scratched his chin then handled milled cheese with his bare hands.

On Thursday, U.S. marshals and Food and Drug Administration agents arrived at the cheesemaker and seized the Gouda, along with piles of Edam and blocks of white cheddar. All told, investigators have locked up more than 80,000 pounds of cheese. Prosecutors say it is all headed for the garbage disposal.

Worried that the cheese would somehow reach the public, and acting to shift the case from state to federal jurisdiction, the Justice Department used a civil legal mechanism to arrest a product — food — and essentially impound it.

Prosecutors filed a civil complaint in federal court in Sacramento last week that lists the cheese — not the farmers who made it — as defendants.

John Sheehan, director of the FDA’s dairy division, said the inspections came from concerns "about raw-milk cheese made under artisanal conditions" and a flurry of nine artisan cheese recalls last year. As of October, the FDA had inspected 102 facilities, some big, some small. Of the 147 samples taken, 32 tested positive for listeria. The inspections continue.

Bravo, which is cooperating with federal officials, has been cleared to make cheese again. It’s using pasteurized milk.

Bravo chesse now pasteurizing milk after making 38 barf

Posted on by
Reply

There is a disconnect between people who produce food, and those they sicken.

Three months after she sampled gouda cheese at a Costco and got sick, a Colorado teenager and her family have decided:

• no more ground beef;
• no more sharing friends’ lunch food at school; and,
• no more tasting cheese, salmon or any other morsels that food stores offer to entice customers.

Madisyn Kirby, 15, who lives in Castle Rock, said the illness that doubled her over in October "was the scariest, worst time of my life. I never want it to happen again."

Madisyn’s family has filed a lawsuit in Douglas County Court claiming Bravo Farms-brand Dutch Style Gouda Cheese she sampled at a Costco store near Park Meadows mall was contaminated by E. coli.’’

Federal and state health authorities linked Bravo Farms cheese to an E. coli outbreak last fall that caused 38 illnesses in Colorado and other Western states.

Yesterday, Bravo Farms co-owner Jonathan Van Ryn said the company’s back in business and last fall’s E. coli outbreak apparently resulted from "an isolated instance of one day’s production."

Madisyn probably doesn’t feel like an isolated case.

Alicia Cronquist, director of foodborne illness investigations at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said a state health team detected "way too many E. coli cases being reported in the Denver metro area. … One thing that stood out was that many had sampled cheese at a large warehouse store. Home visits and lab tests pin-pointed gouda and other cheese samples as the source.

Jon Van Ryn estimated shutdown and recall costs at around $1.5 million and that Bravo, which has specialized in making raw-milk cheeses, is now pasteurizing its milk.

Duh.
 

Portland food detectives crack E. coli mystery, finger Sally Jackson cheese

Posted on by
Reply

The three weeks I spent in France in 2007 with my French-professor wife were memorable on many accounts. Like anywhere else, when I met people and they found out I was involved in food safety, they would tell me their worst barf stories. What was unique was the patriotic-like duty many of the sufferers felt about not reporting any foodborne illness to health-types.

Dr. Mathieu Tourdjman, a French physician who’s currently working at Oregon Public Health in Portland, helped investigate the Sally Jackson cheese mess under the supervision of Bill Keene.

As reported by Lynne Terry of The Oregonian, food is recalled in France but that country does not have a wealth of epidemiologists to investigate outbreaks.

"We don’t have such a developed public health system," said Tourdjman, "and all those epidemiologists know each other and are perfectly happy to cooperate."

To help identify the woman who made raw milk cheese while covered in cow poop, Keene (below, right, photo from The Oregonian) and colleagues at Oregon Public Health offered a unique case study in epidemiology 101.

To this day, no one sickened remembers consuming Sally Jackson cheese. But epidemiologists managed to pinpoint it anyway.

"I can’t recall another outbreak with so many cases and a multi-state outbreak with none of the cases remembering eating the food," said William Keene, senior epidemiologist with Oregon Public Health.

About two weeks ago, Keene found out about two cases of E. coli O157 in Roseburg. Both were women in their early 60s. They didn’t know each other but their demographic similarity sent up red flags, indicating a possible wider outbreak.

Tourdjman quickly caught on. Under Keene’s guidance, he discovered another E. coli case in Vancouver. Turns out that that woman and one of the women in Roseburg had dined one day apart at Clarklewis Restaurant in Southeast Portland.

Not only that, they had both ordered the artisan cheese plate as a starter.

Clarklewis officials could not identify the cheese they ate. But the restaurant’s invoices provided a list of suspects. They included Sally Jackson cheese.

"That was the start, and it turned out to be critical," Keene said. "We assumed that whatever was causing the outbreak was at the restaurant."

Then another Washington connection popped up with a woman who had shopped at Calf & Kid, an artisan cheese store in Seattle.

The shop’s website mentioned Sally Jackson cheese — yet another coincidence.

Then, Keene and Tourdjman discovered that Jackson, an artisan cheesemaker in Oroville near the Canadian border, was threatened with a possible shutdown by Washington state over sanitation concerns.

With Sally Jackson on their radar, the Oregon epidemiologists discovered more cases, including a man in Vermont and one in Seattle.

The Vermont man had visited his uncle in Seattle and eaten at Palace Kitchen, a high-end restaurant that serves Sally Jackson cheese. And the man in Seattle had attended a wedding in Tonasket, Wash., just south of Oroville. The wedding featured local cheese — probably from Sally Jackson.

The scientists had circumstantial evidence. Now, they needed proof. Keene sought Sally Jackson cheese from Oregon restaurants to test for E. coli. Very few had any. Tina’s Restaurant in Dundee had thrown some away. The owner retrieved it by diving into her Dumpster.

In the end, at least two samples of Sally Jackson’s cheese tested positive for E. coli O157:H7, confirming it was the source of the outbreak that sickened eight and involved investigators from four states and the Food and Drug Administration.

Last Friday, less than two weeks after Tourdjman started the investigation, Jackson pulled all her cheese off the market.

Sally Jackson wraps up her cheesecloths after 8 sick with E. coli

Posted on by
2

Shed no crocodile tears for Sally Jackson and her E. coli O157:H7 contaminated cheese.

The infractions documented by U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors last week — after the recall and with inspectors knowingly present – would make anyone wonder why the fancy restaurants and retailers like Whole Foods would buy cheese made with crap. Sally Jackson and staff were seen to:

• Not wash and sanitize hands thoroughly in an adequate hand-washing facility after each absence from the work station and at any time their hands may have become soiled or contaminated. Specifically, the owner was observed throughout the day to altemately perform cheese making functions, such as stirring cheese curd with bare hands and wrapping cheese in grape leaves, with outside activities, such as milking/feeding livestock, without any hand washing being observed.

• Failure to provide handwashing facilities at each location in the plant where needed. Specifically, the approximately 10 inch diameter, shallow bowl handsink in the vestibule is too small for proper use, The sink drain pipe and water supply lines were disconnected.

• Failure to use water which is of adequate sanitary quality in food and on food-contact surfaces. Specifically, the well water supply for the facility is not currently in microbiological compliance. The most recent water analysis was unsatisfactory for total colifom as evidenced by a test report from 10/4/10 observed at the facility. The well has not been retested.

• Failure to clean non-food-contaet surfaces of equipment as frequently as necessary to protect against contamination. Specifically, the wood fixtures, walls and floors were generally soiled and stained with grime/dirt. The floors also showed an accumulation of manure, mud. straw.

• Suitable outer garments are not worn that protect against contamination of food, food contact surfaces, and food packaging materials. Specifically, the owner wore manure-soiled outer clothing during the production of cheese; handling utensils and direct handling of finished product. Owner was observed kneeling in fresh cow manure, while milking a cow outside, then brushed pants with a bare hand and was later observed standing over a bucket of drained curd in the cheese room with the soiled pants coming in to contact with the edge of the bucket.

This could be an exaggeration, but it sounds like Sally Jackson was making cheese while covered in cow shit. Guess it’s all-natural.

Nancy Leson of the Seattle Times reports that Jackson, the Oroville, Washington, cheesemaker whose name has been associated with some of Washington’s finest milk product for 30 years, will shut down her business, after the Food and Drug Administration confirmed that Jackson’s cheese, made from unpasteurized, raw milk, had sickened eight people in four states.

"My argument then was that I have never made anybody sick in 30 years," Jackson said. "That’s what breaks my heart now, that this is how it ended."

That’s a terrible argument, and one I hear routinely. E. coli O157:H7 has been known as a source of human illness for about 29 years, but only in the past 15 years have DNA fingerprinting techniques evolved so that outbreaks are more often linked to a specific food.

The results from the FDA inspection and the sick people also show the fallacies of such an argument.

But why hadn’t anyone noticed? Whole Foods sold – and is now recalling — Sally Jackson cheese from retail outlets in California, Nevada, Washington and Washington, D.C.

“The recalled cheese came from its supplier, Sally Jackson Cheese of Oroville, Wash and was cut and packaged in clear plastic wrap and sold with a Whole Foods Market scale label. Some labels also list Sally Jackson. The affected products are: cow, goat and sheep milk cheese; cow and sheep milk cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves; and goat milk cheese wrapped in grape leaves.”

Where were the Whole Foods safety auditors who approved Sally Jackson raw milk cheese on their shelves? Whole Foods sucks at food safety.