Tag Archives: Doug Powell

Backyard bacteria and consumers: use a thermometer

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I’m really proud of the folks who contribute to barfblog and bites.ksu.edu.

This morning, I wrote all the contributors from yesterday and said, I’m really proud, or good job, or something like that. The mixture of food safety content and personal experience on barfblog.com was excellent yesterday.

Debora MacKenzie at New Scientist magazine seems to have noticed as well, and writes in a blog piece this evening,

Doug Powell food safety expert at Kansas State University and editor of the excellent barfblog says that the only way to ensure the safety of ground burgers is to use a tip-sensitive digital thermometer to make sure the whole patty has reached the 71 ??C (160 ??F) needed to kill E. coli.

Like I said, I’m proud to have a lot of smart folks around me.
 

Waste not, want not: food safety, discarding food, and tough times

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Whenever I think of leftover pizza, I recall my teenage years listening to Rolling Stones on vinyl at George’s apartment, I wonder whatever happened to that stray puppy one of the visitors brought home until the fleas were discovered, and I wonder how long the pizza would be good. I’ve probably eaten pieces of pizza that spent the night on the turntable.

So when Susan Reef, president of US Food Safety Corp., says eating pizza that has spent a few hours at room temperature is a no-no, I sorta scoff (low water activity, no epidemiological history of outbreaks from morning-after pizza consumption, she probably doesn’t like the Stones).

Kim Painter reports in USA Today tomorrow that if Maribel Alonso, a food safety specialist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Meat and Poultry Hotline, brings home a broken egg, she discards it.

Doug Powell, a food safety person at Kansas State University, says he would cook with the egg, probably into a batch of pancakes, adding,

"It’s just messy, but if it’s been kept cold, it should be OK.”

(Messy means, be careful of cross-contamination).
 

Doug dreams about flaming turtles

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I’ve taken to going to sleep about 10 p.m. and getting up about 4 a.m. That means Amy stays up later, feeds Sorenne a couple of more times, and apparently gets to listen to me babble in my sleep.

This is nothing new. I’ve given entire lectures in my sleep – and I’m just talking about with Amy, not classrooms.

I’ve written about the trauma of only having turtles as pets while growing up. And the recent story in the Baltimore Sun and the terrible response about how those tiny turtles are OK as long as little kids don’t put the entire turtle in their mouths apparently triggered some sort of response.

"I’m supposed to kill 6 of those f***ing flaming turtles"

Amy says she laughed, Doug started laughing, then said, "See, I’m wasting my resources when I’m not doing what I’m supposed to."

Amy, who likes to ask questions when I talk in my sleep, says,

"What are you supposed to be doing?"

"Keeping those f***ing new zealanders in line."

This probably had to do with the e-mails I was sending to New Zealanders Katie and Gary before I went to sleep. Or not.
 

FSnet funding, format and future

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I’m a writer.

And writers write.

I may be a scientist, and my group has produced some decent stuf, but really, I’m just a writer.

And writers write.

Some people shouldn’t write, like Bono of the ridiculously overrated band, U2. Bono is a terrible writer. It’s on display in last Sunday’s N.Y. Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11bono.html?ref=opinion

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.

But times have changed. You’ve probably all missed my annual PBS-like funding plea. I’m grateful for the donations, but I can sense the funding model needs to change. Last year, Seattle lawyer Bill Marler stepped up – and I’m quite grateful — and covered the funding shortfall, but I don’t expect that to happen every year.

So, this is what I’m planning to do.

Over the next few weeks, a new web site, bites.ksu.edu will consolidate the existing food safety information resources of the International Food Safety Network – news listservs, blogs, infosheets, videos and others – and we’ll strive to become the pre-eminent daily international electronic food safety publication or portal with text, audio, video, blogs, and RSS feeds. And we’re going to sell advertizing. The bites.ksu.edu not-for-profit environment will additionally:

• provide research, educational and journalistic opportunities for secondary, undergraduate and graduate students in the multi-media electronic environment of bites.ksu.edu;

• develop, implement and evaluate a variety of food safety messages using various mediums to impact the safe-food behavior of individuals from farm-to-fork;

• provide an infrastructure to produce a series of multilingual public service announcements to further stimulate public interest in food safety and security and to raise awareness about specific emerging issues, especially during a crisis;

• host a dynamic and cross-cultural team of secondary, undergraduate and graduate students to create multilingual and multicultural food safety and security information, including weekly food safety info/tip sheets, podcasts and flash-based Internet animations and videos through bites.ksu.edu;

• provide training through a graduate emphasis in food safety, language, culture and policy (with distance education option); and,

• create employment and training opportunities for secondary, undergraduate and graduate students in conjunction with an international internship program to place students with regulatory authorities and industries who promote a food safety culture.

Should I keep the International Food Safety Network name? It’s a bit ponderous and creates confusion with the posers at the University of Guelph. bites is easier to deal with. What else should I keep or eliminate? I’m going to collapse the four listserves – FSnet, Agnet, AnimalNet and FunctinalFood Net into one daily e-publication. For those who want instant news, it will be provided through RSS feeds in the following categories. For those who can wait, a daily e-publication will be distributed, in html and text format.

The draft categories available for RSS feeds are:

E. coli
Salmonella
Listeria
Norovirus
Hepatitis A
other food safety microorganisms
restaurant inspection
handwashing
thermometers
raw – milk, juice, food
infosheets
Yuck
Food safety communication
Food safety policy
Food allergies
animal disease
plant disease
genetic engineering
functional food
pesticides
new science

I’m open to suggestions. If you feel I’m too much of an asshole to deal with, e-mail Ben at his new North Carolina State gig, benjamin_chapman@ncsu.edu, or Amy at ahubbell@ksu.edu.

For me, it’s more writing.

Cause writers write.
 

barfblog.com featured in Jan. Food Technology magazine

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Amy is a merciless editor.

Sure, she looks all sugar and spice, cuddling with baby Sorenne (right, exactly as shown), but when it comes to words, Amy’s vicious.

I know Ben cries – silently, inside — whenever he gets edits from Amy.

I tried to get Kansas State public relations to do a press release about the husband and wife barfbloggers, but they weren’t going for it.

Instead, they came out with this after we wrote a paper about our blogging experiences that was just published in the Jan. 2009 issue of Food Technology, the monthly magazine of the Institute of Food Technologists (the full paper is below).

K-State’s Doug Powell, associate professor of diagnostic medicine and
pathobiology, is a co-author of the article "New Media for Communicating Food Safety.” In the article, Powell and the other researchers describe how methods of informing consumers must evolve to fit a new generation of food handlers.

"It is especially important to reach younger individuals, who at some point might handle food in a food service business and who get their information from nontraditional media like blogs," he said.

One such blog is Powell’s barfblog.com, a site that receives more than 5,000 visitors daily. The site operates with the understanding that to compel audiences to change their food-handling behaviors, the messages should be rapid, reliable, relevant and repeated, Powell said. The blog is available at https://www.barfblog.com

The content combines pop culture references and current events with food-handling information to engage readers. The posts also combine food safety messages with personal experiences, which connect readers to the effects of foodborne illness on families and communities, he said.

"Up to 30 percent of all Americans will get sick from the food and water they consume each year. That’s just way too many sick people," Powell said. "The site is all about providing information in a compelling manner, using pop culture and different languages, to ultimately have fewer sick people."

The other authors of the article include: Amy Hubbell, K-State assistant professor of modern languages; Casey Jacob, K-State research assistant in diagnostic medicine and pathobiology; and Benjamin Chapman, food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University.

barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/uploads/file/powell_newmedia.pdf

Handwashing help wanted – the Pedro version

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Amy read the help wanted advert and apparently thought it was boring.

She wants a Napolean Dynamite theme.

So, work with me on handwashing, and all your wildest dreams will come true.

Reach for the Stars with Pedro.

Dude, wash your hands – researchers required

http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/2008/12/articles/handwashing/dude-wash-your-hands-researchers-required/index.html

Handwashing compliance has been identified as a significant factor in reducing foodborne, hospital-acquired and other infectious disease. People say they wash their hands, but often don’t. Our goal is to develop evidence-based, culturally-sensitive messages using a variety of media to compel individuals to practice good handwashing in numerous settings, and to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches.

That’s a bunch of projects – and we’re looking for a bunch of people with diverse skills. Whatever your background, from microbiology to psychology, as long as you have excellent communication skills and can work both independently and collaboratively, we’re interested in chatting with you. Undergraduate or graduate students, if you’re interested – passionate – about compelling individuals to wash their hands and enhance public health, please contact Dr. Kate Stenske at kstenske@vet.ksu.edu, or Dr. Doug Powell at dpowell@ksu.edu.

Don’t eat poop – wash your hands.
 

Dude, wash your hands – researchers required

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Handwashing compliance has been identified as a significant factor in reducing foodborne, hospital-acquired and other infectious disease. People say they wash their hands, but often don’t. Our goal is to develop evidence-based, culturally-sensitive messages using a variety of media to compel individuals to practice good handwashing in numerous settings, and to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches.

That’s a bunch of projects – and we’re looking for a bunch of people with diverse skills. Whatever your background, from microbiology to psychology, as long as you have excellent communication skills and can work both independently and collaboratively, we’re interested in chatting with you. Undergraduate or graduate students, if you’re interested – passionate – about compelling individuals to wash their hands and enhance public health, please contact Dr. Kate Stenske at kstenske@vet.ksu.edu, or Dr. Doug Powell at dpowell@ksu.edu.

Don’t eat poop – wash your hands.
 

You burnt the bird? A number of reasons to be thankful!

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Michéle Samarya-Timm, a Health Educator for the Franklin Township Health Department in New Jersey, writes,  Thanksgiving, and its hours of food prep, certainly creates a reason to appreciate sound food safety advice.  After all, 3 hours seated at the dinner table should never be followed by 3 days seated on a porcelain throne. 

Over the past few days, I’ve seen lots of advice to ensure a perfectly cooked (and foodsafe) thanksgiving turkey, but what if you’ve applied the cooking process a little too thoroughly?   

Amending a list I found several years ago, here’s an updated version of Reasons to Be Thankful for Burning the Bird:

1.    The useless pop-up timer was rendered useless.
2.    Your tip sensitive digital thermometer will read at least 165F.
3.    Salmonella won’t be a concern.
4.    Another valid reason for cooking stuffing outside the bird.
5.    No one will overeat.
6.    Post dinner sleepiness won’t be due to the tryptophan in turkey.
7.    Uninvited guests will think twice next year.
8.    Pets won’t pester you for scraps.
9.    The smoke alarm was due for a test.
10.    Ash residue is a great motivation for handwashing.
11.    Carving the bird will provide a good cardiovascular workout.
12.    After dinner, the guys can take the bird to the yard and play football.
13.    The less turkey Uncle George eats, the less likely he will be to walk around with his pants unbuttoned.
14.    You’ll get to the desserts quicker.
15.    No arguments about throwing out turkey leftovers.
16.    Next year you’ll pay closer attention to Doug Powell’s Canadian Thanksgiving food prep video.

Enjoy your holidays.  And wash your hands!