3 dead, one miscarriage, Listeria, ready-to-eat products, EU, 2017-2019

Posted on January 27, 2020 by Douglas Powell

The European Centers for Disease Control reports patients had onset of illness between 2017 and August 2019. Three patients have died and one suffered a miscarriage due to the infection. The close genetic relatedness of the strains (≤3 allelic differences), and the temporal distribution of the cases suggest a prolonged, intermittent, common source foodborne outbreak which occurred in at least two EU Member States.

Nine isolates from six sliced ready-to-eat (RTE) meat products, produced between 2017 and 2019 by the Dutch Manufacturing Company A, were found to be contaminated with L. monocytogenes strains matching the outbreak strain (≤3 allelic differences). Although the exact points of contamination have not been identified yet, the results of the investigation suggest that the contamination may have happened at the Dutch Manufacturing Company A, which represents the only common manufacturing point of the contaminated products. The Dutch Manufacturing Company A distributed products to several EU countries as well as to countries outside the EU.

Following the detection in food of L. monocytogenes isolates matching the outbreak strain, and the discovery of the environmental contamination with other L. monocytogenes strains, the Dutch Manufacturing Company A stopped the production in October 2019, and finalised the withdrawals and recalls of all RTE meat products. This measure decreases the risk of new cases occurring possibly associated with products from this company.

Pregnant women, the elderly and immunocompromised people are at higher risk of invasive listeriosis, which is associated with severe clinical course and potential death. Therefore, specific attention should be paid to the administration of RTE meat products to people in hospitals, nursing homes and those belonging to vulnerable population groups.

Money talks: Safety interventions in Dutch vegetable production

Posted on June 3, 2018 by Douglas Powell

Surveys still suck, but the results of this one generally correlate to what we have found doing 20 years of on-farm food safety with fresh produce growers.

Outbreaks and crisis drive grower food safety concerns, prevention is a hard sell, but we’ve shown it can be done.

Understanding growers’ preferences regarding interventions to improve the microbiological safety of their produce could help to design more effective strategies for the adoption of such food safety measures by growers.

The objective of this survey study was to obtain insights for the design of interventions that could stimulate growers to increase the frequency of irrigation water sampling and water testing to reduce possible microbiological contamination of their fresh produce.

The results showed that price intervention, referring to making the intervention less costly by reducing the price via discounts, is the most effective strategy to change growers’ intentions to increase their frequency of irrigation water testing. Moreover, a sense of urgency affects their intentions to increase the frequency of irrigation water testing.

The findings of this survey support the hypothesis that, to date, safety is not perceived as a quality control issue under normal circumstances, but safety becomes an overriding attribute in a food crisis.

Understanding preferences for interventions to reduce microbiological contamination in Dutch vegetable production

June 2018, Journal of Food Protection vol. 81 no. 6

A. P. M. VAN ASSELDONK,¹ *L. MALAGUTI,²M. L. H. BREUKERS,¹ and H. J. van der FELS-KLERX^2,³

https://doi.org/10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-17-106

http://jfoodprotection.org/doi/abs/10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-17-106

Dutch food inspectors to get tough on water in meat product labeling

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Douglas Powell

AArrgghh, the Dutch.

The Dutch food safety board has given the meat industry until July 10 to come clean about how much water it adds to packs of meat and fish sold in supermarkets, the Volkskrant reported on Friday.

European meat firms have been required by law to include ‘water’ on the ingredients list since December 2014 and add the percentage of water in the total weight of the product. But checks by the Volkskrant newspaper found a number of products on sale in Dutch supermarkets do not meet the rules.

For example, a pack of pangasius fish fillets sold by Jumbo are labeled as 78% fish, but do not say how much of their weight is water. The NVWA told the Volkskrant it had found faulty labels in the past but declined to say how many. The body now says it will get tough on food processors who do not comply with the rules in the second half of this year.

Illegal Chinese meat imports in Holland

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Douglas Powell

Police and food safety inspectors have raided two business premises and two private homes in Zuid-Holland province in an investigation into illegal meat imports from China.

There has been an EU-wide ban on importing most types of meat from China for human consumption since 2002 because of concerns about drug residues. Officials seized ‘hundreds of boxes’ of meat and meat products during their search, as well as documents and files. The meat is now being tested, the inspectors said in a statement on Wednesday. The investigators are also trying to establish how the meat was brought into the country and what has happened to previous shipments.

Dutch food safety inspectors enforce meat and water regulations

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Douglas Powell

A professor once told this nubile food science graduate student that it was all about adding water and salt to protein and charging more.

He was right.

The Dutch food safety authority NNWA has made ‘several enforcement visits’ to Dutch factories where meat is tumbled with water to increase its weight in recent months, the Guardian newspaper reported on Saturday.

The aim of the visits was to stop the practice of adding water to imported chicken destined for resale as raw meat, the paper said. The NVWA told the paper chicken produced in this way is illegal.

It was the hemp seed flour from the Dutch; dietary supplement sickens 15 with Salmonella Montevideo in Germany, 2010

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Douglas Powell

"There are only two things I can’t stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch."

Michael Caine in Austin Powers, Goldmember

The freaky dekey Dutch got some salmonella in their groovy hemp seed flour and it made a bunch of Germans sick.

In March 2010 the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) was used to inform about Salmonella Montevideo in a herbal food supplement, formulated in capsules, distributed under a Dutch label in Germany.

Simultaneous to the first RASFF notice, in the last two weeks of March 2010 an unusual number of 15 infections with S. Montevideo was notified within the electronic reporting system for infectious diseases at the Robert Koch Institute. Adult women (median age: 43, range: 1–90 years) were mainly affected.

An outbreak was suspected and the food supplement hypothesised to be its vehicle. Cases were notified from six federal states throughout Germany, which required efficient coordination of information and activities. A case–control study (n=55) among adult women showed an association between consumption of the specific food supplement and the disease (odds ratio (OR): 27.5, 95% confidence interval (CI): 3.1–infinity, p-value=0.002). Restricting the case–control study to the period when the outbreak peaked (between 29 March and 11 April 2010) resulted in an OR of 43.5 (95% CI: 4.8–infinity, p-value=0.001).

Trace-back of the supplement’s main ingredient, hemp seed flour, and subsequent microbiological testing by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis supported its likely role in transmission. This outbreak investigation illustrates that information from RASFF may aid in hypothesis generation in outbreak investigations, though likely late in the outbreak.

The authors note in the discussion that, “while investigations of the food safety authorities were thorough, without delay, and strictly following regulations, it is worth noting that the process from the beginning of the analysis of the first positive sample from an opened package to the recall took more than five weeks. In potential outbreak situations, strength of evidence for a suspected food product ought to be weighed against the potential harm to the consumers posed by the suspected food.

"Interestingly, in the end there was no international aspect to this outbreak (as the Dutch label on the product did not correspond to sales in the Netherlands). … In Germany, unfortunately, currently there is no general requirement to communicate non-international food contamination events to the public health authorities."

E. coli on Dutch sprouts is new; 39 dead in German E. coli O104 sprout outbreak

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Douglas Powell

Researchers say a strain of E. coli found last week on Dutch beet sprouts has not been seen before in the country and they have sent samples for further analysis at labs in Italy and Denmark.

The Dutch Food Safety Authority says nobody appears to have been sickened by the strain.

Friday’s announcement came a day after Germany’s disease control center said the death toll in Europe’s outbreak of a separate strain of E. coli had risen to 39 after one more patient died.

The killer strain has been traced to sprouts from an organic farm in a northern German village.

How to make insects more upscale

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Douglas Powell

Johan Van Dongen sells insects.

A bright, engaging man, Mr. Van Dongen is head of the meat department at Sligro, a kind of Costco on the edge of this trim Dutch town. Besides steaks, poultry and others kinds of meat, he offers mealworms, buffalo worms, locusts and other insects, as well as prepared products containing insects like Bugs Sticks and Bugs Nuggets — not for pets, but as a source of protein for people.

The New York Times reports that on a recent afternoon he arranged two sample stands, one with chunks of chocolate laced with ground mealworms (larvae for a type of beetle), another with various kinds of whole insects for munching, including worms and crickets, in small plastic containers.

The efforts of Mr. Van Dongen and Sligro, a chain of 25 membership-only warehouse stores throughout the Netherlands, are part of a drive to convince the Dutch that crickets, worms and caterpillars are healthier sources of protein, and are less taxing on the environment, than steaks and pork chops.

Dutch breeders of insects, who until now have supplied the market for pet food — insects for geckos and other lizards, salamanders, newts, frogs, birds or fish — have jumped at an opportunity to open a new market and have founded a trade organization to promote the idea. The government is backing them, and last year it appropriated $1.4 million for research into insects as food, to prepare legislation governing insect farms, health and safety standards, and marketing through retail outlets.

“The risky part is: How can we move this product upscale?” said Marian Peters, a public relations expert who is the organization’s general secretary, munching on Mr. Van Dongen’s insect-laced chocolate.

The risky part is, don’t make people barf.

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