Local media outlets report that the Douglas County Health Department is investigating a Salmonella outbreak linked to the Omaha-based Elite Childcare Academy daycare facility.
Candess Zona of Outbreak News Today reports the daycare has closed its doors pending the investigation. The number of illnesses and exact source of the outbreak have not yet been released. The agency’s representative, Phil Rooney, commented that the reason for the lack of information is because children may still be within the incubation period for Salmonella.
In the meantime, the health agency is having the daycare’s staff, parents, and guardians of the 100 or so children that are part of the agency complete surveys to determine the root source.
There’s been some changes in technical stuff at barfblog.com, and I don’t really understand what’s going on, I just write for free to delay the inevitable decay of my brain.
If you want to follow us on facebook, you need to sign up to the barfblog group, because that’s where the postings show up.
I don’t know if subscribers are receiving posts in a timely manner in their e-mail — I’m not, but I’m just a writer — but you can let Chapman know because he’s in charge.
But I’m still barfblog and barfblog is still me, so here is Sorenne, who scored the winning touch to take the final in their inter-school division this afternoon (they call everything grand finals here, and they’re not grand, they’re finals; no one calls the NHL Stanley Cup the grand finals), and a couple of recent pieces of art.
As I said when I started the other newspaper at the University of Guelph in 1988, you don’t like it, start your own paper and stop complaining.
A woman from a U.S. magazine interviewed me this morning about the risks of raw sprouts.
I was sorta nervous because I’ve been out of the media game for a while, but she played to my weaknesses and complimented me by saying I was imminently quotable, so I obliged, even though yesterday I couldn’t remember my phone number (writing allows one to go check things, talking, not so much).
I lost track a couple of times during the interview but she was sympathetic and I would defer by saying, it’s all on the barfblog.com, when I couldn’t remember something.
I did however note that many food service thingies have started using pea sprouts as substitutes for raw alfalfa or mung bean sprouts.
Of course Heston I-didn’t-sicken-550-people-wth-Norovirus Blumenthal would be vain enough to sign up to have cheese made from his skin – his groin area.
I’m a big fan of fermentations but am also a big fan of using knowledge and experience to improve on basic biological phenomena.
Bettina Makalintal of Vice writes that people have been fermenting for at least 9,200 years, and yet, not everyone’s convinced. The process requires bacteria, which can result in funky sights and smells, squicking some people out. Still, it’s safe to say that fermentation advocates have done a good job of turning people on to the magic of microbes: dry-aged beef is on high-end restaurant menus, and more and more people reap the illness flavor rewards of raw-milk cheese.
A new exhibit at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum called “Food: Bigger than the Plate” shows off not only a toilet made of cow manure and an edible water bottle, but also “human cheese.” The latter is made using human bacteria. And not just any human bacteria, but celebrity bacteria
Most cheese is made using starter cultures, bacteria that curdle the milk, and often, those starters come from a packet. For the V&A’s five “human cheeses,” however, that bacteria came from celebrities, who had their skin swabbed in the name of science and truly funky cheese: from baker and food writer Ruby Tandoh to chef Heston Blumenthal to Blur’s Alex James, a cheesemaker himself. (British rapper Professor Green and Suggs of the ska band Madness also contributed.) It’s “like a celebrity selfie in cheese form,” reads V&A’s blog.
The point, the museum says, is to challenge people’s “squeamishness” and to enhance “our appreciation of the microbial world.”
I’ve never been a fan of any particular day, especially birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas and Easter, but I am a fan of changing seasons and the solstices.
Every day, every meal, is food safety for me.
I can be annoying to live with.
According to the World Health Organization, every year, nearly one in ten people in the world (an estimated 600 million people; it used to be 1-in-4, then it was 1-in-6, now I guess it’s 1-in-10) fall ill and 420,000 die after eating food contaminated by bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemical substances. Unsafe food also hinders development in many low- and middle-income economies, which lose around US$ 95 billion in productivity associated with illness, disability, and premature death suffered by workers.
World Food Safety Day 2019’s theme is that food safety is everyone’s business.
Yeah, but my kitchen isn’t a business, it’s a family.
Food safety contributes to food security, human health, economic prosperity, agriculture, market access, tourism and sustainable development.
It’s also supposed to be a place of social sharing, empathy and enjoyment.
Not barfing.
The UN has designated two of its agencies, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to lead efforts in promoting food safety around the world.
FAO and WHO are joining forces to assist countries to prevent, manage and respond to risks along the food supply chain, working with food producers and vendors, regulatory authorities and civil society stakeholders, whether the food is domestically produced or imported.
“Whether you are a farmer, farm supplier, food processor, transporter, marketer or consumer, food safety is your business,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said. “There is no food security without food safety,” he said.
“Unsafe food kills an estimated 420,000 people every year. These deaths are entirely preventable,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “World Food Safety Day is a unique opportunity to raise awareness about the dangers of unsafe food with governments, producers, handlers and consumers. From farm to plate, we all have a role to play in making food safe.”
My cousin of Barrie’s Asparagus is in the midst of the annual crop in southern Ontario, and I know they have good food safety because my students have checked them out in years past and, I’m his cousin.
Unfortunately not all growers are as diligent and any commodity can get branded as shit.
Specifically, Shigella shit.
Findings presented at the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS, conference last month found that contaminated asparagus was the likely source of an outbreak of shigellosis at a wedding party in Oregon that sickened 112 people.
The outbreak was caused by Shigella flexneri type 3a, which accounts for less than 3% of S.flexneri isolates in the United States, researchers said.
“This was one of the largest foodborne outbreaks of shigellosis in U.S. history,” Steven I. Rekant, DVM, MPH, an EIS officer with the Oregon Public Health Authority, said in a presentation. “It was the second largest ever attributed to Shigella flexneri and that type of Shigella flexneri, type 3a, is uncommon in Oregon.”
According to Rekant and colleagues, the Oregon Health Authority received reports of gastroenteritis among attendees at a wedding in August 2018 and identified S. flexneri type 3a in stool samples.
A total of 263 people attended the wedding, and 75% responded to the survey. The patients were aged 2 to 93 years, and 55% were female.
“Simply put, this was big outbreak — 112 cases were reported, with an overall attack rate of 55.7%,” Rekant said.
Of 95 patients with onset information, 97% reported illness 12 to 72 hours following the wedding. Additionally, 57 patients presented to a health care facility and 10 were hospitalized, including a 92-year-old woman. No deaths or additional cases were reported.
The investigators found that only asparagus consumption was associated with illness.
They pointed to poor hygiene on the part of the food-handler as the “likely cause of contamination.”
Rekant SI, et al. Shigellosis at a Wedding — Oregon, 2018. Presented at: Epidemic Intelligence Service conference; April 29-May 2, 2019; Atlanta.
On May 1, 2019, a couple in Mongolia died from bubonic plague after eating raw marmot meat, sparking a quarantine that trapped tourists for days.
Ariuntuya Ochirpurev, a World Health Organization official, told the BBC.
Ochirpurev told BBC that the couple ate the rodent’s raw meat and kidney, which is believed to be good for health in the area.
“After the quarantine (was announced) not many people, even locals, were in the streets for fear of catching the disease,” Sebastian Pique, an American Peace Corps volunteer in the area, told AFP.
All those infected had drunk from the same container of self-pressed apple juice. Incubation period (1 week) and clinical signs were similar among those infected, although some experienced a more prolonged duration of symptoms (up to 2–3 weeks) than others.
The infections resulted after consumption from only one of 40 containers of juice and not from any of the other containers. It seems that although Cryptosporidium oocysts were detected in a sample from another container, the contamination did not affect the whole batch. This is perhaps indicative of a restricted contamination event, either from contaminated ground in the orchard, or during collection of the fruit, or during processing.
Although outbreaks of foodborne cryptosporidiosis have previously been associated with consumption of contaminated apple juice, most of the more recent outbreaks of foodborne cryptosporidiosis have been associated with salad vegetables or herbs. This outbreak, the first outside U.S. reported to be associated with apple juice, is a timely reminder that such juice is a suitable transmission vehicle for Cryptosporidium oocysts, and that appropriate hygienic measures are essential in the production of such juice, including artisanal (non-commercial) production.
Robertson, L. J., Temesgen, T. T., Tysnes, K. R., & Eikås, J. E. (2019). An apple a day: An outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Norway associated with self-pressed apple juice. Epidemiology and Infection, 147. doi:10.1017/s0950268819000232
Wisconsin allows people to register their car-killed deer, bear or turkey online or by phone. Once confirmed, the animal can be removed and used as food without even waiting for a police-issued tag.
But Wisconsin isn’t the only state friendly to roadkill cuisine.
According to The Guardian, over 600 moose are killed in Alaska each year, leaving meat on the road that tallies to thousands of pounds. Rather than wasting it, the state gives the roadkill to charities willing to process and use the animals at their own risk.
Other states that allow roadkill pickups are Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Tennessee. According to the NY Daily News, California is also trying to legalize this practice, which may be further spurred on by the cost of disposing of car-killed animals.
One study by the UCDavis Road Ecology Center counted about 6,600 roadkill instances in California during its study period. These accidents led to an estimated $307 million in expenses for the state, and estimates go as high as $600 million when factoring in accidents unreported to police.
By these numbers, the stakes appear high for officials deciding what to do with road-killed animals. Allowing drivers and bystanders to take the roadkill home seems an easy solution. In fact, the practice has many supporters high up in the ranks.
The PETA website states, “If people must eat animal carcasses, roadkill is a superior option to the neatly shrink-wrapped plastic packages of meat in the supermarket.
“Eating roadkill is healthier for the consumer than meat laden with antibiotics, hormones, and growth stimulants, as most meat is today.”
Gawd.
But there are those nasty bacteria to consider, so roadkill, like any raw product, should be handled with care.
Gabrielle Jones, Sophie Lefevre, et al report in Eurosurveillance that from 25 March to 27 April 2019, 19 suspected Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) associated paediatric haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) cases were notified by French hospital paediatric departments to Santé publique France, compared with 5–10 cases during the same period in previous years [1].
Thirteen cases were confirmed as serogroup O26, with whole genome sequencing (WGS) underway for strain comparison. Initial epidemiological investigations using a trawling questionnaire identified the consumption of raw cow’s milk soft cheeses (Saint-Félicien and Saint-Marcellin) as the common link for eight of these 13 cases. Trace-back investigations using supermarket loyalty cards identified a common producer (producer A) of these cheeses for three cases and on the basis of this information a recall was initiated by French health authorities on 27 April 2019 [2]. As at 27 May 2019, investigations identified 16 outbreak cases including 14 paediatric HUS cases and two cases with uncomplicated diarrhoea (one child and one adult). Investigations are ongoing for one suspected case. The 16 outbreak cases reside in six administrative regions in France. All paediatric cases are under 5 years of age; the median age is 22 months (overall age range: 6 months–63 years). Eight cases are female. Date of symptom onset was between 31 March (week 13) and 29 April (week 18). All HUS cases were hospitalised. Thirteen cases received blood and/or platelet transfusion and seven underwent haemodialysis. Six cases had neurological complications, all of them received transfusions and three also had haemodialysis.
The families of all 16 outbreak cases and the suspected case were interviewed about their at-risk exposures during the 10 days before symptom onset. Families of 16 cases (15 outbreak cases and one suspected case) reported the consumption of Saint-Félicien or Saint-Marcellin raw cow’s milk cheeses by either the case (n = 12) or household members (n = 4). One outbreak case did not report consumption of these cheeses. For the 16 cases with reported consumption of these cheeses, trace-back investigations using loyalty cards and supply data from the different shops where the caretakers reported purchasing the cheeses identified a link with producer A for 13 (all outbreak cases).
Producer A manufactured only Saint-Félicien and Saint-Marcellin cheeses. To date, no positive STEC O26 cheese or milk samples have been identified. Investigations, including sampling of the cheeses and trace-back of the milk supply chains, are ongoing.
Four outbreak cases had not consumed the cheeses themselves but a household member had. This suggests the affected child may have been infected via cross contamination (knives, cutting board, hands, etc.). None of the household members reported symptoms of illness, indicating that the cases were unlikely to have been infected by person-to-person transmission. Investigations are ongoing in an attempt to further document the exposures of these cases (consumption of cheeses or other food items cut by the knives or on the same cutting board as the suspected cheeses). Only one in 16 outbreak cases reported a family member with self-limiting diarrhoea (no stool analysis).
Note: If that many people developed HUS, hundreds could have potentially been sickened.
Candess Zona of Outbreak News Today reports the daycare has closed its doors pending the investigation. The number of illnesses and exact source of the outbreak have not yet been released. The agency’s representative, Phil Rooney, commented that the reason for the lack of information is because children may still be within the incubation period for Salmonella.
