Tag Archives: Going Public

Germany’s E. coli nightmare: Too often, politics trumps safety

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The Aug/Sept. issue of Food Quality magazine contains a package of articles about lessons learned from this year’s E. coli O104 outbreak in Germany linked to raw sprouts grown from seeds produced in Egypt.

My own contribution was an attempt, at the editor’s request, to capture the uncertainty and vagaries that characterize outbreaks of food- or waterborne illness.

My friend Jim called on a Friday afternoon. Jim is a dairy farmer located on the edge of a town in Ontario, Canada, called Walkerton, and he said a lot of people were getting sick. The community knew there was a problem several days before health types went public.

On Sunday, May 21, 2000, at 1:30 p.m., the Grey Bruce Health Unit in Owen Sound, Ontario posted a notice on its website to hospitals and physicians to make them aware of a boil water advisory and inform them that a suspected agent in the increase of diarrheal cases was E. coli O157:H7.

There had been a marked increase in illness in the town of about 5,000 people, and many were already saying the water was suspect. But because the first public announcement was also the Sunday of the Victoria Day long weekend, it received scant media coverage.

It wasn’t until Monday evening that local television and radio began reporting illnesses, stating that at least 300 people in Walkerton were ill.

At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, May 23, the Walkerton hospital held a media conference jointly with the health unit to inform the public of the outbreak, to make people aware of the potential complications of the E. coli O157:H7 infection, and to warn them to take the necessary precautions. This generated a print report in the local paper the next day, which was picked up by the national wire service Tuesday evening, and subsequently appeared in papers across Canada on May 24.

These public outreach efforts were neither speedy nor sufficient. Ultimately, 2,300 people were sickened and seven died—in a town of 5,000. All the gory details and mistakes and steps for improvement were outlined in the report of the Walkerton inquiry
(www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/walkerton).

The E. coli O157:H7 was thought to have originated on a farm owned by a veterinarian and his family at the edge of town, someone my friend Jim knew well, a cow-calf operation that was the poster farm for Environmental Farm Plans. Heavy rains washed cattle manure into a long abandoned well-head, which was apparently still connected to the municipal system. The brothers in charge of the municipal water system for Walkerton, who were found to have been adding chlorine based on smell rather than something minimally scientific like test strips, were criminally convicted.

But the government-mandated reports don’t capture the day-to-day drama and stress that people like my friend experienced. Jim and his family knew many of the sick and dead. This was a small community. News organizations from around the province descended on Walkerton for weeks. They had their own helicopters, but the worst was the medical helicopters flying patients with hemolytic uremic syndrome to the hospital in London. Every time Jim saw one of those, he wondered if it was someone he knew.

I’m not an epidemiologist, but as a scientist and journalist with 20 years of contacts, I usually find out when something is going on in the world of foodborne outbreaks.

The uncertainties in any outbreak are enormous, and the pressures to get it right when going public are tremendous.

The public health folks in Walkerton may have been slow by a couple of days while piecing together the puzzle; what happened in Germany this summer in the sprout-related outbreak of E. coli O104, a relative of O157, was a travesty.
Worse, bureaucrats seemed more concerned about the fate of farmers than that of citizens. By at least one count, 53 have died, and more than 4,200 have been sickened.

Raw sprouts are one of the few foods I won’t eat, and as many epidemiologists have pointed out, sprouts top the list of any investigation involving foodborne illness.

We at bites count at least 55 outbreaks related to raw sprouts beginning in the U.K. in 1988, sickening thousands.

The first consumer warning about sprouts was issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1997. By July 9, 1999, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had advised all Americans to be aware of the risks associated with eating raw sprouts. Consumers were informed that the best way to control the risk was to not eat raw sprouts. The FDA stated that it would monitor the situation and take any further actions required to protect consumers.

At the time, several Canadian media accounts depicted the U.S. response as panic, quoting Health Canada officials as saying that, while perhaps some were at risk, sprouts were generally a low-risk product.

That attitude changed in late 2005, as I was flying back to reunite with a girl I had met in Kansas and 750 people in Ontario became sick from eating raw bean sprouts.

Unfortunately, what food safety types think passes for common knowledge—don’t eat raw sprouts—barely registers as public knowledge. It’s hard to compete against food porn.

Sprouts present a special food safety challenge because the way they are grown, with high moisture at high temperature, also happens to be an ideal environment for bacterial growth.

Because of continued outbreaks, the sprout industry, regulatory agencies, and the academic community in the U.S. pooled their efforts in the late 1990s to improve the safety of the product, implementing good manufacturing practices, establishing guidelines for safe sprout production, and beginning chemical disinfection of seeds prior to sprouting.

But are such guidelines being followed? And is anyone checking?

Doubtful.

This was demonstrated by two sprout-related outbreaks earlier this year linked to sandwiches served by Jimmy John’s, a chain of gourmet sandwich shops based in Champaign, Ill.

Sprouts served on Jimmy John’s sandwiches supplied by a farm called Tiny Greens sickened 140 people with Salmonella, primarily in Indiana. In January, Jimmy John’s owner Jimmy John Liautaud said his restaurants would replace alfalfa sprouts, effective immediately, with allegedly easier-to-clean clover sprouts. This was one week after a separate outbreak of Salmonella sickened eight people in the U.S. Northwest who had eaten at a Jimmy John’s that used clover sprouts.

If the head of a national franchise is that clueless about food safety, can we really expect more from others?

Sprout grower Bill Bagby, who owns Tiny Greens Sprout Farm, said in the context of the German outbreak that, for many like him, the nutritional benefits outweigh the risk:

“Sprouts are kind of a magical thing. That’s why I would advise people to only buy sprouts from someone who has a (food safety) program in place (that includes outside auditors). We did not have (independent auditors) for about one year, and that was the time the problems happened. The FDA determined that unsanitary conditions could have been a potential source of cross-contamination and so we have made a lot of changes since then.”

Independent auditors? Like the ones who said everything was cool, everything was OK, at Peanut Corporation of America (nine dead, 700 sick in 2008-09) and Wright County Egg (2,000 sick in 2010)?

Like the Walkerton E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in 2000, too many are using the filters of their politics to advance their own causes and saying too many dumb things in light of the sprout outbreak of 2011.

It’s really about biology and paying attention to food safety basics—no matter how much that interferes with personal politics.

Government knew about salmonella at Cargill; should have warned public earlier

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Federal officials said in recent days that they turned up a dangerous form of salmonella at a Cargill Inc. turkey plant last year, and then four times this year at stores selling the Cargill turkey, but didn’t move for a recall until an outbreak killed one person and sickened 77 others.

Bill Tomson of The Wall Street Journal reports Cargill and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the recall of ground turkey from the Cargill plant in Springdale, Ark., on Aug. 3. The USDA said the third-largest meat recall in history affected 36 million pounds of ground turkey.

Food-safety specialists said the delay reflected a gap in federal rules that don’t treat salmonella as a poisonous contaminant, even if inspectors find antibiotic-resistant forms such as the Heidelberg strain implicated in the latest outbreak.

"We have constraints when it comes to salmonella," said Elisabeth Hagen, the USDA’s top food-safety official, in an interview. She said that unlike E. coli, salmonella isn’t officially considered a dangerous adulterant in meat unless that meat is directly tied to an illness or death.

Meat plants are expected to pass a performance standard that allows up to 49.9% of tests to come back positive for salmonella. A Cargill spokesman said the Arkansas plant has passed all USDA performance standards despite what he called "routine" findings of salmonella Heidelberg.

Government agencies were "clearly too slow" in informing the public that there was a contamination in ground turkey, said Doug Powell, Kansas State University professor of food safety. He said the USDA should have contacted Cargill earlier about the contaminated store samples.

The USDA didn’t contact Cargill about suspected contamination of ground turkey until July 29, officials said.

I also told reporter Tomson, but it didn’t make it into the story, that Cargill and its customers – in this case Kroger – should be doing their own testing and striving for continuous reduction in salmonella levels, from farm to processing. For Cargill to say it met government standards is like Ford saying its Pinto automobiles, which had a tendency to blow up when struck from behind, met all government standards. Government standards for food is are minimum, the lowest common denominator. Consumers should demand that food folks do better, but they can’t because food safety is not marketed at retail.
 

Did Cargill salmonella-in-ground turkey recall come fast enough?

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The massive ground turkey recall that Cargill Inc. announced this week is raising questions about whether federal food safety regulators should have moved faster to limit a nationwide salmonella outbreak.

I told Mike Hughlett and David Shaffer of Minnesota Star Tribune that, "Part of the problem is the absence of clear guidelines about when to go public."

Doug Powell, a food safety expert at Kansas State University who felt that the recall process was slow with the ground turkey, said food regulators appeared to become more conservative after a big salmonella outbreak in 2008. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration first linked it to tomatoes, only to find out later that jalapeno peppers were the most likely cause. The tomato industry cried foul after it got crushed financially.

The recall that Minnetonka-based Cargill announced late Wednesday covers 36 million pounds of ground turkey, one of the biggest U.S. meat recalls. It’s linked to a particularly virulent strain of salmonella that has infected 78 people in 26 states and led to one death.

The recall involves ground turkey produced as early as February, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture had indications going back to at least July 20 that the culprit might be a Cargill plant in Arkansas.

The timing of the recall highlights a dilemma for the nation’s food regulators over when to go public with recall information. Go too late, and public health could suffer. Go too early and make a mistake, and a corporation or industry’s reputation could unduly suffer.

In Sacramento County, Calif., where a woman older than 65 died in June from the latest outbreak, the county’s health officer brought up another factor bedeviling food regulators these days: budget cutting.

Dr. Glennah Trochet said her department now responds more slowly to outbreaks, sometimes delaying investigations a week or two. Public health workers often aren’t available to interview possible victims. She suspects other agencies face the same constraints. "If you want rapid response, you need to have the resources to do rapid response," Trochet said.

This is something I hear from public health types across the country; it’s almost amazing outbreaks get tracked down at all given the fiscal mess at the state and local levels.

The salmonella outbreak linked to Cargill ground turkey began in early March. Chris Braden, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s director of foodborne diseases, said on Thursday that it was a slowly building outbreak in the beginning.

After recognizing an "unusual clustering" of Salmonella Heidelberg cases, the CDC began investigating on May 23, Braden said. About the same time, routine surveillance by a federal food monitoring system found the same strain of Salmonella Heidelberg in ground turkey in stores.

The monitoring service found four positive samples, one each in April, May, June and July, Braden said. Those four samples were traced to Cargill’s Arkansas plant, he said, though he didn’t elaborate on when.

David Goldman, a public health administrator in the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, told reporters that by July 20 or 21, the agency had traced back two cases from the salmonella outbreak to Cargill’s Arkansas plant. A third traceback to the same plant was confirmed last week.

Late Friday, the USDA put out a public warning about salmonella dangers in ground turkey, without naming the suspected source. Recalls are often initiated when food regulators tell a company they suspect it’s the source of an outbreak.

Walnuts suspected but not confirmed as E. coli source

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The Montreal Gazette is reporting tonight that public health authorities are still trying to pin down the source of an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that has claimed the life of one Quebecer, caused severe kidney complications in another, and sickened 11 others in Canada.

Not much new, other than a few quotes from some of the players.

Adel Boulos, vice-president at Amira Enterprises Inc. said Thursday none of the walnut samples — collected from the individuals who got sick, from stores and from the food importer’s warehouse, adding, "We have decided to do the recall even though none of the walnuts have tested positive. The investigation is going on and we are co-operating fully with the government to make sure that nobody gets sick."

Nathalie Levesque, a provincial Health Department official, said, "The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has serious doubts as to whether the infections are related to walnuts, but it’s the most probable source.”

Read into that what you like. If this was a homegrown product, CFIA would not be saying anything public, based on their past track record (see Maple Leaf). But when it’s imported, CFIA tends to rediscover the basics of epidemiology. Or maybe I’m wrong. If CFIA publically disclosed how, when and why they inform the public about potential food risks, and was consistent, perhaps there would be some confidence in the system.

Alice D’Anjou, a Canadian Food Inspection Agency spokeswoman said, “We got to trace these nuts right back to their source. We’re still trying to identify where the contamination happened, where the problem is, and how to fix it.”

In an advisory issued on Monday, the agency declared that "at this time, the outbreak investigation indicates that several individuals have reported consuming raw shelled walnuts.

The recalled walnuts, all imported by Amira from California, include products sold under the brand names Merit Selection and Tia. The walnuts were sold pre-packaged as well as in bulk bins.
 

Florida norovirus fallout: publicly naming restaurant may limit harm to others

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When outbreaks of foodborne illness are suspected, health types struggle with how much information to publicly provide and when. There are so many uncertainties, and every situation has its own specifics based on potential future exposure, lethality of the agent, and getting it wrong. There aren’t any guidelines, and every county, state and federal department seems to make it up with each outbreak.

What about the collateral damage?

The St. Petersburg Times reports this morning that two days after the Hernando County Health Department (that’s in Florida, north of Tampa) issued an alert that people had gotten sick after eating at an unidentified restaurant on U.S. 19 in Spring Hill, independent restaurant owners along the busy corridor began to feel the ripple effects of the announcement.

Nadia Gauthier, manager of The Restaurant, said Thursday that business dropped by nearly half of what she was expecting as word quickly spread through the community.

"People were definitely talking about it," Gauthier said from the eatery at 3438 Commercial Way. "It seemed like they were scared to eat in a restaurant."

In the following days, concerned diners flooded the Health Department and local media with calls. Most demanded the name of the suspect eatery, noting that by not identifying the place, it painted all Spring Hill restaurants with unfair suspicion.

C.P. Damon, owner of Nellie’s Restaurant in Weeki Wachee, said he saw a 50 percent decline in business.

"It hurt us really bad," Damon said. "Our customers stopped coming because they thought they were going to get sick eating here."

Perhaps his worst day was St. Patrick’s Day, when his staff had prepared corned beef and cabbage for what he expected would be a robust holiday crowd. By 3 p.m., Damon decided to send two cooks and other workers home.

On Wednesday, the Health Department confirmed that more than 100 people had been stricken with norovirus after dining at or coming in contact with someone who dined at Kally K’s Steakery & Fishery, 3383 Commercial Way, Spring Hill.

But when the agency released its original alert on March 15, it declined to name the restaurant, citing its ongoing joint investigation with the state Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

Damon thought that was bad policy.

"It became a guessing game that was based on a lot of rumors," Damon said. "No one wants to eat where they think they’re going to get sick. And with no way of knowing, they just stopped coming."

In a statement, Health Department spokeswoman Ann-Gayl Ellis defended the agency on Thursday, saying, "In any event of this type, until the health department has confirmed clinical results that provide a credible link to the source, it will not issue specific information on the restaurant in question."

Does that apply to something like a listeria outbreak, with its 30 per cent kill rate? Doubtful.

Kally K’s manager Christina Malo said her restaurant has suffered as well, and laments that so many people were affected by the norovirus.
 

Crypto spreading in Adelaide swimming pools?

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Adelaide Now reports that 28 people carrying cryptosporidium may have infected public pools, but South Australia Health has issued no public warning.

Between January and March, SA Health was notified of 28 cases of cryptosporidium where the person reported swimming at a public pool.

SA Health asked seven swimming centres across the metropolitan area to decontaminate their pools to prevent transmission of the infection.

The Advertiser was alerted to the situation when it obtained a copy of a text message sent to members of the Adelaide Aquatic Centre advising them the pool would be closed for super-chlorination.

Adelaide City Council confirmed the Aquatic Centre was aware an infected person had used the pool.

An SA Health spokesman said, "This is within the normal levels we would expect to see – there has certainly been no spike. If there were large numbers then we would issue a public alert.

"SA Health emphasises the importance of observing hand hygiene and people with diarrhoea not sharing baths or swimming in public pools for 14 days after their symptoms have stopped."

The secrets of a salmonella outbreak; over 100 sick

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There are now over 100 sick with salmonella in France linked to hamburgers, primarily school kids, so as in the U.S., questions are being raised about food safety standards and procedures for products purchased by the school lunch program. After a USA Today expose last year, the U.S. asked microbiologist Gary Acuff to lead a panel to review and improve school lunch purchases.

My friend, Albert Amgar, wrote a particularly incisive blog post about the culture of food safety secrecy in France. Amy translated and excerpts follow:

The food poisoning outbreak caused by Salmonella in ground beef patties has raised many questions.

Of course, communication has been, as usual, opaque, but now the school cafeteria’s contract for the hamburgers is itself classified top secret, according to a Nov. 6 article by Emmanuel Coupaye of Centre Presse.fr, the newspaper for Vienne.

This journalist is asking questions: What are the established purchasing criteria for ground meat in the middle schools and high schools? After contamination, the question is disturbing.

Apart from the contamination of hamburgers with salmonella, "What is more upsetting is the National Education’s current difficulty in providing accurate information about the selection of products offered in school cafeterias. Since Thursday (November 4 – aa), we’ve been looking for an answer to a simple question: What are the selected criteria used in sourcing ground meat for Poitiers’ middle schools and high schools? Many parents as well as cattle farmers were surprised to learn that the meat for the hamburger patties was supplied by a foreign producer."

On Thursday, the manager of the high school, contacted by our editorial staff saw no problem with providing us a copy of the contract. We only had to come by the school yesterday morning (Friday, Nov. 5). Our goal was to know what are the established criteria for sourcing ground meat (French, EU or other) and the quality threshold (dairy breed, meat breed, meat with a seal of quality). But then, yesterday morning, after a night of reflection, the answer was no.

"I cannot give you this document," stated the school principal.

By late afternoon, the rector stated that he "did not have any information to add." Too bad the Ministry of Education’s website still boasts, under the catering section, its dual requirement "to maintain nutritional quality" and "better inform parents” (especially on issues related to food safety – aa).

In conclusion, the only thing left for us to do is to seize it through the Committee on Access to Administrative Documents!

I wish a lot of fun to those who would like to access these documents. Indeed, in France, transparency is often emphasized, but as pointed out in a recent book (Corinne Maier, Chao France, Flammarion, 2010) glasnost is not a French word. By comparison, the U.S. Congress passed a law on the freedom of information that requires the administration to establish clear standards to determine what documents can be classified as confidential, secret or top-secret, allowing citizens the right to challenge these classifications in court.

To be continued …
 

Going public: People have a right to know about outbreaks

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Some public health types have long argued there is no point in making outbreaks of foodborne illness public – through media disclosure, for example – when the outbreak has passed or the food is gone and there is no on-going threat to public health.

I disagree.

Even if the threat has passed, public discussion of foodborne outbreaks enhances awareness, holds operators accountable, and builds trust and credibility for the investigating outfit (usually the local health department).

Oh, and as I told Jonathon Sher of the London Free Press (that’s in Canada) people have a right to know about events where people got sick.

Sher reports this morning that Londoners were kept in the dark about a viral outbreak at the London Hunt and Country Club after at least 25 people were stricken with suspected norovirus after a Thanksgiving buffet Oct. 11 and at least four more became ill after attending an event for medical residents on the 13th.

Cathie Walker of the Middlesex-London Health Unit said,

“We were notified Oct. 14 by an attendee who was ill.”

Public health officials didn’t reported the outbreaks to the general public and instead relied on the Hunt Club, which had e-mailed a newsletter to its members about the incident, and the organizer of the event for medical residents.

Walker defends the lack of public notification, saying people who didn’t attend the events weren’t at risk and that the private club had taken over the task of notifying those who attended.

“Health Units are loathe to report it because it creates more work but there’s value to reporting and the public has a right to know,” said Doug Powell, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University.

In outbreaks such as these the cause is most often a food handler who is already sick, Powell said.

Barbara Kowalcyk, director of food safety for the U.S.-based Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention said, “(A worker) would be the logical place to look.”

While kitchen staff worked at both events and some later reported be stricken with illness, it’s not clear if any of the diners attending both events — health investigators never asked to compare the lists, the Hunt Club says.

The health unit instead interviewed 29 ill people, some who responded to the Hunt Club email and others mentioned by the initial people interviewed. But health investigators didn’t speak to the roughly 370 other people who attended, Walker said.

That’s a significant oversight, said Kowalcyk, who is a statistician completing a doctorate in Environmental Health with a focus in Epidemiology.

“If they don’t even talk to people who weren’t sick, I don’t know how they can say they did an investigation,” she said.

If a sick worker was the source it’s possible he or she doesn’t know it and may be still infecting people, she said.

“(The public) may want to know that,” Kowalcyk said. “I’d think public health official would want that worker not to handle food.”
 

Going public with disease information: sooner the better

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When to go public about health warnings – like potential outbreaks of foodborne disease – remains contentious. And no one is willing to come clean about it and say – this is when we go public and why. Or at least write it down. Bureaucrat 101 – write it down, have to do it; so don’t write it down.

I understand the flexibility public health types require to do their jobs effectively, but much of the public outrage surrounding various outbreaks – salmonella in tomatoes/jalapenos, 2008, listeria in Maple Leaf deli meats, 2008, the various leafy green recalls and outbreaks of 2010, and the delay in clamping down on Iowa eggs – can be traced to screw ups in going public.

It’s long been a tenet of risk communication that it is better to default to early public information rather than later. People can handle all kinds of information, especially when they are informed in an honest and forthright manner. In new research that seems directly applicable to going public about foodborne illness outbreaks, two mathematical biologists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia reported today that at the first sign of a disease pandemic, public health officials should begin strongly communicating about the extent of the outbreak and the steps that can be taken by the public to avoid infection

During outbreaks of serious infectious diseases, many individuals closely follow media reports and as a result, take precautions to protect themselves against the disease. These precautions may include staying home, getting vaccinated, avoiding crowds, using disinfectants, canceling travel plans and wearing face masks.

Known as "self-isolation," these precautions can significantly reduce the severity of an outbreak, according to mathematical modeling done by "The more forcefully the media provides information about pandemic infections and deaths, the more the total number of infections is reduced," said Howard Weiss, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Mathematics. "Media coverage also reduces the maximum number of infections at any particular time, which is important for allocating the resources needed for treating infectious diseases."

The benefit of publicly reporting disease outbreaks seems obvious, and public health officials in the United States have a policy of regularly communicating with the news media about such incidents. But according to Weiss, not all world governments choose to communicate so well – and nobody had used rigorous mathematical techniques to study the impact of that communication before.

In a paper about the model submitted to a biostatistics journal and posted on the Physics arXiv blog, Mummert and Weiss describe testing their model with a hypothetical outbreak of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever in Huntington – a college community of about 50,000 residents.

In their model, Mummert and Weiss did not look at such issues as the quality of news coverage, or what may happen if news reports turn out to be false or overstated. They also didn’t study the effect of individuals occasionally leaving their isolation to purchase food or medicine, for instance.

The paper cites the case of a false rumor spread across the Internet in 2003 about a restaurant worker in New York’s Chinatown who had supposedly died of the SARS infection. That rumor led to a decrease in travel to that area.

"In general, our advice to public health officials anywhere in the world is not to hold back," he added. "They should get out the news about infectious disease outbreaks loudly and quickly. It’s clear that vigorous media reporting can have a substantial effect on reducing the impact of an outbreak."

Salmonella in eggs: public relations pros suck at PR

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A summary of egg-talk, almost one month into the salmonella-in-half-a-billion-egg recall that has sickened at least 1,500.

Risk comparisons are risky

The Iowa egg folks wrote at the beginning of the outbreak in mid-Aug. that “the chance of an egg containing Salmonella Enteritidis is rare in the U.S. Several years ago, it was estimated that 1 in 20,000 eggs might have been contaminated, which meant most consumers probably wouldn’t come in contact with such an egg but 1 time in 84 years.”

Some industry-apologist lawyer wrote, “you and I are ten times more likely to die in an auto accident this year than to culture positive for SE as a result of eating eggs (which averages about 1 in 120,000 annually).”

These may be statistically accurate, but are of no comfort to those barfing. The American Egg Board estimates the risk of an egg being contaminated with salmonella at about 1 in 20,000. Holding my nose at one end and something else at the other and assuming such an estimate is accurate (and it’s a pooled estimate so is widely variable), if I make mayo or egg nog or dip into the pancake batter, I’ve upped the risk to 5-6 out of 20,000. If a restaurant is making mayo or aioli, dozens if not hundreds or thousands of eggs could be used, cross-contaminating the kitchen area and potentially sickening lots of people daily.

There’s a different risk exposure dealing with a few eggs at home and the thousands used daily in food service. Risk gets amplified real easy.

Simple messages aren’t simple

More than one misguided commenter has said, here are the facts – just cook your eggs.

Just cook it is an ineffective risk slogan, like, don’t do drugs, employees must wash hands, and, we don’t swim in your toilet so please don’t pee in our pool.

“If you are concerned, just make sure you cook your eggs to well done. If you have someone that is ill or on immunosuppressive medication, you should do this regardless of the source of eggs. In the meantime, my local stores don’t sell eggs with any of the recalled labels, so I had mine over easy this morning.”

I don’t have those special salmonella-vision goggles, and worry more about cross-contamination with those ubiquitous egg juices.

After FDA found piles of crap in Iowa farms linked to the salmonella outbreak, the Iowa Poultry Association said in a statement, the “Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) both state that thoroughly cooked eggs are thoroughly safe eggs. Consumers should know that salmonella is destroyed by the heat of proper cooking. Eggs should be cooked until the whites and yolks are firm. For dishes containing eggs, the internal temperature should reach 160 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Again, nothing about cross-contamination, which we know happens routinely based on hundreds of hours of video observation from food service kitchens.

Jennifer Perry, a post-doctoral researcher at Ohio State University had it more correct:

“Eggs are a raw product. Although it is rare to find Salmonella inside the egg, research conducted by U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists has demonstrated that the pathogen may be present on the exterior of about 8 percent of shell eggs, yet people treat them as if they’re sterile. They wouldn’t handle raw chicken breast the way they handle eggs, but they probably should treat the products about the same.”

Industry and government suck at communication …

… and are apparently terrified to go public with information that could prevent others from getting sick. They also don’t seem to care about the trust lost when people find out information was available that could prevent others from barfing.

State and federal health agencies identified an Iowa egg company as a likely source of illness at least two weeks before the firm launched a massive egg recall Aug. 13, 2010, and the public got its first hint of a growing national salmonella outbreak.

CDC announced on Aug. 16, 2010, a four-fold increase over the expected number of reported isolates of this particular SE PFGE pattern.

But it wasn’t until Elizabeth Weise of USA Today put the numbers into context – 228 million eggs recalled, an increase from the normal 50 salmonella cases per week to 200 in June — on Aug. 18, 2010, that the story began to garner national attention.

On Aug. 19, CDC said, about 1,400 people were sick: that got attention.

Yet there has been a vacuum of silence from government and industry surrounding this outbreak, a vacuum that animal welfare and political opportunists are all too ready to fill.

Chris Clayton of the Progressive Farmer wrote last week that as events have unfolded following a 550-million egg recall, groups created to be agriculture advocates — agvocates — have remained relatively quiet about the situation.

“These groups established by various producer organizations and allied industries to defend agriculture don’t want to talk about how ag should respond to the recall and the large business at the center of the federal health probe and possible criminal investigation. … the groups created within agriculture to address perceptions about agriculture are shying away from talking about the DeCoster fiasco.”

FDA, other federal agencies and industry, do themselves a tremendous disservice by failing to clearly articulate how and when the public (and industry) should be informed about potential health risks. No amount of federal legislation or lawsuits will fix this. Instead it requires a recommitment to having fewer people barf. And any company that wants to lead – especially with profits – will stop hiding behind the cloak of government inspection and will make test results public, market food safety at retail so consumers can choose, and if people get sick from your product, will be the first to tell the public.