C.C. Sabathia returns after missing time with virus

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Ben Chapman

What is going on in the baseball spring training facilities? MLB.com and ESPN.com reported yesterday that the Yankees Pitcher and big-time free agent signee, C.C. Sabathia missed time over the weekend with an intestinal virus.

Yankee’s Manager Joe Girardi was quoted as saying: "He said he wanted to throw his BP and he ended up throwing up again"

C.C. came back on Sunday and reportedly looked pretty decent against Yankee sluggers Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira.

Sabathia had been scheduled to pitch Saturday, but he was unable to make it to the mound, fighting a virus that he acquired from his children, who had been ill earlier in the week.

Probably a good idea for the Yankees (and maybe all MLB staff) to take a look at our cleaning up vomit/norovirus food safety infosheet.

Update: Sounds like the Astros and Giants also have some virus control issues.

My parents probably saved me from Salmonella

Posted on January 23, 2009 by Ben Chapman

I always wanted a pet turtle. When I was 10, I was really into comics (nerd alert). There was a comic book store in between my school and house, that I used to spend lots of time at, and all of my allowance. Right around that time, an underground comic book from creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird made its debut: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. What a ridiculous concept, but the coolest thing to this 10-year-old comic nerd. This was before the really cheesy cartoon, and even cheesier movies. When the Ninja Turtles were cool.

I made nunchaku and a bo staff out of broomsticks and chains from the hardware store. I was a 10-year-old blonde-haired Canadian Napoleon Dynamite.

All of this background to set this up: I also begged my parents for a pet turtle. I was going to keep him in my room, and call him Leonardo. My parents refused and got me a cat instead.

I know it had little to do with pathogen concerns, and lots to do with the potential smell. However, I’m grateful they shielded me from Salmonellosis.

This week’s food safety infosheet is all about reptile-related food safety concerns.

Download the infosheet here.

Talking turkey

Posted on November 26, 2008 by Ben Chapman

Being a food safety nerd, I’ve had a lot of fun developing food safety infosheets over the past 5 years. The idea behind the infosheets is to take stories, add some humour/shock/kitch and generate dialogue around food safety.

The turkey food safety infosheet is generating a lot of interest. I’m no Sarah Palin, but most responses have been from over-eager gotcha folks who are pointing out what appears to them to be serious food safety errors (especially around thawing, stuffing and cooling leftovers). Some have been nice; others, not so much.

Our focus in building the food safety infosheets is to provide practices based on the best available science. And sometimes what the FDA Food Code, USDA FSIS consumer education and published peer-reviewed articles say around food safety practices differ.

Go figure.

We base the food safety infosheets on the best available science, not jurisdictional regulation. It’s our way of being consistent because recommendations changes so much from location to location (Canada and the U.S. recommend two different temperatures for endpoint temp for poultry: 165F in the U.S., and 180F in Canada — both countries apparently looking at the same data).

People seem to get especially antsy when we disagree with the regulators. Everything we put in "what you can do" section of the food safety infosheets has to have references to back it up (which sometimes the regulatory recommendations do not).

Here are the references for the 3 recommendations folks have mentioned the most (thawing, cooking stuffing to 150F and cooling leftovers)

Thawing on the counter:

Lacroix BJ, Li KW, Powell DA. 2003. Consumer food handling recommendations: is thawing of turkey a food safety issue? Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research, 64(2): 59-61. (this whole paper can be found at the bottom of this post)

Lee M. 1993. Methods and risks of defrosting turkeys. Environmental Health Review (Winter):96-100.

OP Snyder, 1999. Thawing at ambient temperature on the counter. Hospitality Institute of Technology and Management, St. Paul, MN USA.

Stuffing:

The 150F recommendation is based on a 6-7 log reduction of salmonella in stuffing at 140F for 12.7 min (pathogen destruction is time/temperature, and it will take that long to take the stuffing from 140-150. Pete Snyder’s Turkey HACCP document explains it well (second paragraph on page 2).

From the doc:

As expected, no salmonellae or staphylococci was recovered. They were killed above 130°F as the turkey was cooking. Actually, if the stuffing had been sampled at 140 to 150°F, they would have found that these organisms would be dead, considering that 140°F for 12.7 minutes gives a 7D reduction of Salmonella in beef.

Cooling:

Turkey should be refrigerated within 2 — and continuously cooled reaching 41F within 15 hours. Pete Snyder also has a referenced cooling paper that explains this well.

from the doc:

In 1992, this author received an agreement from Ray Beaulieu and Jeffery Rhodehamel at the FDA that there was indeed no scientific basis for the FDA retail food cooling regimes, and that it was appropriate to do a study. With the help of Dr. Vijay K. Juneja, USDA ARS ERRC, a study was conducted using hamburger as the food item and C. perfringens as the target organism (Juneja, 1994). Clostridium perfringens was selected, because, of the three spores, C.perfringens has the shortest lag and fastest generation time.

Hamburger was selected as the media, because C. perfringens is found in hamburger, and hamburger has often been involved in C. perfringens outbreaks. Various cooling times were evaluated in order to determine the safe cooling time. One cooling time chosen arbitrarily was 15 hours to go from 130 to 45ºF, with a 38ºF temperature of coolant, in this case, air in the refrigerator. The 15-hour cooling time showed about 3 multiplications of C. perfringens. The USDA has accepted this cooling time as safe (Federal Register, January 6, 1999), because it now accepts cooling when there are 3 or less multiplications of C.perfringens.

As I replied to one interested subscriber, here are our references, show us yours.

Food safety infosheets to be offered in Spanish

Posted on November 4, 2008 by Douglas Powell

Every week or thereabouts, Ben Chapman and a few of us electronically chat and come up with a food safety infosheet, a graphical one-page food safety-related story directed at food handlers, and available at foodsafetyinfosheets.ksu.edu or http://fsninfosheets.blogspot.com/.

Thanks to Mayra Rivarola, food safety infosheets will now be translated into Spanish as they appear, and are available at http://fsninfosheetsesp.blogspot.com/.

Here is the most recent food safety infosheet in Spanish.

Nueva Infosheet de Food Safety Network – Si estás enfermo, quedate en casa

El más reciente folleto sobre seguridad alimenticia, un relato gráfico de una página dirigido a productores de alimentos, está ahora disponible en http://fsninfosheetsesp.blogspot.com/

Puntos importantes:???Si estás enfermo con diarrea o vomito, habla con tu gerente. Es mejor que te quedes en casa para evitar la transmissión de enfermedades.
Una ley en Indiana requiere que los trabajadores se queden en casa si son diagnosticados con una de las siguientes 5 enfermedades: salmonella, shiga toxin-producing E. coli, shigella, hepatitis A o norovirus.

Un cocinero en Michigan se presentó enfermo al trabajo en el 2006 y fue asociado a un brote de norovirus que enfermó a 364 clientes después de vomitar en los basureros de la cocina.

Que puedes hacer: Llama al trabajo para avisar que estás enfermo. Siempre lávate las manos

Estos folletos son creados semanalmente y repartidos a restaurantes, supermercados, granjas, y son usados en entrenamientos alrededor del mundo. Si tienes alguna solicitud de otro tema, fotos que te gustaría compartir, contacta con Ben Chapman en bchapman@uoguelph.ca

New Food Safety Infosheet — Stay home if you are sick

Posted on October 30, 2008 by Ben Chapman

Don’t go to work if you are ill.

It’s easy to say, but hard to do. Especially if you are a food handler supporting a family, and you don’t get paid for sick days. Or if you are a line cook and your boss tells you that she really needs you to show up because someone is already sick.

Indiana, like other juresdictions around North America has a law that says if a food handler has one of a handful of illnesses that can be passed to the public through food, they need to stay home. Indiana’s list includes: Salmonella, shiga toxin-producing E. coli, Shigella, hepatitis A and norovirus.

According to the Star Press, the Delaware County (IN) Health Department is starting to crack down on food establishments that lack a policy of excluding employees from work if they have one of the five illnesses: "A recent informal survey revealed operators typically could not name any of the five reportable illnesses, or name the reportable symptoms," the Indiana State Department of Health reports in its Winter 2008 newsletter Food Bytes. "Only a few could name any symptoms and perhaps name one reportable illness.

Why hasn’t the law been enforced before now?

"It was sort of like, not a hidden rule, but not a very well understood rule," said Terry Troxell, food division supervisor at the county health department. "No one knew its importance. Now, after we’ve become standardized by the state, it’s one of the things being picked up on during inspections."

This week’s Food Safety Infosheet is all about why it is important to stay home if you are ill, and stay away from food handling until you stop shedding the pathogen in your poop and puke.

Click here to download the Food Safety Infosheet

What do you do if someone pukes at your restaurant or event?

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Ben Chapman

Clean it up. That’s the easy answer.

Exactly how is another question. After Amy’s story of one of her students yacking in class, we started tossing around that question and using norovirus outbreaks at Georgetown and USC as hooks. Mayra and I decided to build a food safety infosheet around it. After reviewing available guidelines from regulators and peer-reviewed research publications, we came up with some steps for cleaning up vomit.

We based our recommedations on a norovirus-induced vomit (because aerosolized spread of virus particles is likely).

If you are looking for a cool paper on vomit, check out: Evidence for airborne transmission of Norwalk-like virus (NLV) in a hotel restaurant (Epidemiology and Infection, 2000. 124:481-487), which discusses the spread of post-vomit norovirus (abstract is here).

A pdf of the vomit cleanup food safety infosheet can be found here.

Ladies Tea outbreak linked to Country Cottage

Posted on September 12, 2008 by Ben Chapman

An E. coli O111 outbreak linked to Country Cottage, a Locust Grove, OK buffet restaurant, has expanded to a church gathering in Broken Arrow, OK (not to be confused with Neil Young’s home, the Broken Arrow Ranch in Northern California).

According to KFSM, Tests show at least one person at the tea, which was catered by Country Cottage, has E. coli O111. There are four additional probable cases and 10 suspected cases.

The Country Cottage outbreak was the inspiration for the latest iFSN infosheet, which you can download here.

New International Food Safety Network Infosheet — Food safety at festivals and fairs

Posted on July 30, 2008 by Ben Chapman

It’s fair and festival season. For the past 25 years, the last weekend of July has marked the Hillside Festival, a weekend-long outdoors concert at Guelph Lake. I’ve never been. I’ve had lots of friends attend and have often felt like I’ve missed out on hearing some great bands. Part of the reason is that I’m not a huge camping fan; it always seems to rain when I camp. And then I whine to whomever I’m camping with.

Prior to an ultimate frisbee game on Monday night, I was warming up with a friend who attended this year’s installment of Hillside. As we jogged she told me all about the weekend: The bands were great, but the best part of the weekend was the food. She described a set-up where many local restaurants have temporary booths and were serving up selections of their normal menus to the hungry concert-goers.

This conversation made me think about last year’s Salmonella outbreak linked to the Taste of Chicago. Temporary kitchens can be problematic for the staff who work in them when it comes to controlling food safety risks. Equipment may not be readily available, line-ups add to the time pressure, spaces can be cramped and handwashing sinks might be hard to access (or even find).

Coupling my conversation with a link that Doug came across about fair food safety in Wisconsin led to today’s infosheet, which can be downloaded here.

After the infosheet was created, Doug sent on another link about a Shigella outbreak in Oregon — which has been linked to visiting the Oregon County fair. Depending on the information that follows in the upcoming days, maybe next week’s infosheet with focus on that outbreak.

New International Food Safety Network Infosheet — Foodborne illnesses prompt fine at golf course in Western New York

Posted on July 3, 2008 by Ben Chapman

It may not surprise regular readers of barfblog that we selected an outbreak linked to a golf course for this week’s iFSN infosheet; we’ve chronicled food safety at a golf course in the past. During the past week there have been reports of two outbreaks traced to golf courses, one in Wheaton, IL and, the inspiration for the infosheet, in Niagara Falls, NY.

Click here to download the infosheet.

New iFSN Food Safety Infosheet: Raw egg dish linked to 18 Salmonella illnesses

Posted on June 26, 2008 by admin

Raw egg dishes have been linked to numerous Salmonella outbreaks (check out CSPI’s outbreak database for a list of egg-related outbreaks since 1990).

Today’s infosheet focuses on a couple of recent outbreaks where raw egg dishes were implicated on Guernsey Island and in Australia. Raw egg dishes including Caesar salad dressing, Hollandaise, mayonnaise, mousses, icings and homemade ice cream have been linked to Salmonella outbreaks.