Elizabeth Licata of Fox News reports an employee at a chicken processing plant in Minnesota has been convicted of intentionally contaminating chicken and causing a massive poultry recall in 2016.
In June of 2016 the Minnesota-based GNP Company had to recall almost 56,000 pounds of “Gold’n Plump” and “Just BARE” branded chicken after it was found to be contaminated by sand and black soil. After an investigation, 37-year-old Faye Slye of Cold Spring, Minnesota, reportedly confessed to contaminating chicken with plastic bags of dirt and sand she’d filled from the plant’s parking lot.
Slye was reportedly filmed by the company’s surveillance cameras, and there was dirt and sand from the parking lot on her sleeves.
Slye has been convicted of two counts of causing damage to property in the first degree, a felony, and she’s been sentenced to 90 days in prison. She will also be on probation for five years, and she also has to pay $200,000 to the company in restitution for causing the recall. The tainted products were reportedly shipped to foodservice and retail operations nationwide, and nearly 28 tons of poultry had to be recalled and destroyed.
I’ve been in jail, sometimes for long times, sometimes for short times, but my best measure of a graduate student has always been the one who would bail their prof out of jail.
Mara H. Gottfried of the Twin Cities Pioneer Press reports that bacteria in food was probably what sickened 137 inmates at the Ramsey County jail recently, according to testing by the Minnesota Department of Health.
The jail notified the Minnesota Department of Health and St. Paul-Ramsey County Public Health. State health officials said they tested sample trays of food served for lunch and dinner Sept. 8 and a bacteria called Clostridium perfringens was found in a sample of tamale pie and in rice.
“C. perfringens is a common bacteria that lives in the environment and can be a common cause of bacterial intoxication if food is not handled appropriately with respect to time and temperature,” Amy Saupe, a foodborne-disease epidemiologist, wrote in an email.
“Due to the difficulty of this type of food testing, these results are not sufficient on their own to implicate this food,” Saupe said. “However, the identification of C. perfringens in the tamale pie support other investigation findings. Bacterial intoxication, specifically C. perfringens enterotoxin, was the likely cause of the outbreak.”
The Ramsey County sheriff’s office has a contract with Summit Food Service to provide and serve food at the jail. There were no additional cases reported outside of the Ramsey County jail, according to a Health Department spokesman.
“Food safety is our top priority, and we continuously work to ensure our food service operations comply with the standards of our company and our facilities,” Doug Warner, Summit Food Service spokesman, said in a statement. “While food has not been conclusively identified as the source of the symptoms at Ramsey County jail, we take these issues very seriously, and have been working closely with the health department and our client.”
Oh, fuck off.
Shakita Riley said her fiance, Justin Reynolds, called her from the jail during the outbreak and told her he kept having to use the bathroom and had fever, chills and vomiting. Reynolds said his stomach cramping lasted several days.
“He said, ‘I think we got food poisoning,’” Riley said. She said she could hear other inmates in the background talking about how sick they were.
Reynolds, who has been jailed since July and is awaiting trial in a fatal shooting outside a St. Paul bar, has mostly avoided eating the jail-issued food since he became sick in September. But other options are limited — he’s been buying noodles from the vending machine, Riley said.
Aidan Gardiner of DNA Info reports three restaurateurs were arrested this week for bribing city monitors to not penalize them for violations including flies, handling food without gloves and keeping a lizard in a fish tank, officials said.
Morie Kabba of The Bronx was arrested Monday while Jonathan Niranjan and Mohammad Safi, who run establishments in Queens, were arrested Tuesday, according to Department of Investigation officials. They all face bribery charges and up to seven years behind bars, officials said.
“DOI’s investigation found these defendants were as dirty as their restaurants,” said Mark Peters, the DOI commissioner.
“In New York City, you can’t clean up a dirty restaurant with a bribe. DOI will continue to pursue unscrupulous business owners and operators who try to corrupt city employees for their own interests,” Peters said.
In each investigation, the men first bribed inspectors with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene who refused the money, but reported it to DOI which then sent undercover officers to each restaurant.
The undercover inspectors, spotted uncovered garbage cans, multiple flies and food residue on the floor of Jagana Family Kennedy Fried Chicken at 1375 Boston Road in Morrisania in October and reported it to Kabba, 42, officials said.
Kabba in turn gave the investigator $160, officials said.
Kabba was arraigned Monday and pleaded not guilty, officials said. He was released and due back in court on Jan. 17, 2017, officials said.
Similarly, a health inspector spotted an aquarium with a lizard inside Amazura, a music venue at 91-12 144th Place in Jamaica, and told Niranjan, 28, he’d have to remove it, officials said. Niranjan then told the inspector he forgot something in the bathroom, prompting the inspector to return inside and find “a wad of cash” on top of the sink, officials said.
An undercover inspector then visited the establishment in August and spotted a broken sink faucet, many flies and food handlers not using gloves, officials said. Niranjan then gave the undercover $300 in cash to “save him on some of the violations,” officials said.
Undercover investigators in May also spotted uncovered garbage cans, a broken sink faucet and staff touching food with bare hands inside Farm Fried N Curry Chicken at 120-20 Merrick Blvd. in South Jamaica, officials said.
On October 6, 2014, Oasis Brands, Inc. recalled cuajada en hoja (fresh curd) after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration isolated Listeria monocytogenes from environmental samples collected from the production facility.
Whole-genome sequences of the Listeria monocytogenes strains isolated from recalled quesito casero cheese produced by Oasis Brands, Inc. were found to be highly related to sequences of Listeria strains isolated from one person who became ill in September 2013 and four persons who became ill during June through October 2014.
These five ill persons were reported from four states: Georgia (1), New York (1), Tennessee (2), and Texas (1).
Four of the five ill persons were hospitalized. One death was reported in Tennessee. Three illnesses were related to a pregnancy – one of these was diagnosed in a newborn.
All ill persons were reported to be of Hispanic ethnicity and reported consuming Hispanic-style soft cheese. Two persons who were able to answer questions about specific varieties of Hispanic-style soft cheeses reported consuming quesito casero, though neither could remember the brand.
According to Andrea Torres of ABC Channel 10, after making promises to the feds, Christian Rivas knew he was distributing cheese with listeria and did so anyway.
Rivas was in federal prison Nov. 11, 2016 and faced 15 moths in prison after federal prosecutors armed with the results of CDC tests and FDA inspections were ready to show consumers were “fraudulently led to believe” the cheese was safe to eat when it wasn’t.
Before the criminal case, authorities recalled 15 of their “Lacteos Santa Martha ” products targeting Central American migrants in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina. The list included the “Queso Seco Olanchano,” the “Queso Seco Hondureno,” the “Queso Cuzcatlan,” and the “Crema Guatemalteca.”
Rivas plead guilty to charges that he acted with an “intent to defraud and mislead, delivered cheese processed and packed at the Oasis facility into interstate commerce that was adulterated,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola sentenced Rivas to 15 months in prison.
“We will continue to pursue and bring to justice those who put the public’s health at risk by allowing contaminated foods to enter the U.S. marketplace,” Green said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reportson October 12, 2015, a county health department notified the Wyoming Department of Health of an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness among residents and staff members at a local correctional facility.
The majority of ill persons reported onset of symptoms within 1–3 hours after eating lunch served at the facility cafeteria at noon on October 11. Residents and staff members reported that tortilla chips served at the lunch tasted and smelled like chemicals. The Wyoming Department of Health and county health department personnel conducted case-control studies to identify the outbreak source.
Consuming lunch at the facility on October 11 was highly associated with illness; multivariate logistic regression analysis found that tortillachips were the only food item associated with illness. Hexanal and peroxide, markers for rancidity, were detected in tortilla chips and composite food samples from the lunch. No infectious agent was detected in human stool specimens or food samples. Extensive testing of lunch items did not identify any unusual chemical. Epidemiologic and laboratory evidence implicated rancid tortilla chips as the most likely source of illness.
This outbreak serves as a reminder to consider alternative food testing methods during outbreaks of unusual gastrointestinal illness when typical foodborne pathogens are not identified. For interpretation of alternative food testing results, samples of each type of food not suspected to be contaminated are needed to serve as controls.
Gastrointestinal illness associated with rancid tortilla chips at a correctional facility — Wyoming, 2015
Sui Man ‘Christine’ Ip was sentenced to nine years and three months in the Auckland High Court on Monday for importing a class A controlled drug.
Customs found three cans marked as ‘stewed pork ribs’ were in fact filled with just over one kilogram of meth in total.
Ip arrived in New Zealand in January and moved into a flat the same day.
Two weeks later, a package of assorted food items mailed from Hong Kong was x-rayed by the Ministry for Primary Industries and referred to Customs as the cans’ contents didn’t look like food.
Customs investigators linked the package to Ip and arrested her at Auckland International Airport in early March when she tried to leave the country.
She will have to serve at least half her jail-term before facing deportation.
Maurice O’Brien, Customs Investigations Manager, said it was not uncommon for offenders to come into the country solely to ‘catch’ and re-deliver drugs.
The Indian Express reports that 22 people were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for making and selling more than 5,000 kilograms of tainted dog meat in China’s Jiangsu Province.
Prosecutors in Rugao city have investigated 14 cases regarding tainted food, which involved over 5,000 kilograms of poisoned dog meat, 11,000 poisoned birds and 500 kilograms of hazardous chemicals.
Police detained Lao Gan (pseudonym) who purchased 7,000 kilogrammes of poisoned dog meat before tracking down another five people.
They also bought half of the meat and sold it to restaurants in the outskirts of cities in Anhui, Shandong and Jiangsu provinces, state-run Global Times reported.
Local police also caught eight men for killing and selling over 11,000 ‘poisoned birds’, most of which were sold to restaurants in Shanghai, Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces.
The sentences came as China faced criticism both at home and abroad for not banning the annual dog meat festival in Yulin last week where 10,000 dogs were reported to have been slaughtered.
Eugene K. Brinson is among more than 500 inmates who sued the U.S. government following a June 2011 salmonella outbreak at the federal penitentiary at Canaan in northeastern Pennsylvania. Most of those lawsuits were settled for a total of around $700,000.
Brinson appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, challenging the $350 in damages district Judge Matthew W. Brann awarded in his case. A panel of the appeals court upheld Brann’s decision in a recent ruling.
Although an official cause is still pending, State Epidemiologist Laura Cronquist says testing by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points to Clostridium perfringens bacteria as the culprit, based on stool samples from several inmates.
Clostridium perfringens is commonly found on raw meat and poultry, according to the CDC, and infection can occur when foods are prepared in large quantities and kept warm for a long time before serving.
“It’s really common,” Cronquist said, adding, “It’s not really surprising that it’s an institution that this happened in.”
Last month’s outbreak was the second major outbreak at the Cass County Jail in four years. In the latest case, about 40 percent of the jail’s 282 inmates had symptoms including diarrhea and nausea. No inmates were hospitalized, and jail staff said the illness was short-lived.
Clostridium perfringens was also the likely cause of a larger illness outbreak at the jail in November 2011, when 90 percent of the 184 inmates inmates came down with diarrhea and vomiting. In that case, the organism was also found inside sick inmates, but couldn’t be confirmed in the most likely food source, the chili macaroni served that day.
The Cass County Jail freezes meal samples daily to save in the event of illness in a process referred to in the corrections industry as a “dead man’s tray.” Cronquist said she’s working with the CDC to determine which of those specific foods will be tested.
In June of 2016 the Minnesota-based GNP Company had to recall almost 56,000 pounds of “Gold’n Plump” and “Just BARE” branded chicken after it was found to be contaminated by sand and black soil. After an investigation, 37-year-old Faye Slye of Cold Spring, Minnesota, reportedly confessed to contaminating chicken with plastic bags of dirt and sand she’d filled from the plant’s parking lot.
