Tag Archives: Mammoth Burger

Language, culture and Salmonella

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Amy’s a French professor so I get to hang out with a bunch of folks in Modern Languages. And she speaks French to baby Sorenne, who probably understands more than I do. I’ve taught Amy how to use a digital, tip-sensitive thermometer when cooking all kinds of meat, and she’s taught me to be more sensitive to the cultural nuances of communication.

The intersections of food safety, language and culture are ripe for study. And action. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, yesterday launched a Spanish language Food Safety at Home podcast series. That’s good. But what’s going on in Oregon is better.

There is an outbreak of Salmonella associated with white pepper that has so far sickened at least 42, including 33 in California, four in Oregon, four in Nevada and one in Washington state. Some excellent epi work led William Keene, senior epidemiologist for the Oregon state Public Health Division, and colleagues to test ground white pepper from an Asian restaurant on the east side of Portland. Sure enough, it was positive for salmonella.

According to a report in this morning’s Oregonian, the spice was imported as peppercorns from Vietnam and then ground, packaged and distributed by Union International Food to distributors and manufacturers in the West. It was packaged under the Lian How and Uncle Chen brands.

The Food and Drug Administration has printed warnings about the recall in both English and Mandarin while Oregon’s Public Health Division has added an additional Vietnamese version.

Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s associate commissioner for foods, said,

"This issue illustrates an important area for food safety in that we are dealing with a relatively small facility. Getting the appropriate information out to small facilities who may not necessarily have English as their first language" is a challenge.

USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service invites consumers to subscribe to the free podcast service by visiting http://www.fsis.usda.gov/News_&_Events/Feeds/index.asp. Once subscribed to the RSS feed, new broadcasts will be downloaded automatically to the feed reader used by the subscriber.
 

Bite Me ’09: First gig, Raleigh, North Carolina

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It was like Spinal Tap goes to the airforce base (below).

But Ben’s dad enjoyed the talk, New messages, media, to reduce incidence of foodborne disease.

The global incidence of foodborne illness continues to rise. The World Health Organization estimates that up to 30 per cent of individuals in developed countries suffer from foodborne illness each year . Current strategies for compelling individuals and organizations to practice food safety appear inadequate and are rarely evaluated. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported in April 2008 that efforts to reduce foodborne illness have stalled. New messages using new media are required to create a culture that values microbiologically safe food.

Culture encompasses the shared values, mores, customary practices, inherited traditions, and prevailing habits of communities. The culture of today’s food system (including its farms, food processing facilities, domestic and international distribution channels, retail outlets, restaurants, and domestic kitchens) is saturated with information but short on behavioral-change insights. Creating a culture of food safety requires application of the best science with the best management and communication systems, including compelling, rapid, relevant, reliable and repeated, multi-linguistic and culturally-sensitive messages.

The effectiveness of multilingual, convergent and distinctive food safety communications must be evaluated by direct observation – people lie a lot on surveys. A novel video capture system will be discussed.

The talk went well. We captured everything on video so the material will get used in about 30 places.

And after doing my usual, why are animal activists the only ones who know how to use a video camera spiel, Cargill Beef announced today it had implemented a third-party video-auditing system that will operate 24 hours a day at its U.S. beef harvesting plants to enhance the company’s animal welfare protection systems. All of Cargill’s U.S. plants are expected to have the program in place by the end of 2009.

We’ve now traveled to North Myrtle Beach for a few days of golf with a bunch of other Canadians.

And Amy appears to have some sort of foodborne illness.

Life with cats and dogs

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With Doug and Amy on the Bite Me ’09 tour, it’s just me and the pets here in Manhattan (Kansas). Having never lived with pets before it took me a while to warm up to the cats and dogs, but with the humans gone they’ve quickly become my only friends.

Today The Boston Globe reports that both cats and dogs are safe to live with. Phew.

Many of the germs carried by pets are far more likely to be transmitted through contaminated food or water than from a pet, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the benefits of pet ownership are legion – lower blood pressure, reduced stress, even better social lives.

Dr. Lisa Moses at MSPCA Angell Animal Medical Centre in Boston, continues,

"The reality, fortunately, is that transmission of infectious diseases from pets to people is a relatively rare event.”

Neither cats or dogs are completely risk free, and pet owners should wash hands after cleaning up after pets or handling pet food.
 

Day care diarrhea

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Amy and I are fortunate we get to spend most of our time with baby Sorenne. Both of us do most of our work at home, Katie’s been a great help, and we have a student babysitter come to the house twice a week for a total of five hours.

If we were in a different situation and had to use a day care, I’d be there checking out the food safety. The Cannock House Day Nursery, Chelsfield, U.K., would be an excellent model of how not to do things.

In March 2007, the nursery was closed after 147 people contracted salmonella, including 139 children. Yesterday, a court was told salmonella was found on a chopping board and three mixing bowls in the kitchen at the premises.

Prosecutor Rob Sowersby said the cleanliness of the kitchen was found to be poor and cleaning facilities were too small, being appropriate for a home rather than a business.

Mr Sowersby said there were insufficient procedures relating to washing hands, changing nappies and organising cleaning.

Mr Sowersby added there was no toilet paper in the toilets and that children were handed some when they had to go.

Lessons from Wales; fallacy of food safety inspections

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Do more inspectors make food safer?

No.

The latest evidence is from Professor Hugh Pennington, who concluded in a report last week that serious failings at every step in the food chain allowed butcher William Tudor to start the 2005 E. coli O157 outbreak, and that while the responsibility for the outbreak, “falls squarely on the shoulders of Tudor,” there was no shortage of errors.

Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan picked up on that theme yesterday and pledged to do everything possible to prevent a repeat of the E.coli outbreak of 2005 – for the sake of the families affected.

“Poor hygiene practices at the abattoir and the butcher’s premises” caused the outbreak, but he added,

“These failings were not dealt with effectively by the Meat Hygiene Service or local authority environmental health officers. …” Environmental health inspectors need to “sharpen up” and “drill down beyond the box-ticking part of the inspection process to the potential danger of the reality beyond.”

In his report Pennington said an inspector who made four pre-arranged visits to Tudor’s in the run-up to the outbreak, should not have allowed him to continue using one vacuum-packing machine for both raw and cooked meat because of the risk of cross contamination.

Among his 24 recommendations, Pennington said all checks should be unannounced, unless there were exceptional circumstances.

Don’t tell mom the babysitter’s dead.
 

HACCP increases customer satisfaction

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The Eye of Dubai reports that the Tawam Hospital in Abu Dhabi has increased patient satisfaction by implementing a HACCP plan.

Were patients, staff, and guests previously dissatisfied with their foodborne illnesses, I wonder?

 The CEO of the hospital, Mr. Michael E. Heindel, was quoted as saying,

“By implementing food safety audits and ensuring that staff at Tawam adhere to food safety standards and procedures we have been able to increase patient satisfaction and meet the [requirements for HACCP certification].”

The article, titled Taste and quality of hospital food on the rise, mentions several other improvements in the service of food at Tawam Hospital and seems to credit all of them to the HACCP plan.

It appears the culture of food safety stirring at the hospital has raised enthusiasm for improved quality of service overall.

To that, I say, “Hooray for HACCP.”
 

Cop finds pubic hair on Wendy’s sandwich

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Charges are pending against two employees of the Wendy’s drive-through in Moundsville, West Virginia after a sheriff’s deputy said he found pubic hair on his sandwich.

According to the Marshall County Sheriff’s Department, the deputy went through the Sunday night before heading to work.

He finished his chili and opened his sandwich. It was then he said he spotted the ball of pubic hair.

Later, two Wendy’s employees confessed to the crime and said they purposely targeted an officer.

Deputies are waiting for Bender’s blood test results. If he has any diseases, the misdemeanor charge will be escalated to a felony.
 

More than just street meat

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In a bid to divert attention from the lack of a June Stanley Cup parade in Toronto, councillor and city board of health chairman John Filion announced today that new food options will be available at street vendors throughout the GTA this summer.

Souvlaki, salsa karahi, jerk chicken and pad thai will be on the menu this May when the city of Toronto rolls out a street-food program to showcase the multicultural dishes of Canada’s biggest city.

[Filion] said the new street food, offered in addition to the familiar hot-dog stands on Toronto street corners, “will be healthy, personal, interesting and may introduce us to cultures we are not familiar with.”

The Globe article notes that carts will be visited by public health inspectors regularly.  Good.  But what’s more important is what happens when the inspectors aren’t around.

Operators must know (and care) about the risks associated with the products they sell, More complicated foods come with complicated preparation and handling steps.  Multiple raw ingredients need to be kept at the right temperature, operators have to avoid cross-contamination and, keep bacteria and viruses off of their hands. 

A program specific to the new types of permissible street foods should supplement these inspections, so vendors and public health inspectors can discuss potential issues well before the first pad thai is served. Allowing vendors to sell new foods with minimal facilities without providing resources to help them learn how to create them safely is a potential recipe for disaster.

Butcher of Wales report out Thursday

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During an inquiry last year, Prof Hugh Pennington heard how John Tudor and Son, known on barfblog as the Butcher of Wales, used the same machine to vacuum package both raw and cooked meats, leading to an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak beginning in Sept. 2005, which sickened some150 children in 44 schools in southern Wales and killed five-year-old Mason Jones.

Sharon Mills, Mason’s mother and vocal food safety activist, was quoted in the Western Mail today as saying,

“There should be zero tolerance of rogue traders like Tudor.
“Health inspectors should not give people so many chances. Tudor fobbed them off so many times.
“Some meat producers could be dicing with death and they shouldn’t be given a second chance or allowed a few weeks to make things better because it can have a devastating effect. The inspectors should shut them down until they get it right.”


Ms Mills, also mum to Chandler, 11, and Cavan, four, said she hopes Professor Pennington will also recommend a change in the law to force butchers to have entirely separate areas for the processing of raw and cooked meat with separate sets of equipment for each.

“I would also like to see better training for GPs and hospitals, so they become more aware of the bacterium and more aware of the signs of infection so they can hospitalise people as soon as possible,”

“My little boy is lying in a cemetery. He died for nothing, so some good has got to come out of it. We also need to be looking at the health inspectors themselves and asking if they have the right training and if they are the right people to do the job. Are they strong enough to stand up to the people who break the rules?”

Inspection is part of the solution, but is only one factor in safe food production. Lowering the incidents of foodborne illness is not going to happen with increased inspection alone — what Mills suggests about the quality of inspection, and looking for the right indicators is more important.  Having inspectors, auditors, coaches, etc. who know the production, processing and preparation systems and who can be the bug is the key to risk reduction.

Obama makes food safety statement: forms committee

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U.S. President Barack Obama used his weekly radio – and YouTube – address today to bolster and reorganize the nation’s fractured food-safety system by forming a committee — the Food Safety Working Group.

President Clinton had a similar group 13 years ago.

Obama said,

“In the end, food safety is something I take seriously, not just as your president, but as a parent.”

Me too. But when it comes to the safety of the food supply, I generally ignore the chatter from Washington. If a proposal does emerge, such as the creation of a single food inspection agency, I ask, Will it actually make food safer? Will fewer people get sick?

In the initial parsing of the speech, the N.Y. Times reported,

Experts have long debated whether the F.D.A. should increase inspections or rely instead on private auditors and more detailed safety rules. By calling the limited number of government inspections an “unacceptable” public health hazard, Mr. Obama came down squarely on the side of increased government inspections.

Government inspections have a role. But it’s minimal compared to what industry can do. And FDA has no authority over farms, so problems with tomatoes, spinach and sprouts are not going to be solved by increasing inspections at processing plants.

Obama is excellent at setting tone, and that is the best that can be expected from this committee formation. Maybe it will send a message that everyone, from farm-to-fork, needs to get super-serious about providing microbiologically safe food. Maybe that will increase the safety of the food supply and result in fewer sick people.