Tag Archives: Mason Jones

Welsh government responds to E. coli outbreak report; parents of Mason say it’s not enough

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After the 2005 E. coli O157 outbreak which killed 5-year-old Mason Jones and sickened 160 schoolchildren in Wales, Professor Hugh Pennington led a public inquiry which revealed the futility of food safety training, government inspection, and pretty much anything to do with the so-called food safety system.

Yesterday, First Minister Rhodri Morgan announced more of the same in responding to Pennington’s report in the Wales Assembly.

“We know already that the Food Standards Agency is to review the use of equipment such as vacuum-packing machinery for both raw and cooked products.”

Duh. It shouldn’t happen.

“The training of inspectors and their managers is also being examined, with the aim of making this more comprehensive, helping them develop a sixth sense of what is potentially catastrophic.”

So they can see dead people?

“Inspections will be unannounced unless there is a clear requirement otherwise.”

Just make the inspections unannounced.

Sharon Mills and Nathan Jones, the parents of Mason Jones (above, right) said they would like to see Mr Morgan take more direct action and impose measures on the authorities involved, instead of leaving them to correct their own mistakes, with Ms. Mills stating,

“It was a bit disappointing because there was nothing definite about what he said. I thought we were going to get some answers and there still aren’t any. I don’t think we are any further forward than we were before.”

Somewhere, Prof. Pennington, who also headed the inquiry after the 1996 E. coli O157 outbreak in Scotland that killed 21 and sickened over 400, is wondering how to escape this Groundhog-Day-esque cycle of outbreak-illness-death-report-repeat.
 

Wales E. coli O157 parents: All food safety inspections should be unannounced

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In his report into the 2005 epidemic that struck down more than 150 people, most of them children, across the South Wales Valleys and claimed the life of Mason Jones, aged five (right), Professor Hugh Pennington found that all of the inspections made at the premises of the butcher responsible in the months before people became ill had been pre-arranged.

This allowed Bridgend-based William Tudor time to clean up and to doctor cleaning records to mislead Bridgend Council’s inspectors.

Prof Pennington has now recommended all inspections, primary and secondary, must be unannounced unless “there are specific and justifiable circumstances or reasons why a pre-arranged visit is necessary”.

The parents of four of the victims want to go further and Julie Price, Jeanette Thomas and Mason’s mother Sharon Mills, are re-forming an action group in a bid to achieve their aim.

“We want to make it illegal for hygiene inspectors to carry out announced visits of butchers and other places where food is prepared,” said Mrs Price, mother of 13-year-old Garyn, who was left fighting for his life after contracting the food poisoning bug which spread through school dinners.

“We want that set in stone.”

Unannounced inspections are recommended in The Food Law Practice Guidance (Wales). But announced inspections remain lawful and continue to happen.

Should food safety inspectors get fired if they screw up? Welsh parents say yes

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Ya can’t inspect your way to a safe food supply.

For all those in Canada and America clamoring for more inspectors, please, read the report Bill-Murray-in-Groundhog-Day impersonator Professor Hugh Pennington wrote after the 2005 E. coli O157 outbreak in Wales, which sickened 160 and killed 5-year-old Mason Jones (right).

The Western Mail reports this morning that the parents of those kids want the inspectors – the environmental health officers who failed to shut down the butcher responsible for the E .coli outbreak – fired.

Julie Price, 44, whose son Garyn, 13, was left fighting for his life after his kidneys failed when he contracted E.coli O157, said:

“At the end of the day, the buck stops with (butcher) Tudor, but these people were in place to protect our children and they didn’t. I would like to see them sacked.”

Jeanette Thomas, 37, from Mountain Ash, whose sons Garyn ,10, and Keiron ,13, both contracted the bug, said,

“These environmental health officers shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, especially considering what these poor kids have been through."

Pennington’s report noted that the inspectors, could and should have stopped Tudor using a single vacuum-packing machine for raw and cooked meat.

The butcher was HACCP-trained, inspected and in the business for 30 years, but apparently didn’t know or care about cross-contamination between raw and cooked product. Neither did the imspectors.
 

Microbiologically safe food – regardless of farm size

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Daughter Courtlynn spent her spring break with daughter Sorenne in Manhattan (Kansas).

Which is the only lede I got into foodborne illness, conspiracies and shameless exploitation of children.

The conclusion is this: Michelle Obama should use the White House garden to endorse microbiologically safe food, from around the corner or around the globe.

Phillip Brasher wrote in The Des Moines Register yesterday,

“In recent years, the federal government and the food industry have taken some significant steps to improve the safety of fresh produce. Those measures include stringent inspection standards for farms that supply schools and supermarket chains. The standards sometime restrict the use of compost and manure to fertilize crops and restrict how close cattle can be to fields.”

Stringent standards is not the descriptor to be used in the wake of the Peanut Corporation of America-AIB auditing fiasco. Worse, associations representing small-scale farmers have taken to the Intertubes to whine and conspiratorize about the end of family farming; that somehow standards for producing safe produce shouldn’t apply to small farms, or my garden.

The group that keeps getting cited for its threatening analysis of proposed food safety legislation is the ponderous Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which is run by the folks pushing raw milk. And some of those folks have, uh, interpretations of food safety that are not only wrong but dangerous to public health. Epidemiology does work, but not everyone likes the results.

Back to my kids. Or Mason Jones, the five-year-old who died in the 2005 E. coli O157 outbreak in Wales. Or Barack’s kids, since he cited them in a food safety chat. The food safety goal, for me, is to have fewer people barfing and dying. There is some microbiology and food science available to help achieve that goal. There is a lot of speculation, fairytales and unknowns about the providence of nature and immunology which can get in the way of that goal.

Michelle Obama, you are embracing local and fresh and natural foods and whatever that means. As I asked March 11, 2009, use the White House bully garden to embrace microbiologically safe food.

E. coli report: lots of blame to go around in Wales

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Five-year-old Mason Jones died a painful and unnecessary death.

Mason (right) died Oct. 4, 2005, from E. coli O157 as part of an outbreak which sickened 161 — primarily schoolchildren — in south Wales.

Mason’s mother, Sharon Mills, said in 2005 that her son’s death was "avoidable" and that lessons "have to be learnt."

"There was nothing wrong with him, only that he ate a dinner – an innocent child eating a dinner. I never thought you could die from E. coli. Never. I had heard of E.coli and I just thought it was food poisoning. I never ever thought Mason would die from it."

Today, Professor Hugh Pennington concluded that serious failings at every step in the food chain allowed rogue 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, including:

• local health types did not sufficiently assess or monitor John Tudor & Son’s food safety management or HACCP plan;

• the abattoir was allowed to continue slaughtering despite longstanding and repetitive failures, in breach of legislative requirements and without significant improvements; and,

• the procurement process was “seriously flawed in relation to food safety”

Prof Pennington said he was disappointed that the recommendations he made more than 10 years ago, following the E.coli O157 outbreak in Wishaw, Scotland, which killed 17 people had failed to prevent the South Wales Valleys outbreak.

“I was very disappointed that the more we looked into what happened in South Wales, the greater the number of parallels between Scotland and Wales. That was disappointing for me personally because I had spent a lot of time coming up with the recommendations in 1996 and 1997 – they were implemented but somewhere things fell down in the way they were implemented. I am looking for these recommendations to be implemented as soon as possible because E.coli is as powerful a threat now as it was in 2005.”
 

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.

E. coli sickens seven in Canada

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Any cases of E. coli O157:H7 are "heart-wrenching.”

That’s what Tanya Maksymic, whose daughter Julia became seriously sick with E. coli in 2007, told the Calgary Herald after hearing that public health types are investigating a cluster of five cases in Calgary, which appear related to additional cases in Edmonton and Saskatchewan.

Dr. Richard Musto, Calgary medical officer of health for Alberta Health Services, said,

"We think we see some patterns here. It’s still early, but it looks like there is some . . . connection between these cases."

Two of the people required hospitalization, according to sources, who added the Calgary cases appear linked to three unnamed Vietnamese restaurants. …

In the latest cases, the seven people fell ill between Nov. 26 and Jan. 2.

Maksymic went on to add,

"I never let my guard down, I’m always taking extra precautions. You don’t live normally after that (experience)."
 

Want effective food safety communication? Put a name and a face on victims

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Acording to the Western Mail, in a speech tomorrow, Professor Hugh Pennington will tell world food safety experts at FoodMicro in Aberdeen that “we owe it to people like Mason Jones” to ensure “top-rate” safety systems are put in place. Mason Jones was a five-year-old boy who died after eating a school lunch in October 2005. Some 150 schoolchildren were sickened in the outbreak traced to the John Tudor & Son meat plant in Bridgend, which supplied hundreds of schools in the Valleys with cooked meats. Owner William Tudor was sentenced to 12 months in jail in 2007 after admitting breaching food hygiene rules and supplying contaminated meats to schools. A public inquiry into the outbreak, which Pennington led, was chronicled on barfblog.
 

What struck me about Pennington’s comments was how he, like Doug and I have been doing through barfblog and food safety infosheets, was putting names and faces on the victims. Pennington is calling out the food safety professionals to make food safety personal.  Food safety communication isn’t just about the statistics, it’s about the stories.

We’re not just making this stuff up.

Morgan and colleagues (2002) evaluated various safety messages targeted at farmers regarding the use of personal protective structures for vehicles, by presenting message combinations and surveying 433 members of the target audience. Although the researchers did not look at practices (self-reported or otherwise) of the target audience, and only measured what the respondents felt would have the highest impact with them, they found, that messages based on stories, and those that were meant to elicit fear about individual practices had more impact with than presenting consequence-based statistics alone.  Slater and Rouner (1996) investigated the effectiveness of a variety of messages containing a combination of narratives and statistics around the safety of alcohol consumption with a convenience sample of 218 undergraduate students. Slater and Rouner (1996) found that survey respondents who were non-believers prior to the presented information, rated messages with narratives as higher quality and perceived them as more effective.  Slater and Rouner (1996) also found that statistics alone only reinforced respondents who identified themselves as already believing in the messages. Psychologist Howard (1991) argues that narratives and storytelling are effective methods in conveying information and suggests that there is a better understanding of one’s place in a system when individual sees himself or herself as an actor within the context of a story.

Our research supports this concept of storytelling: the most impactful infosheets (from a food handlers’ point of view) are the ones which put a name and a face on victims, the food safety offenders and their establishments.  Food safety communications is about storytelling, and personalizing the outcomes for the front-line staff who are in control.

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Howard, G. S. 1991. Culture tales: A narrative approach to thinking, cross-cultural psychology, and psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 46: 187-197.

Morgan S.E., Cole H.P., Struttmann T. and Piercy L. 2002. Stories or statistics? Farmers’ attitudes toward messages in an agricultural safety campaign. Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health. 8:225-39.

Slater, M. D., & Rouner, D. 1996. Value-affirmative and value-protective processing of alcohol education messages that include statistical evidence or anecdotes. Communication Research. 23: 210-235.

 

Bureaucrats: We were told to take a “softly softly” approach to food safety plans in Wales

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The families of the E. coli victims in the 2005 outbreak in Wales believe the public officials charged with protecting their families failed in their duty, but that butcher William Tudor “motivated by greed and profit bears the principal responsibility for the outbreak."

Bridgend County Council responded by saying it made a "reasonable" decision to allow William Tudor, the Butcher of Wales,  to use one vacuum-packing machine for both cooked and uncooked meat and that the rules on the issue were "unclear."

The BBC reports that Bridgend council do accept that there were deficiencies in the way its officers worked with the factory to introduce a hazard assessment plan, but it says that the government had intended the scheme to be introduced on a "softly softly" basis.

It also says that Mr Tudor’s "undoubted attempts at deceit" gave their officers the impression that he was a "competent and informed food operator."

E. coli butcher encouraged ill staff to prepare meat

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The public inquiry into the 2005 E. coli outbreak in Wales began yesterday and already the evidence is shocking — or, maybe, all too common.

Professor Chris Griffith, head of the food research and consultancy unit at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, was asked by South Wales Police to compile a report assessing the health risk posed by John Tudor and Son butchers.

Media Wales is reporting that,

E. coli butcher William Tudor encouraged staff suffering from stomach bugs and diarrhoea to continue preparing meat for school dinners.

He was also aware of cross contamination between raw and cooked meats, but did nothing to prevent it.

Some 150 schoolchildren were sickened in the outbreak and five-year-old Mason Jones died in October 2005.

Prof Griffith was quoted as telling the inquiry,

"Packaging in which raw meat had been delivered was subsequently used to store cooked product," and that a cleaning schedule at the factory was so bad it was "a joke."

Yesterday the inquiry was told that a routine inspection of John Tudor and Son in January 2005, by Bridgend Council environmental health officer Angela Coles, found that one vacuum-packing machine – referred to in the inquiry as a vac-packing machine – was being used to package raw and cooked meats – a potentially serious source of cross-contamination, and that there were no facilities for small equipment – such as knives – to be cleaned.