Don’t eat raw crayfish – you may get lung worm

Continuing the weird-things-people-do-with-food theme, doctors are warning people not to eat raw crayfish.

Physicians at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have diagnosed a rare parasitic infection in six people who had consumed raw crayfish from streams and rivers in Missouri. The cases occurred over the past three years, but three have been diagnosed since last September; the latest in April. Before these six, only seven such cases had ever been reported in North America, where the parasite, Paragonimus kellicotti, is common in crayfish.

"The infection, called paragonimiasis, is very rare, so it’s extremely unusual to see this many cases in one medical center in a relatively short period of time," says Washington University infectious diseases specialist Gary Weil, MD, professor of medicine and of molecular microbiology, who treated some of the patients. "We are almost certain there are other people out there with the infection who haven’t been diagnosed. That’s why we want to get the word out."

Paragonimiasis causes fever, cough, chest pain, shortness of breath and extreme fatigue. The infection is generally not fatal, and it is easily treated if properly diagnosed. But the illness is so unusual that most doctors are not aware of it.

The half-inch, oval-shaped parasitic worms at the root of the infection primarily travel from the intestine to the lungs. They also can migrate to the brain, causing severe headaches or vision problems, or under the skin, appearing as small, moving nodules.

The recent infections, which occurred in patients ages 10-32, have prompted the Missouri Department of Health & Senior Services to issue a health advisory alerting doctors across the state. The department also printed posters warning people not to eat raw crayfish and placed them in campgrounds and canoe rental businesses near popular Missouri streams. Thoroughly cooking crayfish kills the parasite and does not pose a health risk.

Paragonimiasis is far more common in East Asia, where many thousands of cases are diagnosed annually in people who consume raw or undercooked crab that contain Paragonimus westermani, a cousin to the parasite in North American crayfish.

The crayfish is the State Invertebrate of Missouri. I’m not making this up.

14 sick with E. coli from water at Missouri sports complex

Daughter Sorenne is comfortably sleeping through the night now, at 17-months-old, so I decided it was time to get off my lard ass and get moving again.

I like to rise early and bike about 15 miles (an hour) on my recumbent cycle (right, not exactly as shown) in the basement. I’ve got a table set up so I can use my computer, and I sweat volumes. I go through a couple of liters of water.

I’m confident in the municipal water supply because it is tested routinely. Bottled water is a complete waste. Except maybe if you work out at the Class Act Sports Complex, 2336 County Road 301, which is just outside the city of Jackson, Missouri.

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services reports that at least 14 people have fallen ill after drinking water at the sports complex. Four people have been hospitalized.

Officials with the Cape Girardeau County Public Health Center tested water from a drinking fountain and a faucet within the facility and confirmed the presence of E. coli in both samples. The sports complex, which is served by a private well, shut off its water last Thursday at the urging of local health officials.

It would be useful if the strain of E. coli was provided in future public announcements.

Missouri, listeria and a culture of food safety

My friend Jorge Hernandez and I both spoke at the Missouri Milk, Food and Environmental Health Association annual meeting in Columbia, Missouri on April 2, 2010.

We never plan these things because we’re both busy – Jorge in his crisp, tailored suit, talking about all the meals U.S. Foodservice serves in a day, me looking ever more rumpled and frumpy as I evolve into the professor’s outfit of patches on the elbows of the corduroy suit jacket in my future. But our talks were surprisingly complimentary. Jorge (right, not exactly as shown) with his self-deprecating Mexican jokes, me just looking weird.

Jorge took a similar message to the Conference for Food Protection meeting in Rhode Island this week, calling for the creation of integrated food safety cultures within the farm-to-fork food safety system.

“The best way to ensure the right food safety and HACCP behaviors from employees, suppliers, and customers is to make sure there are clear benefits and rewards for excellence,” said Hernandez, U.S. Foodservice’s senior vice president, food safety and quality assurance. “A culture of continuous improvement must be developed at all levels of the food chain.”

Jorge gets it, which is good considering the number of safe meals US Foodservice provides on a daily basis. He also likes to say, trust, but verify, which is appropriately apt when dealing with food safety.

I’m not sure John Coyne, vice-president of legal and corporate affairs for Unilever Canada gets it. He told a recent symposium,

"We are not just in the protection business, we are in the anticipation business. … (The) 2008 listeria event shook our entire industry; going forward, if we fail to anticipate food safety risks, it will be at our peril” and he encouraged companies to adopt a "culture of courage" when it comes to food safety.

The 22 people who died in the Canadian listeria outbreak were not an event: they were a preventable tragedy. Have the courage to call it accurately, Coyne. When I was in Missouri earlier this month I asked the audience of sanitarians, didn’t the nursing homes where all these Canadians died have dieticians and how brilliant was it to be giving immuno-compromised elderly folks cold-cuts that were a known listeria risk? A woman interjected and stated,

“I’m a dietician.”

“OK”

“We got one hour of food safety training.”

“Is that god or bad?”

“It’s awful.”

Salmonella contamination from head cheese warns Missouri health dept.

Head cheese is a product made from meat pieces of the head of a calf or pig and combined with spices. It is usually eaten cold or at room temperature. Thorough cooking kills salmonella bacteria, but since head cheese isn’t cooked, the bacteria stays in the product.

That’s gross.

Missouri’s Scott County Health Department is asking people who may have purchased head cheese that originated in New Hamburg to discard it for fear it may be contaminated with salmonella.

According to a health department news release, a public health investigation has determined that there may be a risk of salmonella contamination associated with the consumption of head cheese produced and distributed at a private residence in mid-November in New Hamburg.

Meth doesn’t make for safe burgers

During a drive to Kansas City, MO I remember Doug telling me about the abundance of methamphetamine labs in the Midwest, and to keep an eye out for stray bathtubs on the side of the highway – I guess that’s where the meth is made.

Bathtubs and fast food kitchens it turns out. kfvs12.com reports that a Cape Girardeau, MO Sonic restaurant was closed after there were allegations of a shift manager manufacturing methamphetamine inside the kitchen.

Dennie Bratcher, 27, faces charges of burglary and manufacturing meth in the case. According to Cape Girardeau Police Sgt. Jason Selzer, officers found Bratcher, still wearing his Sonic uniform, inside the business after responding to a burglar alarm. Bratcher apparently worked a night shift but went back to the restaurant after closing time.


According to Selzer, Bratcher told officers he planned to make the meth on the roof, but he opted for the kitchen because it was too cold outside.


Environmental Public Health Specialist Amy Morris said the incident has forced the restaurant to completely restock the store,


"We’re talking everything from sugar packets to hamburgers, to straws to the ice cream in the machines."


Morris also stressed that the store would have to be "100% safe" before the store would be allowed to reopen.


Sonic officials have offered no comment.

Missouri-born Brad Pitt (right) would be so disappointed.
 

Caf?? Rotavirus – a barf poem by John Estes

There’s an upside to getting written up in Slate magazine, as barfblog.com did last week, and it’s that a new audience can be reached.

Like the barf poetry crowd.

John Estes, who teaches at the University of Missouri, wrote me this morning to say he discovered barfblog.com through the Slate article, and that,

“Since you have no barf poetry (it’s a niche genre) I wanted to offer my poem, ‘Cafe Rotavirus.’"

So here it is (and that’s John’s son, Jonah, with their dog, Sophie, right)..

Cafe Rotavirus

Last time we all
ate here, a Sunday, after
the baby played with
—chewed on—
their toys: six
days and nights
of puke and diarrhea.
This stuff kills
starving kids in Africa,
underdeveloped as
electrolyte industries
are there.

But I cannot stop
returning and returning.
What pathogenesis
makes me weak
for, so consoled by,
this biscuits and gravy—
though I cannot
stop imagining
trillions of rotifer-driven
microbes racing
around this apparent
locus amoenus
like, but not like,
animated soap
bubbles scrubbing up
bathtub scum?

To believe in history,
now that fixed
stars are not so fixed,
might be to believe
each instant struggles—
fatally, hopefully—
to loose itself from
some unoriginate whole.
But, and this makes
instinctual sense
so long as instinct is
nothing but undigested
experience, it may also,
or maybe instead,
be the collective orgy
clearing its gorge,
suffusing each instant
with the particles
of every other
but in tastier order,
because nothing is real
until it means
and nothing means
until it returns,
returns like a dog returns,
as it will with verve,
to a baby’s vomit.

John Estes teaches at the University of Missouri and lives in Columbia. Recent poems have appeared (or will) in West Branch, Southern Review, New Orleans Review, Tin House, and other places. He is author of Kingdom Come (C&R Press, forthcoming) and two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Swerve (Poetry Society of America, 2009) which won a National Chapbook Fellowship.  See his website for more poems and prose.

From France to Kansas City: foodborne illness in schools

Several headmasters from the Haute-Garonne and Tarn primary schools in France simultaneously informed the health authorities of the occurrence of digestive disorders of low severity among students.

A retrospective cohort study, conducted through self-administered questionnaires among approximately 3,000 students and teachers who had participated in two meals in 36 schools concerned, was initiated to confirm the existence of a foodborne outbreak and its origin. …

This large-scale foodborne outbreak illustrates the main factors that encourage the occurrence of foodborne outbreaks (multiple malfunctions in the preparation of meals), and stresses the importance of associating the epidemiological, veterinary and microbiological investigations in the early management of the alert, as well as the first management measures (eviction of sick personal) to avoid major consequences in collective catering.

Meanwhile in Missouri, two Lee’s Summit kindergarten students have been hospitalized with salmonella.

The kids, a boy and a girl, have been enrolled in Richardson Kids Country during the school year. The Health Department has not determined if their illness is related to the school.

Raccoon: the other dark meat

When I was 17-years-old, my friend Dave and I hitchhiked to Grand Bend, Ontario, on Lake Huron, to go camping for a few days.

A camping neighbor went into town and bought us four cases of beer – for a fee. We asked for Pleasure Packs – Molson Canadian and Export – and he came back with something else. It contained a beer called 50. Horrible, horrible beer.

But we drank it.

I won’t go into all the sordid details – girlfriends visiting and not being happy, sleeping with the American girls, the dead raccoon – but we got kicked out of the park and then rechecked in under another name.

Did I mention the dead raccoon?

We didn’t eat it.

But I didn’t know about Missouri back then.

The Kansas City Star reported this morning,

He rolls into the parking lot of Leon’s Thriftway in an old, maroon Impala with a trunk full of frozen meat. Raccoon — the other dark meat.

In five minutes, Montrose, Mo., trapper Larry Brownsberger is sold out in the lot at 39th Street and Kensington Avenue. Word has gotten around about how clean his frozen raccoon carcasses are. How nicely they’re tucked up in their brown butcher paper. How they almost look like a trussed turkey … or something.

Seriously, Dave and I drove a 1972 Impala to Grand Bend.

Raccoons go for $3 to $7 — each, not per pound — and will feed about five adults. Four, if they’re really hungry.

Those who dine on raccoon meat sound the same refrain: It’s good eatin’. …

The meat isn’t USDA-inspected, and few state regulations apply, same as with deer and other game. No laws prevent trappers from selling raccoon carcasses.

Raw milk sickens infant; lawsuit filed

It’s always the kids.

As a father with four daughters and a fifth on the way, I relate to the let’s not make kids sick aspect of raw milk.

Proponents of raw milk say that is just so much statistical shit, and that hardly anyone gets sick from raw milk.

Except it is entirely preventable, and well-meaning people get sucked in by nutritional gobbledygook.

Like Angela Pedersen, who says her almost one-year-old Larry contracted E. coli O157:H7 from raw milk she bought at the Herb Depot and Organic Market in Monett, Miss.

"It was a living hell. I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone. I don’t know how many days I would look at my son and I didn’t know if he was going to take another breath.”

The family’s now suing that business. Pedersen says back in April she went to the store to buy almond milk. She says she was then told about the benefits of raw milk.

"We were approached and told that the goat’s milk would be a better alternative. It’s healthier than breast milk and it would be wonderful for him. We agreed to try it," says Pedersen.