Dutch News reports the national safety council will investigate fish processors Foppen where the outbreak occurred earlier this month, as well as the role of the government. The aim is to find out how such outbreaks should be dealt with in the future. There is no 
question of apportioning blame, says Nos television.
The salmonella was eventually traced to one of Foppen’s production lines in Greece.
So far 18 of the people who contracted salmonella have joined forces to fight for compensation.
I like salmon. There’s no wild salmon in Australia but it’s farmed in the cooler waters of Tasmania, and it’s an excellent product.
I used to eat a lot of smoked salmon, but that didn’t start until my 40s. Now, I can get better fillets and do it myself, although I do have the only kid at pre-school who has 
lunches of salmon, brie and baguette.
Sadly, smoked salmon has its risks.
Three elderly people have died and the number of those sickened by salmonella after eating infected smoked salmon has risen to 950, Dutch health officials said on Thursday.
Dutch food and consumer watchdog NVWA rang alarm bells earlier this month, pinning the outbreak on Dutch fish producer Foppen and advising all major Dutch supermarket chains to take the contaminated salmon off the shelves.
The National Institute for Public Health (RIVM) in the Netherlands.
added that around 100 people in the United States were also infected “by the same type of salmonella.”
Foppen, headquartered in the central Dutch town of Harderwijk in the meantime blamed a contaminated production line in Greece for the outbreak, Dutch media reported.
Seek and ye shall find.
But countries still won’t test their way to a safe food supply.
Testing is extremely useful for validating safety procedures and to have a sense of what’s out there.
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There’s lots of various E. coli out there.
RNW reports for the second time this week the Dutch Food Quality Authority (nVWA) has found sprouts contaminated with the EHEC bacterium, although it is not the O104 variant. A spokesperson for the Authority said on Friday that the beet seed sprouts have been withdrawn from the market on the orders of Health Minister Edith Schippers.
Meanwhile, Thailand said on Saturday that it had detected E. coli in cabbage imported from Europe and was checking whether it was the lethal strain involved in a killer outbreak in northern Germany.
On Friday Thailand said that E. coli found in avocados a day earlier was not the deadly strain that has swept Europe in recent weeks.
Testing has a role — make it meaningful.
At what point does steak tartare earn the label, ‘ready-to-eat?’
Maybe it’s a Dutch thing.
Eurosurveillance reports today about the fourth food-borne outbreak in recent years linked to consumption of steak tartare and other raw beef products in the 
Netherlands. In 2006 to 2008, despite intensive monitoring and control programmes, Salmonella was still found in-store in raw meats (such as steak tartare and ossenworst) intended for direct consumption.
In the latest case, between October and December 2009, 23 cases of Salmonella Typhimurium (Dutch) phage type 132, each with an identical multiple-locus variable-number tandem-repeat analysis (MLVA) profile (02-20-08-11-212), were reported from across the Netherlands. A case–control study was conducted using the food-consumption component of responses to a routine population-based survey as a control group. The mean age of cases was 17 years (median: 10 years, range: 1–68). Sixteen cases were aged 16 years or under. Raw or undercooked beef products were identified as the probable source of infection. Consumers, in particular parents of young children, should be reminded of the potential danger of eating raw or undercooked meat.
The full report is available at:
http://www.eurosurveillance.org/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleId=19705
A bites-barfblog reader from the Netherlands sent along this 2008 video, which has an English-speaking bit with a self-proclaimed hamburger professor in New York (New Amsterdam?) demonstrating the touch-the-hand method of determining whether a hamburger is properly cooked (note: this technique is complete BS).
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The technique in question appears about five minutes in.
Epidemiological studies conducted in France show that beef burger consumption is the main risk factor of a serious disease caused by Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli bacteria or STEC.
A quantitative risk assessment for the consumption of beef burgers containing STEC by the Agence Francaise De Securite Sanitaire Des Aliments concluded that almost 50% of children under the age of 5 eat well-done beef burgers (as well as 29% and 24% of 5-10 year olds and 10-15 year olds respectively). The proportion of beef burgers consumed rare increases with the children’s age: 10%, 17% then 20% for each of the age groups defined (under 5, 5-10 year olds and 10-15 year olds). Regarding the effectiveness of cooking (a frozen beef burger being pan-fried and turned over once), it should be noted that cooking “rare” is associated with a percentage of STEC destruction of 0% to 87% ; “medium” 37% to 96% and “well done” 94% to 99.8%. Concerning the consumption habits that prevail in French households today, these results highlight the importance of the length of cooking on STEC destruction (currently not enough), and the hygiene of beef burger production.
A place to start might be to accurately define what rare, medium and well-done actually mean, as quantified by time and temperature
Eurosurveillance reports that the Netherlands experienced a nationwide outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O157 with onset of symptoms from the end of December 2008 until the end of January 2009. A total of 20 laboratory-confirmed cases were linked to the outbreak strain, serotype O157: H-, stx1, stx2, eae and e-hly positive. The investigation into the source of this outbreak is still ongoing, but evidence so far suggests that infection occurred as a result of consuming contaminated raw meat (steak tartare).