The E. coli O157 outbreak associated with a picnic in Germantown, Ohio has now sickened at least 55 people with 10 in hospital.
Public Health – Dayton & Montgomery County officials are asking anyone who got sick after attending the picnic to call (937) 225-4460 to report their illness.
Public health officials have confirmed that five of the people taken ill are infected with E. coli O157.
Neff’s Lawn Care seems like a decent enough company.
But when they decided to thank a couple of hundred customers with a picnic in Germantown, Ohio, 
things went bad.
Health types in Dayton & Montgomery County say that food served at the picnic led to at least 36 individuals have become ill; of those, nine have been hospitalized. Of the ill, 5 have been confirmed to be infected by E. coli O157.
Parents should think carefully about any pet, particularly small turtles, reptiles, and chicks or ducks, that can carry human disease. Young children are much more vulnerable to things like Salmonella.
And U.S. federal agencies continue to have a going public problem, and should develop public guidelines for when, or when not, to name a business or farm in a disease outbreak, and apply those guidelines consistently
That’s what I conclude from reports that health types have cracked an 8-year-old Salmonella outbreak linked to live, mail-order poultry.
JoNel Aleccia of msnbc.com writes, between 2004 and 2011, at least 316 people in 43 states were sickened by a strain of salmonella Montevideo that had stumped staff at the Centers for Disease Control and .jpg)
Prevention. An estimated 5,000 additional cases likely went unreported, officials say.
Only through careful analysis of the genetic fingerprint of the bug and cooperation with human and animal health officials and poultry experts did the CDC crew link the cases to “Hatchery C,” a supplier of 4 million birds a year identified only as being in the western U.S.
“It was definitely an interesting outbreak,” said Casey Barton Behravesh, one of a team of CDC researchers who reported on their investigation in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Because the hatchery was cooperative and because the threat of this particular infection appears to be over — with only one case of the outbreak strain reported so far this year — CDC officials declined to name the source of live young poultry popular as Easter presents or with urban backyard chicken farmers.
Since 1990, there have been 35 outbreaks of salmonella tied to contact with shipments of live, young poultry. CDC officials are investigating two separate outbreaks now, strains of salmonella Altona and salmonella Johannesburg, which together have sickened nearly 100 people in 24 states.
It was the salmonella Montevideo outbreak, though, that sent CDC officials scrambling to find out the source of infections whose victims were mostly children under the age of 5.
?In the end, about 80 percent of the illnesses were traced back to Hatchery C, which can ship as many as 250,000 birds a week in the spring, the peak season, according to the report. Even after the hatchery took steps to curtail salmonella transmission, the infections dropped, but did not stop.
Even when state agriculture officials have forced hatcheries to get rid of their birds, clean up the sites and start over, salmonella outbreaks have erupted again.
“Shutting down the hatcheries is not necessarily the answer here,” Behravesh said.
There are some 20 hatcheries in the U.S. that ship an estimated 50 million live poultry by mail-order every year, generating between $50 million and $70 million a year, said CDC officials, citing unpublished data.
In 2011, the U.S. Postal Service shipped some 237,778 boxes or 1.7 million pounds of live poultry, spokeswoman Sue Brennan told msnbc.com.
Many of those birds go to agricultural feed stores, where they may be sold as Easter pets. Others are shipped directly to urban farmers, including many who have adopted the recent trend of raising backyard flocks of chickens.
In this outbreak, the number of illnesses peaked in May of 2006, forcing interventions at Hatchery C, the paper reported.
Those included beefing up biosecurity and rodent control, decontaminating feed, replacing and updating old equipment, changing airflow, improving testing and giving vaccines to adult birds.
Such steps may be recommended, but not required, by the National Poultry Improvement Plan, a program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. All compliance is voluntary, Behravesh noted.
Still, even after that effort, the salmonella infections didn’t cease completely, Behravesh said.
The CDC researchers called for more targeted efforts to raise awareness about the danger of salmonella infections from live poultry. Only about 21 percent of patients interviewed said they knew that poultry could transmit salmonella and only 7 percent said they were warned about the risk at the time of purchase.
Part of the problem is that people regard the young poultry as pets, often buying chicks dyed neon colors as holiday favors.
New England Journal of Medicine, 366;22
Nicholas H. Gaffga, M.D., M.P.H., Casey Barton Behravesh, D.V.M., Dr.P.H., Paul J. Ettestad, D.V.M., Chad B. Smelser, M.D., Andrew R. Rhorer, M.S., Alicia B. Cronquist, R.N., M.P.H., Nicole A. Comstock, M.S.P.H., Sally A. Bidol, M.P.H., Nehal J. Patel, M.P.H., Peter Gerner-Smidt, M.D., D.Med.Sci., William E. Keene, Ph.D., M.P.H., Thomas M. Gomez, D.V.M., Brett A. Hopkins, D.V.M., Ph.D., Mark J. Sotir, Ph.D., M.P.H., and Frederick J. Angulo, D.V.M., Ph.D.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1111818
Abstract
Background
Outbreaks of human salmonella infections are increasingly associated with contact with live poultry, but effective control measures are elusive. In 2005, a cluster of human salmonella Montevideo infections with a rare pattern on pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (the outbreak strain) was identified by PulseNet, a national subtyping network.
Methods
In cooperation with public health and animal health agencies, we conducted multistate investigations involving patient interviews, trace-back investigations, and environmental testing at a mail-order hatchery linked to the outbreak in order to identify the source of infections and prevent additional illnesses. A case was defined as an infection with the outbreak strain between 2004 and 2011.
Results
From 2004 through 2011, we identified 316 cases in 43 states. The median age of the patient was 4 years. Interviews were completed with 156 patients (or their caretakers) (49%), and 36 of these patients (23%) were hospitalized. Among the 145 patients for whom information was available, 80 (55%) had bloody diarrhea. Information on contact with live young poultry was available for 159 patients, and 122 of these patients (77%) reported having such contact. A mail-order hatchery in the western United States was identified in 81% of the trace-back investigations, and the outbreak strain was isolated from samples collected at the hatchery. After intervention at the hatchery, the number of human infections declined, but transmission continued.
Conclusions
And, in a new and separate outbreak, CDC 93 additional people have been sickened. The complete CDC report is available at http://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/live-poultry-05-12/index.html. Highlights below.
A total of 93 persons infected with outbreak strains of Salmonella Infantis, Salmonella Newport, and Salmonella Lille have been reported from 23 states.
18 ill persons have been hospitalized, and one death possibly related to this outbreak is under investigation.
37% of ill persons are children 10 years of age or younger.
Collaborative investigative efforts of local, state, and federal public health and agriculture officials linked this outbreak of human Salmonella infections to exposure to chicks and ducklings from a single mail-order hatchery in Ohio.
Findings of multiple traceback investigations of live chicks and ducklings from homes of ill persons have identified a single mail-order hatchery in Ohio as the source of these chicks and ducklings. This is the same mail-order hatchery that was associated with the 2011 outbreak of Salmonella Altona and Salmonella Johannesburg infections. In May 2012, veterinarians from the Ohio Department of Agriculture inspected the mail-order hatchery and made recommendations for improvement.
Mail-order hatcheries, agricultural feed stores, and others that sell or display chicks, ducklings, and other live poultry should provide health-related information to owners and potential purchasers of these birds prior to the point of purchase. This should include information about the risk of acquiring a Salmonella infection from contact with live poultry.
Mail-order hatcheries, agricultural feed stores, and others who sell or display chicks, ducklings and other live poultry should provide health-related information to owners and potential purchasers of these birds prior to the point of purchase. This should include information about the risk of acquiring a Salmonella infection from contact with live poultry.
Two foodborne illness outbreaks in Granville, Ohio during the past two weeks have been blamed on norovirus.
Test results from an Ohio Department of Health laboratory found Norovirus in samples from both an outbreak resulting from a catered Feb. 12 event at Bryn Du Mansion and from a separate incident among students at Denison University.
Licking County Health Commissioner Joe Ebel told the Newark Advocate in an interview an investigation will be conducted into whether or not the two incidents could be related.?? Ebel said .jpeg)
Tuesday that 41 of 78 people who attended the Bryn Du event, put on by the Columbus Museum of Art, experienced a gastrointestinal illness. He said most of those attending were from Franklin County, but one test sample returned from the lab involved a Licking County resident.
??In Thursday’s health department announcement, Ebel said 36 Denison students and two staff members were affected by the outbreak there, which occurred gradually over about the past 10 days. ??“Usually in a school setting like that, once it gets started it’s hard to get stopped." Dr. Charles J. Marty, medical director for Denison University Health Services, said in an emailed statement Thursday that DU community members have been advised to report any illness however slight, wash hands often and avoid sharing food or beverages.
A new paper in Epidemiology and Infection revisits a 2006 outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium linked to tomatoes served at various restaurants that sickened 190 — even a Canadian.
The authors write that “in response to the outbreak, the grower/packer made improvements in good agricultural and manufacturing practices relating to the packing house and contracted a third-party auditor to improve food-safety practices based on customer request.’’
Do auditors improve food safety practices or just evaluate?
Abstract below:
Multiple salmonellosis outbreaks have been linked to contaminated tomatoes. We investigated a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium infections among 190 cases. For hypothesis generation, review of patients’ food histories from four restaurant-associated clusters in four states revealed that large tomatoes were the only common food consumed by patients.
Two case-control studies were conducted to identify food exposures associated with infections. In a study conducted in nine states illness was significantly associated with eating raw, large, round tomatoes in a restaurant [matched odds ratio (mOR) 3·1, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1·3–7·3]. In a Minnesota study, illness was associated with tomatoes eaten at a restaurant (OR 6·3, mid-P 95% CI 1·05–50·4,P=0·046).
State, local and federal regulatory officials traced the source of tomatoes to Ohio tomato fields, a growing area not previously identified in past tomato-associated outbreaks. Because tomatoes are commonly eaten raw, prevention of tomato contamination should include interventions on the farm, during packing, and at restaurants.
Epidemiology and Infection, FirstView Article : pp 1-9
C. Barton Behravesh, D. Blaney, C. Medus, S. A. Bidol, Q. Phan, S. Soliva, E. R. Daly, K. Smith, B. Miller, T. Taylor Jr., T. Nguyen, C. Perry, T. A. Hill, N. Fogg, A. Kleiza, D. Moorhead, S. Al-Khaldi, C. Braden and M. F. Lynch
The story may be old, but, as noted by Faded Tribune, the video is new and over the top.
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And they can’t seem to get enough of it on the news stations here in Australia.
Footage from a surveillance camera at a McDonald’s in Toledo, Ohio shows an unhinged woman punching two workers and smashing the drive-through window because she could not get Chicken McNuggets in the wee hours of New Year’s Day.
For the vandalism, 24-year-old Melodi Dushane was sentenced last month to 60 days in jail, three years of community service and ordered to pay more than $1500 for the damage. She said she had been drinking and suffers panic attacks, which she blamed for leading up to her rampage.
Billy Joe Gregg Jr. – a man with not two but three first names and of course, it’s Billy Joe – an Ohio dairy farm worker has been charged with 12 counts 
of cruelty to animals after a welfare group released a video it says shows him and others beating cows with crowbars and pitchforks.
He’s in jail, pondering his 15 minutes of fame.
Associated Press reports the County sheriff’s office says Gregg was fired from Conklin Dairy Farms in Plain City on Wednesday.
Conklin calls the mistreatment shown on the video "reprehensible." Chicago-based Mercy For Animals says the undercover video was shot between April 28 and Sunday.
The video is available at:
http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DgYTkM1OHFQg
It is graphic and disturbing.
Is Michael Pollan becoming the John Irving of food writing? Irving, the author of The World According to Garp and dozens of other whimsical tomes, is often characterized by excessive wordage – as in, great story, but could have been told with half the words.
Foodie Pollan shows the same characteristics in a longwinded reviewed of a bunch of new books about food politics – because what’s better than preparing and eating food than reading about it and watching others do it on television.
But there’s a nosestretcher alert hidden in all those words. Pollan writes,
“The 1993 deaths of four children in Washington State who had eaten hamburgers from Jack in the Box were traced to meat contaminated with E.coli O157:H7, a mutant strain of the common intestinal bacteria first identified in feedlot cattle in 1982.”
To clarify: E. coli O157:H7 belongs to a ?family of bacteria called verotoxigenic E. coli (VTEC) first recognized by researchers at Health Canada in 1977. VTEC is used interchangeably with Shiga-toxin producing E. coli, or STEC, and appear to have evolved tens of thousands of years ago.
In 1982, E. coli O157:H7 was first identified as a cause of human disease after 47 people in White City, Ore., and Traverse City, Mich., developed severe stomach disorders after eating McDonald’s hamburgers.
Twenty years later, more than 200 hundred different serotypes –members of the same bacterial strain but with different proteins on their outer shell — have been isolated from humans, foods and other sources. About 150 of these have been isolated from humans, and more than 50 have been shown to cause disease in humans.
Carlton Gyles (above, right, exactly as shown), a leading STEC researcher at the University of Guelph, wrote in 2007 review in the Journal of Animal Science:
Shiga toxin-producing E. coli refers to those strains of E. coli that produce at least 1 member of a class of potent cytotoxins called Shiga toxin. The STEC are also called verotoxin-producing E. coli. The names Shiga toxin (Stx), derived from similarity to a cytotoxin produced by Shigella dysenteriae serotype 1 (O’Brien et al., 1982), and verotoxin (VT), based on cytotoxicity for Vero cells (Konowalchuk et al., 1977), are used interchangeably. Those STEC that cause hemorrhagic colitis and hemolytic uremic syndrome are called 
enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC; Levine et al., 1987; Nataro and Kaper, 1998). Ruminants, especially cattle, constitute a vast reservoir.
The STEC have been characterized by a variety of methods, including serotyping, which is used extensively to categorize strains of E. coli (Blanco et al., 2004a,b; Prager et al., 2005). The serotype of an E. coli isolate is based on the O (Ohne) antigen determined by the polysaccharide portion of cell wall lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and the H (Hauch) antigen due to flagella protein. There are 174 O antigens (numbered 1 to 181, with numbers 31, 47, 67, 72, 93, 94, and 122 deleted) and 53 H antigens in the international serotyping scheme, with E. coli isolates having various combinations of O and H antigens (Scheutz et al., 2004). A high percentage of STEC serotypes are nonmotile (NM) mutants of strains with an H antigen. … Because of the importance of serotype O157:H7 in human disease, it is common to consider STEC serotypes in 2 major categories, O157 and nonO157.
Those non-O157 types are showing up in romaine lettuce. E. coli O145 has sickened some 50 people who consumed lettuce processed by Freshway Foods. However, additional testing revealed another STEC in a bag of Freshway lettuce, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has types as Escherichia coli O143:H34. That E. coli has not, according to the Columbus Dispatch, been linked to any known food-borne illness here or elsewhere, but it could sicken people.
Greene County, Ohio, is located between Cincinnati and Columbus and perhaps not much happens because when people started showing up with Salmonella, nurse Amy Schmitt said,
"Four reports in two business days is unprecedented for us. … Two out of the four were hospitalized. … At this point, we don’t have a common link for those four individuals."
I’ve never heard of Athens, Ohio, although it is apparently home to a heavy metal band I’ve never heard of, the aptly named Skeletonwitch (right, exactly as shown).
An unnamed but popular eatery that I have also never heard of in Athens, Ohio, was apparently home to a Salmonella outbreak last week that sicken at least 22 people.
WBNS-10TV cited Athens County health officials as saying the restaurant poses no threat to public health and that is has been inspected.
Health department spokesman Charles Hammer said the restaurant was immediately inspected, adding,
"Everything is currently in order. If we were to find a food service operation with an ongoing threat to the public health we would close that operation. this is not the case here."