Tag Archives: Oysters

Raw oysters from Louisiana sicken 11 in Mississippi with norovirus

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The Louisiana state Department of Health and Hospitals has closed a large section of east bank Plaquemines Parish waters to oyster fishing through at least mid-April, after 11 people in Mississippi – at a seafood conference, repeat, at a seafood conference — became sick after eating oysters believed to be traced to that area.

The Times-Picayune reports the state has also issued a recall of any oysters harvested from that area since March 6, meaning wholesalers must review their records and contact any restaurants, brokers or other buyers who bought oysters from those waters. Under Food and Drug Administration and state health guidelines, oyster dealers are required to have a recall plan in effect.

The risk of risk comparisons – raw oysters vs Cheetos edition

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Risk comparisons can be risky: they usually offend the target audience and make the author sound like a jack-ass.

James Wesson, oyster scientist with the Virginia Marine Resource Commission, told the Daily Press that the overwhelming majority of oysters sold in the United States are not contaminated, adding,

"More people die each year from eating Cheetos than from eating oysters.”

No data was provided.

The comment was made as part of a story about Virginia regulators requiring stiffer rules to prevent the sale of contaminated oysters harvested from the Chesapeake Bay during warm-water months.

Each year about 15 people die from eating contaminated oysters, according to the agency. Most of the problem oysters come from the Gulf of Mexico, but at least one has been linked to Virginia waters since 2000, said Robert Croonenberghs, director of the state Health Department’s shellfish sanitation division.

If the FDA finds another contaminated oyster sold by Virginia seafood suppliers, the agency could prohibit shipping raw oysters outside state lines, he said. Such a ban could stifle the industry and cause thousands of dollars in losses to suppliers, watermen, and oyster farmers.

The number of deaths may be statistically trivial – unless it happens to you or someone you know. And this risk can be managed.

Diners’ fury at Heston Blumenthal’s £200k food bug payout

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A year after 529 diners were sickened by norovirus at the swanky Fat Duck restaurant in the U.K., after the chef, Heston Blumenthal, blamed his decision to buy and serve raw oysters grown in human sewage on others, and months after a government report slammed the restaurant for letting sick workers work, Blumenthal has received £200,000 compensation for lost business related to the incident while sick diners have yet to receive a penny.

The Mail Online repots the payout news has angered scores of customers still fighting the restaurant for compensation.

Deborah Darke, 53, a deputy headteacher from Ilfracombe, Devon, who was one of the diners who became ill, said,

“I’m incensed the restaurant has received this payout when so many are still waiting for compensation. I understand that if he was supplied with contaminated food it is not his fault, but the report said there were hygiene issues. I won’t be returning.”

Oysters -steamed – may have caused illness at Raleigh oyster bar

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NBC17 is reporting this afternoon that several customers have notified the 42nd Street Oyster Bar that they became ill after eating oysters at the longtime Raleigh restaurant.

Brad Hurley, a partner with 42nd Street Oyster Bar, told NBC17 that the restaurant received calls on Monday and Tuesday from customers who reported becoming sick over the weekend.

Hurley said the restaurant has pulled steamed oysters from their menus. The restaurant does have a separate batch of oysters from the North Carolina coast that is not suspected to cause illness that are still on the menu.

So far it has not been determined what is causing the reported illnesses. The restaurant is going through all equipment and working with the Wake County Health Department to determine the cause of the illnesses.
 

Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck continues to blame others for over 500 getting sick in his restaurant; manuals are not the basis of food safety

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When naïve me and my students started out to improve the microbial safety of Ontario greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers back in 1997, the former of which still dominate the Manhattan (Kansas) marketplace, we thought, OK, we’ll make a food safety manual.

We had another idea, which was to actually go out and talk to people, and we found out the manual pretty much stayed on the shelves.

So when Heston Blumenthal, a UK chef who says that after 529 people barfed from norovirus at his famed Fat Duck restaurant,

“Our staff training manual very clearly lays out a 48-hour return to work policy – you don’t come back to work until 48 hours after you feel better – and I don’t know many restaurants that do that,”

I sorta wanna barf. People don’t read manuals and they don’t follow them. And why would anyone pay a couple hundred bucks to eat at this dude’s restaurant when he had no idea of food safety or sourcing food from safe supplies.

To me, Heston Blumenthal sounds like that rapper douche, Chris Brown, who keeps popping up to say he don’t know what happened when he beat his girlfriend at the time, Rihanna, but that people are still supposed to listen to him.

Heston, the famed chef of The Fat Duck, told This is London in a story published yesterday,

Legal constraints during the investigation by the Health Protection Agency, and again during further investigative work by insurers, effectively gagged him.

It’s clear that he found this enormously frustrating, and hated not being able to talk.

"The insurance company just put a big veil over everything too. For a while, I wasn’t allowed to go to Bray because the place was crawling with reporters."

The source was eventually traced to a specific strain of norovirus, or vomiting bug, found in oysters served in two dishes – "Jelly of Oyster and Passionfruit with Lavender", and the "Sound of the Sea".

"The report insinuated things that I find really frustrating," says Blumenthal. "For example, that people were back at work while they were physically ill.

"Now, our staff training manual very clearly lays out a 48-hour return to work policy – you don’t come back to work until 48 hours after you feel better – and I don’t know many restaurants that do that.

"I’d say there’s no other restaurant in the history of Britain that’s gone through such an investigation and then had the results released fully to the public in such detail."

"You have to ask the question: how is it that oysters are allowed to be harvested from waters containing sewage – at low levels, but sewage nevertheless – when this thing is so horrendously contagious?

"You only need one spore, and an oyster with a virus is still a glisteningly fresh clean oyster. It has no smell, and it’s very hard to test for."

It’s not a spore, it’s a virus. And since it’s so hard to test for, maybe you shouldn’t serve oysters raw if you don’t want your customers to barf.

Oh and Heston, I played with liquid nitrogen 25 years ago doing DNA sequencing; doesn’t make you a rock star; especially if over 500 people barf on your watch.

As the U.K. Health Protection Agency concluded earlier this year,

Delays in notification of illness may have affected the ability of the investigation to identify the exact reason for the norovirus contamination??????.

As I’ve said, it’s the chef’s responsibility to source food from safe sources. If the chef thinks raw shellfish is a smart thing to serve, and to have sick workers working, then customers get what they pay for.
 

Fat Duck won’t face charges – ‘I’ll never set foot in there again’ says food poisoning victim

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The Telegraph reports this morning that Heston Blumenthal and the Fat Duck restaurant – home to 529 cases of norovirus earlier this year – will not face criminal charges despite failures in reporting illness and what appears to be an overall lack of food safety awareness.

Windsor and Maidenhead Council said that although the restaurant could have taken greater steps to combat the norovirus outbreak, there was insufficient evidence to take formal action.

Jim Rosenthal, the television sports presenter, who was among those affected after dining at the restaurant to celebrate his wife Chrissy’s birthday, said,

“I’m disappointed but not surprised. Unfortunately, the council has probably been forced to take a pragmatic view and decide against what would probably be the enormous cost of mounting a case against someone who can afford the best lawyers." If it was a café at a lay-by doing what he did they would have been taken to court long ago. Chrissy and I will never set foot in there again.”

Boxing promoter Frank Warren, who is also still awaiting compensation, said,

"The whole way they have handled this has been a disaster from start to finish. To hear that the council isn’t going to take him on doesn’t surprise me – it’s just because of who he is rather than what he’s done or not done.”

A spokeswoman for the Duckster claimed that the HPA report was "flawed" and continued to blame others.

“We are not surprised by the local authority’s decision, given that the Health Protection Agency’s report clearly concludes that responsibility for the outbreak lies with a shellfish supplier and the local water authority after its shellfish was contaminated with the norovirus. Regarding the assumptions made about The Fat Duck in the report, both our own experts and those appointed by our insurers believe them to be flawed.”
 

Fat Duck still spinning but sorry for making 529 diners sick 7 months ago

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I don’t know who does public relations for the Fat Duck restaurant but they should be fired.

Seven months after sickening 529 customers with norovirus, Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal today said,

"I am relieved to be able to finally offer my fullest apologies to all those who were affected by the outbreak at the Fat Duck. It was extremely frustrating to not be allowed to personally apologise to my guests until now.

"It was devastating to me and my whole team, as it was to many of our guests and I wish to invite them all to return to the Fat Duck at their convenience."

Wow. Saying sorry is not an expression of guilt. It is an expression of empathy. Like, that really sucks you and 528 other people are barfing. I barfed once and it felt awful. Hope you feel better.

Some spokesthingy for the restaurant said,

"The Fat Duck, its insurers, experts and legal advisers only received a copy of this report a few hours before its publication and have only now had time to consider its contents. This meant that until all these parties had had the opportunity to review it and take expert advice it wasn’t appropriate or indeed possible to comment in detail on its contents or respond fully to our customers.”

Of course, that didn’t stop  Blumenthal from issuing his own delusional statement on Sept. 10, 2009, as soon as the Health Protection Agency report was released:

“We are glad that the report has finally been published and draws a conclusion to the closure of the Fat Duck and more importantly that the norovirus has been identified as the cause and not due to any lapse in our strict food preparation processes. We were affected by this virus during a national outbreak of what is an extremely common and highly contagious virus. The restaurant has been open as normal since March 12 and I would like to reassure our guests that they can continue to visit us with total confidence.”

All apologies aside, the report clearly stated that the norovirus outbreak – linked to the consumption of raw oysters — continued for at least six weeks because of "ongoing transmission at the restaurant” through "continuous contamination of foods prepared in the restaurant or by person-to-person spread between staff and diners or a mixture of both." The report also identified poor reporting and sick staff showing up and working as factors in making the outbreak far worse than it should have been.

Saying sorry is nice but never enough. The Fat Duck should be judged on its food safety actions.

Someone’s looking for some advertizing dollars: UK’s Independent says norovirus at Fat Duck was ‘a freakish occurrence;’ check toilets for cleanliness

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I first went to London in 1993. I was once again a graduate student, someone looked after the older two girls, and we took 6-week-old Braunwynn.

I loved to get a morning coffee – which cost about $895.58 pounds or something outrageous — and reading the broadsheet newspaper, The Independent.

About that time I also realized, The Independent sorta sucked.

Rob Sharp writes in today’s Independent that Robin Hancock – not the musician, but the proprietor of Wright Brothers, an oyster wholesaler which supplies top restaurants – says the risks are overblown. In fact, he says, oysters should be enjoyed because they are full of vitamins, iron, calcium and are low in cholesterol.

"I would like to set the record straight," he says. "food poisoning from oysters is something from the past. We sell four to five tonnes of oysters a week – that’s nearly 60,000 or 2.5 million a year – and we get maybe four or five cases of food poising in that time. What happened at the Fat Duck was somewhat of a freakish occurrence." Several thousand fishermen breathe a sigh of relief.

Fat Duck was 529. That’s more than four or five.

Hancock recommends the old adage of "checking to see if the toilets are clean" when venturing into a restaurant; general levels of hygiene can be a useful clue.

Not useful.

“We should not make too much of the viral thing; it is exceptionally rare. Again, I think the staff at the Fat Duck – where they are obsessed with a clinical, almost scientific preparation of food and are more than aware of these processes – were incredibly unlucky."

Or incredibly sloppy.

UK celebrity restaurant Quaglino’s closes after woman celebrating 50th birthday dies, possibly related to oysters

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A leading London restaurant has been forced to close after a female diner died of a mystery illness following a 50th birthday celebration there.

Quaglino’s was shut by management this week after the death of the Denise Martin who dined at the eatery with five friends on Saturday night.

The Health Protection Agency says it is investigating food poisoning as a possible cause of death.

Mother-of-two Ms Martin was found dead in her bed by partner Roy Johal,52, on Tuesday – three days after the meal which saw her eat oysters for the first time.

Last night the restaurant refused to comment, other than to confirm it had reopened following a two-day closure.
 

Metal man taken down by bad oyster

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Metal Underground – it’s my favorite source for news of all things Metal — reports Metallica frontman James Hetfield was recently taken to hospital after suffering from a stomach bug.

"James here, alive, at about 80% but getting better. I want to say sorry for missing the second Stockholm gig on Sunday due to illness. The cause/diagnosis at the hospital was narrowed down to either a 24 hr virus or a bad oyster…yes, hate to admit, an oyster could have taken me down.

"I acknowledge and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused fans who had travelled near and far for the show. I had done everything possible to make it, and was at the point of falling if I stood up. On a lighter note since my illness, the support band ‘Swedish Oyster Cult’ will be thrown off the tour. More Cowbell?…More barf bagz!!”