Everything can be recorded, amplified through social media: Worm found in Connecticut school lunch

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Douglas Powell

A worm discovered in a fruit cup served for lunch at Sheehan High School in Wallingford has some parents worrying about food safety. The director of food services confirmed Monday that a fruit worm was found in one fruit cup served for lunch and was sent to a lab for testing.

Parents took to Facebook Monday morning expressing concerns after parent Kimberly Davidson posted several cell phone photos taken by students showing worms and a moldy loaf of bread served for lunch at Sheehan. At least three separate pictures appear to depict worms in the school lunches.

Davidson said her daughter sent her a picture of a worm from her fruit cup several weeks ago via Snapchat and last week overheard several other students complaining about finding similar bugs in their food. Davidson said she was contacted by Gini Selvaggi on Friday saying her daughter had also found a worm in her fruit cup that week at Sheehan.

“What are they feeding our kids?” Davidson asked. “It looks like a maggot.”

“It’s kind of gross that this is an ongoing problem,” Selvaggi said.

After seeing the pictures posted on social media, Town Councilor Christine Mansfield reached out to Food Services Director Sharlene Wong, who confirmed that a worm had been discovered, not a maggot.

“It was a fruit worm that was found in the cupped fruit,” Wong wrote. “The distributor was contacted and a QA review started. The company came to pick up the worm and the supposed fruit cup it was in. My understanding is that it is being sent to a lab for testing.”

Wong said she had also received a letter from the company that packs the canned fruit.

“They stated that ‘organic matter’ can appear because it is impossible for fruit to be defect free due to the limited amount of pesticides being used in orchards,” she wrote. “They process thousands of pounds of fruit through the high speed processing line and a fruit worm could be in the middle of a piece of fruit and make it into the can. The canning process cooks the organic material. They stated there was no danger of any foreign matter surviving.”

From the duh files: Media can help slow spread of disease, study finds

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Douglas Powell

A mathematical study of how infectious diseases spread has demonstrated a surprising link between the progress of an outbreak and the way that outbreak is portrayed in the media.

The study suggests that when public health officials are speaking to reporters about an outbreak, they should include information about the rate at which a disease is spreading and not just the total number of cases in a population. The study’s authors say that in a real-world situation, effective media communication could delay the peak of an outbreak by days or weeks, buying crucial time for health agencies to respond.

“It’s a really interesting result,” said Abba Gumel, a professor of mathematical biology at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study. “It shows that the quality of media coverage, especially during the early stages of an outbreak, is really important.”

To quantify that importance, researchers led by Jianhong Wu, director of York University’s Centre for Disease Modelling in Toronto, built a mathematical model based on a 2009 flu outbreak with data on case numbers from the Shaanxi province of China. In the model, the influence of the media has an effect on the number of individual contacts, which can spread the infection from one person to another.

“We know intuitively that the media can change population behaviour,” Dr. Wu said. “What we’re trying to do is find the functional relationship between the media and that change.”

When the media influence was removed or altered in the model, the team was able to study the difference in the way the outbreak proceeded. They found that the media’s impact was not uniform across the duration of the outbreak but was strongest during the initial stages, when the rate of new infections is changing most rapidly.

In contrast to previous studies, they found that media impact seems to switch off as an outbreak nears its peak, despite the fact that this is when the probability of getting infected is at its highest. In a discussion of their results, published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, the team said that the way media influence switches on and off as a disease spreads through a population may account for why some outbreaks feature multiple peaks.

A key finding of the study is that by emphasizing the rate of change of case numbers rather than simply the total number of cases, officials may be able to significantly slow the growth of an outbreak. In the case of a deadly flu pandemic, that would increase the opportunity for health agencies to develop and produce antiviral medications.

#Norovirus

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Ben Chapman

Katie Overbey, an MS student studying food science at NC State writes,

The Internet is a hub for oversharing, and nothing seems to be off limits, including vomit.

Check out these Twitter hashtags from recent school outbreaks of norovirus: #RHSplagu, and #DSSplague2014. RHS is Richardson High School in Texas, where norovirus sickened about 600 people this past January. The second hashtag is from Delta Secondary School in Canada, where about 300 people came down with norovirus in June. Some common themes from these hashtags are updates on the progression of the virus, concerns about missing school, various plans for trying to not get sick and discussions about vomit. Don’t have your vomit fix? Do a search of #norovirus on Twitter and for even more fun try #vomit.

Besides providing hours of entertainment and the occasional cringe, why should people care about broadcasting their bodily functions for the world to see?

Researchers are demonstrating that the symptom-sharing provides a signal to aid in identifying outbreaks. All those seemingly TMI posts about people’s evenings spent on the toilet could actually be predicting norovirus outbreaks sooner than any lab test. New York City Health Department has been using Yelp reviews that mention food poisoning or norovirus to find outbreaks and gather more details about them. Chicago has a Twitter account, @foodbornechi, for people to tweet about their foodborne illnesses.

Last year, the U.K. Food Standards Agency (FSA) embarked on a social media listening project that, it hopes, has the potential to predict outbreaks of the winter vomiting bug, norovirus, earlier than ever before.

FSA’s social media team sifted through Twitter data from the last norovirus outbreak during the winter of 2012-13, hunting for spikes in certain related key words and phrases being used in tweets. They then compared the frequency of the key words to the number of lab reports of confirmed norovirus cases in the same period.

They found significant correlations between spikes in the number of lab reports and spikes in conversations on Twitter using words and hashtags such as #winterbug, #norovirus, sickness bug, winter virus and vomiting.

What’s more, they discovered a set of symptom keywords, such as #barf, #flu, chuck up, puke, retch and upset stomach, which strongly correlated to future lab cases.

FSA stated some caveats though, – People self-diagnose. Symptom keywords and search terms are broad so “there’s always going to be a bit of noise”. And early warnings of an outbreak will increase chatter around the subject and might skew the data.

Exploring the use of Twitter for disease detection is promising and could allow health officials to disseminate information earlier and potentially control the spread of norovirus.

Use of social media to identify foodborne illness — Chicago, Illinois, 2013–2014

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Douglas Powell

An estimated 55 million to 105 million persons in the United States experience acute gastroenteritis caused by foodborne illness each year, resulting in costs of $2–$4 billion annually (1).

Many persons do not seek treatment, resulting in underreporting of the actual number of cases and cost of the illnesses (2). To prevent foodborne illness, local health departments nationwide license and inspect restaurants (3) and track and respond to foodborne illness complaints. New technology might allow health departments to engage with the public to improve foodborne illness surveillance (4). For example, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene examined restaurant reviews from an online review website to identify foodborne illness complaints (5). On March 23, 2013, the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) and its civic partners launched FoodBorne Chicago (6), a website (https://www.foodbornechicago.orgExternal Web Site Icon) aimed at improving food safety in Chicago by identifying and responding to complaints on Twitter about possible foodborne illnesses. In 10 months, project staff members responded to 270 Twitter messages (tweets) and provided links to the FoodBorne Chicago complaint form.

A total of 193 complaints of possible foodborne illness were submitted through FoodBorne Chicago, and 133 restaurants in the city were inspected. Inspection reports indicated 21 (15.8%) restaurants failed inspection, and 33 (24.8%) passed with conditions indicating critical or serious violations. Eight tweets and 19 complaint forms to FoodBorne Chicago described seeking medical treatment. Collaboration between public health professionals and the public via social media might improve foodborne illness surveillance and response. CDPH is working to disseminate FoodBorne Chicago via freely available open source software

FoodBorne Chicago tracked Twitter messages using a supervised learning algorithm (7). The algorithm parsed tweets originating from Chicago that included “food poisoning” to identify specific instances of persons with complaints of foodborne illness. The geographic boundaries used by the algorithm also included some neighboring Chicago suburbs. However, follow-up inspections were conducted only at restaurant locations within the city limits. Tweets identified by the algorithm were reviewed by project staff members for indications of foodborne illness (e.g., stomach cramps, diarrhea, or vomiting) from food prepared outside the home. Project staff members provided feedback on whether each tweet fit the criteria, enabling the tweet identification algorithm to learn and become more effective over time.

For tweets meeting the criteria, project staff members used Twitter to reply. For example, Tweet: “Guess who’s got food poisoning? This girl!” Reply: “That doesn’t sound good. Help us prevent this and report where you ate here (link to Foodborne Chicago and a web form to report the illness).” The information in submitted forms went directly into the Chicago 311 system that handles all requests for nonemergency city services. Descriptive statistics were used to evaluate FoodBorne Chicago over its first 10 months of use and to compare the results of complaint-based health inspections of food establishments resulting from FoodBorne Chicago use with health inspections of food establishments based on complaints not submitted through FoodBorne Chicago. The comparisons did not include reinspections or routine inspections not based on a complaint.

During March 2013–January 2014, FoodBorne Chicago identified 2,241 “food poisoning” tweets originating from Chicago and neighboring suburbs. From these, project staff members identified 270 tweets describing specific instances of persons with complaints of foodborne illness. Eight of the 270 tweets (3.0%) mentioned a visit to a doctor or an emergency department. A total of 193 complaints of food poisoning were submitted through the FoodBorne Chicago web form. However, project staff members were not able to track how many of the 193 came from persons led to the form via Twitter and how many came from persons who visited the FoodBorne Chicago site on their own.

Of the 193 FoodBorne Chicago complaints, 19 (9.8%) persons indicated they sought medical care. The complaints identified 179 Chicago restaurant locations; at 133 (74.3%) locations, CDPH inspectors conducted unannounced health inspections. These 133 inspections amounted to 6.9% of the 1,941 health inspections of food establishments prompted by complaints during the study period. Of the 133 FoodBorne Chicago–prompted health inspections, 122 (91.7%) inspection reports identified at least one health violation, compared with 91.8% of inspection reports following complaints filed outside of FoodBorne Chicago during the same period.

Of the 133 FoodBorne Chicago–prompted health inspections 27 (20.3%) identified at least one critical violation, compared with 16.4% of the 1,808 inspections not prompted by FoodBorne Chicago. Critical violations indicate an “immediate health hazard” resulting in a high risk for foodborne illness. Critical violations must be fixed while the inspector is present or the restaurant fails inspection, has its license suspended, and is closed.* Twenty-nine restaurants (21.8%) reported via FoodBorne Chicago had at least one serious violation compared with 27.8% of restaurants not reported via FoodBorne Chicago. Serious violations indicate a “potential health hazard” that must be corrected within a timeframe determined by the health inspector, typically 5 days. If the serious violation is not fixed on re-inspection, the license is suspended, and the business is closed. Overall, at least one critical or serious violation was found in 37.6% of inspections prompted by FoodBorne Chicago and 37.2% of inspections from other complaints during the same period.

Some differences were noted in the distribution of specific violations between FoodBorne Chicago inspections and other complaint inspections. For example, 13.5% of FoodBorne Chicago inspections resulted in (critical) violation 3 (i.e., food not stored at appropriate temperatures), compared with 8.2% of other complaint inspections (Table). In addition, 14.3% of other complaint inspections reported (serious) violation 18 (i.e., food not protected from contamination), compared with 6% of FoodBorne inspections.

A total of 21 (15.8%) of the 133 restaurants reported through FoodBorne Chicago failed inspection and were closed; an additional 33 restaurants (24.8%) passed with conditions, indicating that serious or critical violations were identified and corrected during inspection or within a specified timeframe. Of the inspected restaurants with complaints not reported through FoodBorne Chicago, 25.8% failed and 14.2% passed with conditions. During the study period, among all restaurants inspected, FoodBorne Chicago–prompted inspections accounted for 4.3% of failed inspections and 11.4% of pass with conditions inspections.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Jenine K. Harris, PhD, Raed Mansour, MS, Bechara Choucair, MD, Joe Olson, Cory Nissen, MS, Jay Bhatt, DO

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6332a1.htm?s_cid=mm6332a1_x

Thai restaurant in NZ goes online to fight vandals

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Douglas Powell

When a vandal smashed the Thai Container in Christchurch, the owner turned not to police, but social media.

Thirty minutes after posting security video on his Facebook page, owner Ren Bell had the alleged offender’s name – and an apology.

The video shows a well-dressed young man walk on to the site about on Saturday. He looks at a security camera then disappears from screen. About 30 seconds later, the camera is destroyed.

The damage tally included two security cameras, gas piping, a flood from towels placed in the sink and the taps turned on, a door and stock, totalling about $2000.

It was the fourth time Thai Container had been targeted by vandals since Bell and his wife set it up in May 2011. They lost their central city restaurant in the quake.

Bell reported the three earlier incidents to police, giving them security footage, but heard nothing.

This time, he decided to do his own sleuth work and says he would do it again in a heartbeat.

Bell offered a $500 reward for whoever “can deliver this guy”, uploading the security video on the restaurant Facebook page.

Within half an hour, the man “handed himself in” by sending Bell a private message.

The young man, alerted to the post by friend, said he was sorry and agreed to meet Bell at a hamburger restaurant to sort out reparation and settle things privately.

Bell said he waited an hour last night, but the young man was a no-show.

So Bell handed the footage, the man’s name and details to police today, telling them, “job is done, see you in court”, he said.

“Now I really truly comprehend the power of social media,” he said.

Detective Sergeant Darren Folau said social media was a platform that police also embraced.

We like the social media stuff: barfblog is now active on Facebook

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Ben Chapman

Someone asked me about the history of barfblog this week – stuff like how it started and where the name came from.

Here’s how I remember it: Doug had been editing a bunch of daily listservs (FSNet, Agnet, Animalnet and FFnet) in some form since 1993. These were a big source of food safety-related news for risk managers (folks in industry, academia and the regulatory agencies) before Google Alerts, RSS feeds and Twitter existed. Beyond sharing what was going on in the food safety world, Doug encouraged the students and staff who worked for him to write evidence-based commentary and submit op-eds and letters to the major publications (back when there were actual newspapers).

I came along in 2000 and became a news junkie and jumped into the whole share-your-thoughts-in-an-interesting-way thing. Even with my grammar, spelling and general logic challenges. In 2005, when self-publishing was all the rage, we decided to start a forum to post stories about food safety experiences, the stuff that others didn’t publish or didn’t fit the format of the traditional newspapers.

And we started a blog. It wasn’t really a blog at the start, but a forum. And it got bombarded by porn spam. So we left it for a while and relaunched the whole thing in 2007.

But it needed a name.

Christian, a particularly creative undergraduate, came up with the name – barfblog (all in lowercase as Dave Stanley always told Doug uppercase was a waste in e-mail, and he agrees) – and then created a video of him guzzling vermouth and actually barfing.

The idea was (and still is) to write stories about what makes people barf and take current news items and highlight what we thought was important – based on the literature and our experiences.

Doug’s more concise description is this:

Every time I talk to someone on a plane, train or automobile, they find out what I do, and then proceed to tell me their worst barf story. barfblog.com was created to capture those stories, except most people don’t want to be bothered writing, so we did it for them.

Since 2007 we’ve embraced social media as a channel to carry out that dialogue and increase discussion. But we’ve really sucked at Facebook. Until now. We’ve got a somewhat new, but now active space where we’ll be posting our, uh, blog posts as well as pictures and links. And we’re looking for folks to jump in on the discussions.
Check out barfblog on Facebook at Facebook.com/safefoodblog

Food safety communication: reinventing the past, but with new tools

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Douglas Powell

Twitter, online news and blogs are increasingly important communication channels when talking about food safety.

Duh.

That’s the conclusion of a European Union funded project.

Based on three case studies, the researchers also found Twitter was primarily used during all recent food crises to inform readers of breaking news and to refer them to more detailed information – usually online news. Compared to traditional media, social media users respond very quickly to a food crisis; however, they also lose interest quicker.

The researchers also encourage communicators to monitor ‘what is being said’ and ‘who said it’. Monitoring provides insight into consumers’ perceptions of food issues and allows detection and tracking of impending issues and on-going debates. It also provides an opportunity to correct any misleading or incorrect information.

Risk communication 101.

Based on a web-based survey with more than 6,000 consumers from nine countries in Europe — Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK — consumers most likely learn about food issues from the television and in newspapers.

Why did an Internet-based survey conclude that people watch TV? Must be that multi-tasking thing.

I look forward to the results being published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The FoodRisC project concludes that the current popularity of social media has increased the potential of these channels for communicating about food issues, but more traditional means of communication still have an important role to play. To build a strong communication strategy, the FoodRisC project encourages communicators to look into consumer reactions in each specific case, and respond accordingly. FoodRisC created the online VIZZATA tool (www.vizzata.com), enabling communicators to explore consumer responses to new, conflicting or uncertain messages, to obtain insights and facilitate future communications.

On 12 September 2013, at the FoodRisC/European Food Safety Authority Conference ‘New Challenges when Communicating Food-Related Issues’, researchers presented key research outcomes, including the FoodRisC e-resource centre on food risk and benefit communication created by the FoodRisC project. FoodRisC was a three-and-a-half-year EU-funded project to assist communicators in effective dissemination about food issues, and thereby promote consumer understanding through clear messages.

Scientists urge food safety professionals not to dismiss social media

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Douglas Powell

I’m not sure food safety types were dismissing social media; we haven’t, and continue to actively research potential benefits, pitfalls, and improvements.

And we practice what we preach.

So do lots of others.

A new paper has outlined why food safety professionals cannot afford to dismiss the use of social media as a communication tool.

The science paper, titled ‘The use of social media in food risk and benefit communication‘, is published in a leading international journal Trends in Food Science and Technology. The authors are researchers from Ghent University in Belgium, University College Dublin in Ireland, and a communications company in the United Kingdom. Their research into this area is part of the FoodRisC (‘Food Risk Communication – Perceptions and communication of food risk/benefits across Europe’) project, which is funded under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission.

The researchers believe that many opportunities are opening up for food risk communicators through the wide variety of social media applications and the digital environment. As a result, users of social networks are playing a fundamental role as disseminators of food risk and benefit information. So, for food professionals, being able to monitor online conversations could provide an insight into consumers’ perceptions of food issues. This also allows detection and tracking of impending issues and ongoing debates on topics such as genetic modification and animal cloning.

However, because of the broad landscape of social media, it can often be seen as a minefield of information which is either incorrect or misleading. This is where food risk communicators need to be proactive on social media, details the science paper. This could effectively increase visibility for the general public and key opinion formers (i.e. popular bloggers and journalists), and help to establish food professionals as credible interactive sources of information, enabling timely communication with the public.
Having a social media presence, claim the researchers, is vital in order to rapidly address and correct developments containing inaccuracies and misinformation, thus ensuring an erroneous momentum does not build up. This is particularly important in food crisis situations where social media can lend itself to scare mongering and create potentially unwarranted panic and hysteria.

Active involvement with social media, in particular the constant monitoring and correcting of inaccurate information, is likely to require considerable effort, resources and long-term expense (the time and cost effectiveness of different popular social media tools are graded low, medium or high in the paper).

Commenting on the review findings, coordinator of the FoodRisC research project Professor Patrick Wall said, ‘There is an increasing trend of private businesses investing in social media. Other risk and benefit communicators, such as food safety authorities, have been slow to use social media and there is a real need to harness this resource, so that it becomes a productive tool for communicating on food risks and benefits.’

The researchers conclude that the distribution of information is not the only task for food risk communicators in times of crisis. An organization that takes responsibility or expresses sympathy during a crisis is regarded as more honorable and understanding. Social media applications are especially useful in this area due to the opportunity for direct communication and interaction with the audience.