Alberta Health Services (AHS) is warning Calgarians to take precautions to reduce the risk of E. coli following 14 confirmed cases in the region including two linked to a pork sausage sold by local retailers.
According to AHS, tests confirm two patients who contracted E.coli O157:H7 had consumed Paolini’s Sausage & Meats Ltd.’s Hungarian Farmer’s Sausage.
“In the preparation of the product it was not processed adequately to be regarded as ready to eat,” explains Dr. Judy MacDonald, AHS medical officer of health for the Calgary Zone. “There was probably a misunderstanding, or a lack of understanding, about what to do with this product.”
Anyone who purchased Hungarian farmer’s sausage prior to February 2 should treat the sausage as if it contains raw pork and cook to an internal temperature of 71 degrees Celsius. MacDonald says Paolini’s provides sausage to more than 20 retailers and the name Paolini may not be evident on the product’s packaging.
On February 2, Paolini’s Sausage & Meats Ltd. production facility was closed and disinfected.
Nice to see my microbiological friends Linda Harris and Trevor Suslow, both of the University of California, Davis, mentioned in this National Geographic piece.
Rachel Becker writes that Chipotle Mexican Grill has had a rough couple of months.
In early December, Chipotle declared that it would revamp its food handling practices to become an industry leader in food safety. It even took the unprecedented step of announcing it would close more than 2,000 locations for four hours on February 8 so employees could attend a company-wide meeting broadcast from Denver to discuss the company’s new food safety procedures.
But the bad press just keeps coming. In a country where foodborne illnesses sicken 48 million people, hospitalize 128,000, and kill 3,000 each year, does Chipotle deserve the scrutiny it’s been getting? Or is the company that makes its money selling “Food with Integrity,” shunning the standard fast food supply chain in favor of “responsible” food, just getting picked on for trying to stand out?
Linda Harris, a food safety microbiologist at the University of California, Davis (left, exactly as shown, and she was on my PhD advisory committee), thinks that the scrutiny is fair, adding that the number of outbreaks Chipotle has had this year is “verging on the ridiculous.”
“I think if other restaurants have had problems over that time frame and in those states, it would have been reported as much as it was for Chipotle,” she says.
In July, five people in Seattle came down with E. coli O157:H7 infections after eating at a local Chipotle. Then in August, norovirus struck a southern California Chipotle, sickening a final count of 234 people including 18 employees according to Ventura County environmental health spokesperson Doug Beach.
Around the same time, tomatoes contaminated with Salmonella Newport found their way into 22 Chipotle locations in Minnesota, infecting 64 people. Between October and December two strains of another type of E. coli, E. coli O26, infected 60 people in total who had eaten at Chipotle. To cap off a series of unfortunate events, in December 136 people were infected with norovirus in Boston after eating at the fast-casual restaurant—the outbreak was traced back to a sick employee.
Fortunately, there have been no deaths. But there has been a lot of diarrhea.
Chipotle has taken steps to address the problems. It’s moved tomato, lettuce, and cheese preparation to a central kitchen, implemented more testing for dangerous microbes, added a blanching step for some of the produce, changed marinating procedures, and added financial incentives for restaurant managers that are contingent on high food safety audit scores.
But it wasn’t enough to stop the financial bleeding. The restaurant announced on February 2 that revenue went down the toilet in the fourth quarter of 2015 with a 44% decrease in profit.
Doug Powell, a former professor of food safety at Kansas State University and founder of the appropriately named food safety blog, barfblog.com, says that he anticipated these outbreaks at Chipotle years ago.
“I’ve pointed this out since 2007,” he says. “They were more concerned about GMO-free, sustainable, natural, antibiotic-free—and in my experience when you do that, you tend to lose your focus on the things that actually make people sick.”
(Chipotle, to some extent, also anticipated these problems; their 2014 Annual Report listed food borne illness as a potential consequence of their emphasis on using fresh produce in their restaurants.)
Chris Arnold, a Chipotle spokesperson, disagrees that Chipotle’s priorities were misplaced. “I don’t think there is any validity at all to that,” he says. “We have always maintained food safety programs that are consistent with industry standards. These incidents have shown us that we need to do better, and that is what we are doing.”
Trevor Suslow, who specializes in food safety of produce at University of California, Davis, says that assessing whether Chipotle’s new food handling strategies will be effective requires that Chipotle make more details available. He expressed concerns that blanching—dipping foods into boiling water for a matter of seconds—might not kill certain kinds of bacteria embedded in produce or coating food items in a biofilm.
And Suslow, Harris, and Powell also note that there are limits to how much food testing can protect a food supply chain. “Product testing is a very last icing on the cake, if you will, of food safety management. It’s a verification activity only. It should not be the basis of your food safety management program,” Harris says.
Chipotle spokesperson Arnold responds that testing is an important part of their new plans, but not the only part. It’s “the layering of all of these program components that contribute to the strength of the whole food safety program,” he says in an email.
Instead, Harris and Powell say, the key to avoiding repeated outbreaks is a systemic culture of food safety.
“I think it really goes back to Chipotles’ attitude,” Powell says. “They want to put all of their money into sustainable, GMO-free, organic, whatever. That’s great. I don’t really care about how it’s grown. I care if it’s going to make people barf.”
Design A retrospective cohort study using data collected through routine surveillance questionnaires between 2009 and 2012.
Participants 3323 symptomatic cases of STEC O157.
Main outcome measures Incidence of human STEC O157 and tHUS, proportion of cases reporting bloody diarrhoea, hospitalisation, tHUS and death. Odds of progression to tHUS and predicted percentage chance of developing tHUS based on case demographics, STEC O157 strain characteristics and clinical symptoms.
Results From 2009 to 2012, 3323 cases of symptomatic STEC O157 with completed questionnaires were reported, of which 172 developed tHUS (5.18%). Being aged 1–4 years (OR 8.65, 95% CI 5.01 to 14.94, p=0.004) or female (OR 1.61, 95% CI 1.12 to 2.30, p=0.009), being infected with phage type (PT) 21/28 (OR 2.07, 95% CI 1.25 to 3.42, p=0.005) or PT 2 (OR 2.18, 95% CI 1.06 to 4.50, p=0.034), receiving β-lactam antibiotics (OR 4.08, 95% CI 1.43 to 11.68, p=0.009) and presenting with vomiting (OR 3.16, 95% CI 2.16 to 4.62, p<0.001) or bloody diarrhoea (OR 2.10, 95% CI 1.38 to 3.20, p=0.001) were found to be significant risk factors for progression to tHUS. The predicted percentage chance of developing tHUS varied from under 1% to 50% if all risk factors were present.
Conclusions The data from this study indicate the use of β-lactam antibiotics should be avoided in suspected cases of STEC infection in all age groups, particularly in those under the age of 5.
Disease severity of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli O157 and factors influencing the development of typical haemolytic uraemic syndrome: a retrospective cohort study, 2009–2012
BMJ Open 2016;6:e009933
N Launders, L Byrne, C Jenkins, K Harker, A Charlett, G K Adak
Inactivation of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in beef roasts cooked under selected cooking conditions was evaluated.
Eye of round roasts were each inoculated at five sites in the central plane with a five-strain cocktail of E. coli O157:H7 at ca. 6.3 log CFU per site and cooked to center temperatures of 56 to 71°C in a convection oven set at 120, 140, 180, or 200°C, in a conventional oven set at 120 or 210°C, and in a slow cooker set on high or low.
Prime rib roasts were each inoculated at 10 sites throughout the roast with the same E. coli O157:H7 cocktail at ca. 6.6 log CFU per site and cooked in the conventional oven set at 140 or 180°C to center temperatures of 58 to 71°C.
The number of sites yielding E. coli O157:H7 after cooking decreased with increasing roast center temperature for the eye of round roasts cooked in the convection oven or in the slow cooker at a given setting, but this trend was not apparent for roasts of either type cooked in the conventional oven. Reductions of E. coli O157 in both types of roasts were generally less at the center than at other locations, particularly locations closer to the surface of the meat. When eye of round roasts were cooked to the same center temperature in the convection oven, the reduction of E. coli O157:H7 increased with increasing oven temperature up to 180°C and decreased after that. The reduction of E. coli O157:H7 in replicate roasts cooked under conditions in which the organism was not eliminated during cooking mostly differed by >1 log CFU per site. However, E. coli O157:H7 was not recovered from any of the inoculation sites when eye of round roasts were cooked to 65, 60, 60, or 63°C in the convection oven set at 120, 140, 180, and 200°C, respectively; cooked to 63 or 71°C in the conventional oven set at 120 and 210°C, respectively; or cooked to 63°C in the slow cooker set at high or low.
For prime rib roasts, E. coli O157:H7 was not recovered from any of the inoculation sites in roasts cooked to 71 or 58°C in the conventional oven set at 140 and 180°C, respectively.
Inactivation of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in beef roasts cooked in conventional or convection ovens or in a slow cooker under selected conditions.
Chipotle is apparently targeting its hipster university campus demographic – the people who buy into Chipotle’s marketing BS – by offering a $5 off coupon for blood donations at Hoxworth Blood Center, which is associated with the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
barfblog.com readers, please forward any other dubious marketing attempts to dpowell29@gmail.com.
Sure it was 4 a.m., I was talking with Joseph Erbentraut of The Huffington Post, getting ready for hockey, and didn’t want to deal with niceties.
It’s been six months since the start of Chipotle’s food safety crisis — a series of six outbreaks that have sickened at least 500 people.
The company has apologized for the outbreaks of norovirus and E. coli, tweaked its cooking methods and announced that it will temporarily close all its stores for a companywide food safety meeting on Feb. 8. But with an investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still underway, it appears the company still hasn’t identified the source of the contamination.
Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold pointed The Huffington Post to a Jan. 19 press release announcing that the company’s “comprehensive new food safety programs” are largely already in place, and that it will be sharing information with its employees at the Feb. 8 meeting about what they believe caused the food safety issues.
Doug Powell, a former Kansas State University food safety professor and the publisher and editor of Barfblog, a popular food safety blog, isn’t convinced. He’s been wary of Chipotle for almost a decade now, and has his doubts that the company’s new approach will solve anything.
HuffPost recently spoke with Powell about why Chipotle has struggled in its response to the outbreaks — and what it should be doing instead.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is it taking Chipotle so long to figure out the source of this E. coli outbreak, compared to the other food safety issues they’ve had over this last year?
Never underestimate the power of denial. The epidemiology is clear that there was an outbreak involving E. coli O26, and in this case it was probably from the cilantro or some other fresh produce item that wasn’t cooked. Fresh produce is the biggest source of foodborne illness in the U.S. and has been for the last 10 years, and that’s because it’s not cooked. We want it fresh.
Somehow in the last five years in the U.S., the produce folks have gotten much more aggressive about having to test [bacteria] in the product and find it. Tell any scientist that and they’ll say that’s bullshit, because it’s a fresh product, so it’s here and gone and we’re not going to find [bacteria]. Testing really only tells you that this one really minor sample, in this one batch, in one lot, came back negative. It doesn’t tell you much else. You can’t test your way to a safe food supply.
Chipotle has really built its brand around using fresh produce, and consumer demand for food like this has been rising. So the company has put itself in this risky position, right?
It doesn’t have to increase the risk. It means that they have to be better at having on-farm food safety plans for their suppliers and enforcing them. It seems to me that Chipotle was much more concerned about being natural, sustainable, GMO-free, hormone-free — anything but microbiologically safe — and that’s why they’ve had six outbreaks in six months. The two norovirus outbreaks have nothing to do with the on-farm contamination. That’s human.
They say they’ve introduced sick leave [on Wednesday], but they actually had it six months ago. They’re recycling press releases at this point, which tells me they’re kind of desperate. They’re all about the money and they’ve lost 47 percent of their stock value.
The company is facing a new class-action lawsuit this week, where it’s being accused of a cover-up in the norovirus outbreak in Simi Valley, California. How much damage has this done to Chipotle’s brand at this point?
It’s billions of dollars. It’s embarrassing that a company is allowed to get away with this sort of stuff, these multiple failures, while at the same time they’re charging a premium for “sustainable” food, whatever that means. All these adjectives that they use in their marketing don’t really mean anything. This is a company really focused on bullshit rather than being focused on microbiologically safe food. [Chipotle has emphasized that it is just as dedicated to using what it calls the highest-quality ingredients as it is to being an industry leader in food safety.]
Does the question of government regulation play a role in this?
Government is there to ensure a minimum standard. But they do not make the profit and they do not really enforce safe food. That is up to the company… You want to make the profit off the food, you’re going to be liable. So they’re taking some well-deserved hits at this point. Whether they’ll recover or not — they can, but just going to the PR solution and this gimmick of shutting all the stores down for two hours on Feb. 8 isn’t how you do training. It takes every week reinforcing the messages and focusing on one goal.
What should Chipotle be doing right now that it isn’t already? Are there examples to look to of similar companies that have handled this effectively?
They’ve followed the Jack in the Box model from 1993 in that they hired some food safety consultants and they’re listening to them. That’s good, but that is not going to change the culture within the organization. Those two norovirus outbreaks are cultural things more than anything. That’s not some mysterious bug coming in — it’s employees showing up sick to work. They can say they have strict procedures that sick employees don’t work, but anyone who’s ever worked at a restaurant knows what happens when you don’t show up to work. You’re done.
I don’t see, so far, that they’ve gotten that religious about food safety. They’ve hired some good consultants and they’ll do more testing and that’s all good, but when you’ve got 2,000 locations, that’s a pretty big vulnerability.
Volkswagen’s top executive apologized earlier this month for his company’s role in its ongoing emissions cheating. CEO Matthias Mueller spoke at a Detroit restaurant on the eve of the city’s annual auto show, and said, I’m sorry.
Not much else.
I’ve been to that auto show, covering it as a journalist for a computer magazine 25 years ago, and it was deeply weird.
Scantily-clad women, sales-thingies hawking their new toys, a lot of back-slapping and back-stabbing.
As they say in Kansas, always smile when you twist the knife (because a straight stab usually isn’t enough to kill).
Blue Bell Creameries says that new findings of Listeria in one of its ice cream manufacturing plants are media misstatements.
And they’re still sorry.
When your product kills three people and your food safety strategy is shown to be woefully insufficient, that’s a bad soundbite.
Instead, share Listeria test results with the public, through a website or QR codes. How much does Blue Bell have left to lose?
Probably less than Chipotle.
The diarrhea burrito is not healthy eating, but Chipotle is still getting a free pass – not so for Chipotle shareholders, who have seen their investments decline by 47 percent in the past six months.
They’re really sorry too.
For whatever reason – money – Chipotle investors and apologists are willing to look beyond the company’s many failings.
If Chipotle really wanted to be a leader, they would have embraced microbiologically safe food and internal verification long before the 2015 outbreaks.
If Chipotle really wanted to be a leader they’d stop playing to consumer fears with their advertising.
If Chipotle really wanted to be a leader, they would embrace genetically engineered foods that require fewer and far less harmful pesticides.
Chipotle is a follower, sucking up dollars wherever it can.
In its latest PR rah-rah stunt, Chipotle is going to close all of its 1,900 outlets on Feb. 8 for a few hours “for company executives to be transparent about the status of the E. coli outbreak, and what Chipotle is doing to prevent it from happening again.”
“Chipotle emphasizes fresh, locally sourced ingredients. It was the first major chain to reject genetically modified food. Chipotle has embodied the notion of doing well by doing good.”
That’s not doing anyone any good.
It’s marketing BS.
Consumers aren’t so dumb or confused. Chipotle said same-store sales dropped a greater-than-expected 14.6 percent in the last quarter, and analysts have been scrambling to downgrade their ratings.
They’re going to wait until Feb. 8 to close all its restaurants so employees can learn about the gravity of its foodborne illness outbreak.
E-mail works.
Last week, company executives appeared at an investor conference in Florida in a bid to soothe unnerved shareholders, if not customers, and acknowledged 2016 would be a “messy” year for earnings. As reported in Wired, it helped. Shares in the company, once a darling of Wall Street, rebounded more than 12 percent and appear to be holding steady.
People can be dumb.
But food safety is nothing compared to the weight of investor portfolios, so of course, Chipotle had an investor smile and shake before it had a food safety meeting.
Anything to make a buck.
“During that whole time, all of our food safety and food handling practices were within industry standards,” Chris Arnold, a Chipotle spokesman, says. “These incidents have shown us what we need to do better in that area, and that is exactly what we are doing.”
The Pinto defense – that car that had a tendency to blow up when hit from behind — should not inspire investors.
And more testing won’t stop Norovirus.
“This plan should reduce the risk of similar risks to a level as near zero as is possible,” Arnold says.
There is no such thing as zero risk, no matter, how much testing, a topic I covered almost 20 years ago in my co-authored book, Mad Cows and Mother’s Milk.
That Chipotle is just discovering this concept is an embarrassment for all the investors who have lost money.
And a blight on microbial food safety.
Stop apologizing for Chipotle just because it may be hipster.
In 2006, then U.S. food safety czar, David Acheson, proclaimed on CNN – that was back when people watched CNN – that spinach after the 2006 outbreak that killed four and sickened about 200 would, when it back on sale, be as safe as it was before the outbreak.
For whatever reason – money – Chipotle investors and apologists are willing to look beyond the company’s many failings.
If Chipotle really wanted to be a leader, they would have embraced microbiologically safe food and internal verification long before the 2015 outbreaks.
If Chipotle really wanted to be a leader they’d stop playing to consumer fears with their advertising.
If Chipotle really wanted to be a leader, they would embrace genetically engineered foods that require fewer and far less harmful pesticides.
Chipotle is a follower, sucking up dollars wherever it can.
Chipotle’s stock price sits is currently down around 40% off its 52-week high, as the outbreak news hurt sales more than had been expected. The company has advised investors that it could be a few rocky quarters before Chipotle sees a definitive, positive improvement.
In an effort to bring back some of the customers it’s lost, Chipotle co-CEO Monty Moran said Wednesday it will be doubling the amount of free food restaurants can give away to its customers, reports CNBC.com.
The New York Times says, with a straight face, Chipotle’s new mantra is “Safe food, not just fresh” while gushing that, “From its start in 1993 as a burrito stand in Denver opened by a young Culinary Institute of America-trained chef who borrowed money from his parents, Chipotle now has more than 2,000 locations. Its stock nearly doubled over the last five years, and in August the company reached a market value of $23 billion.
“Chipotle emphasizes fresh, locally sourced ingredients. It was the first major chain to reject genetically modified food. Chipotle has embodied the notion of doing well by doing good.”
That’s not doing anyone any good.
It’s marketing BS.
Consumers aren’t so dumb or confused. Chipotle said same-store sales dropped a greater-than-expected 14.6 percent in the last quarter, and analysts have been scrambling to downgrade their ratings. On Tuesday, Chipotle shares dipped below $400 and were down 47 percent from the August high.
Two of the incidents, the one in Simi Valley, Calif., in August that sickened 234 people, and another in Boston in December, which affected at least 136 customers, were linked to a norovirus, a highly contagious virus that causes gastroenteritis. It is spread through contact with an infected person, a surface bearing the virus, or by contaminated food.
Chipotle has said both outbreaks were caused by sick employees who ignored strict policies prohibiting them from coming to work and, without elaborating, said that disciplinary measures were meted out to those responsible.
Anyone can say they have strict policies (Heston-norovirus-isn’t-my-fault Blumenthal comes to mind) but verification, that takes effort.
In August, 64 people were treated for salmonella after eating at a Chipotle in Minnesota. Fresh tomatoes were identified as the culprit.
Chipotle shares have jumped nearly 14 percent over the last two days after company executives gave an upbeat presentation to investors, bankers and analysts at the ICR investor conference in Orlando, Fla., where they predicted the brand would regain its luster and reiterated an aggressive expansion and growth plan.
FoodNet Canada tracks illnesses of the gut, commonly known as food poisoning, in Canadians, and traces them back to their sources, such as food, water and animals. These data are analyzed to help determine which sources are causing the most illness among Canadians and help us track illnesses and their causes over time.
In the 2014 surveillance year, FoodNet Canada was active in three sites (partially or throughout the entire year) in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. In each location, or “sentinel site,” enhanced human disease surveillance is performed in parallel with active surveillance for specific bacteria, viruses and parasites in the possible sources to which the ill may have been exposed.
The purpose of this report is to present the preliminary findings from the 2014 surveillance year in the sentinel sites. This report will be followed by a comprehensive annual report which will include more extensive analyses of temporal trends and subtyping information for an integrated perspective on enteric disease from exposure to illness.
With the expansion to three sites in 2014, FoodNet Canada is able to provide more valuable information on enteric disease in Canada. This information on enteric disease continues to be essential to the development of robust food and water safety policies in Canada.
In 2014, Campylobacterand Salmonella remained the most common causes of human enteric illness in the sentinel sites.
Campylobacterwas the most prevalent pathogen found on skinless chicken breast in all sites with close to one-half of all samples testing positive. Across all three sites,Salmonella is the most commonly found pathogen in chicken nuggets, with more than one-quarter of all samples testing positive. Salmonella prevalence on skinless chicken breast ranged across the sites from 15% – 26%. In ground beef, VTEC remains at a low prevalence. Pork chops appear to contain the pathogens of interest (Campylobacter,Salmonella, and Listeria monocytogenes) at relatively low levels.
Fresh-cut fruit sampling showed that these products are rarely positive for the parasites, viruses and bacteria tested.
On farm, Salmonellawas commonly found in broiler chickens in all sites. Salmonella was also found in turkey in the BC site, but at a lower prevalence than in the broiler chickens. In turkey in the BC site, Campylobacter was again the most common pathogen found in 2014, as in 2013. Campylobacter was also commonly found in beef and dairy manure samples in the ON site, as in previous years. Campylobacter prevalence in broiler chickens was variable across the sites, ranging from 8.7% – 22%.
VTEC was found in about one quarter of irrigation water samples in the BC and AB sites.
Results from the 2014 FoodNet Canada sampling year have demonstrated that retail meat products, particularly chicken products, remain an important source of human enteric pathogens. Some of this contamination is likely due to high levels on farm and other points along the farm to store continuum. Fresh-cut fruit does not appear to be an important source of enteric disease for Canadians, while irrigation water has the potential to be a source of VTEC in particular. Continued monitoring of human cases and potential sources in the sentinel sites is important to help further understand enteric disease in Canada and detect emerging trends. This information will help protect Canadians and help to develop future public health policy.
According to AHS, tests confirm two patients who contracted E.coli O157:H7 had consumed Paolini’s Sausage & Meats Ltd.’s Hungarian Farmer’s Sausage.
