A story today in the National Post reports that Canadian farmers have filed four class-action suits  seeking compensation for losses of more than $9-billion since 2003 due primarily to government mismanagement of BSE. 

C’mon food industry, the government isn’t your mom.  You should not continually rely on regulators to protect you from everything, and expect them to know the risk associated with your business better than you do.  The government is there to support public health and create an infrastructure to produce safe food and control disease.

Cameron Pallett, the lawyer representing the cattle farmers was quoted today as saying that the Canadian government lost track of cattle imported from the UK in the 1980s and 90s and that "the government released a report in 2006 that said the likely cause of Canada’s BSE crisis was one of these cows — whoops."  Mr. Pallett also goes on to say it took 18 months for Canada to act on a World Health Organization recommendation in 1996 to ban feed containing cattle or sheep remnants. 

So why didn’t the cattle industry force a defacto feed ban by requiring that their input suppliers not use risky products? That could have been done without the government’s help — farmers, not the government, actually bought the feed.

Even if Pallet and his clients are correct about the mismanagement, how many other cows with the BSE were not counted or couldn’t be counted?  We still know little about BSE appearance and transmission.  How well has the industry been implementing feed restrictions? The Edmonton Journal suggested not very well in 2005 (CFIA found mislabeled or problem feed during inspections) — but went on to also blame the government.

It’s garbage to suggest that the economic impact of BSE in Canada can be blamed primarily on one player.  Like many food safety issues everyone from farm to fork had a role to play. 

It’s expected that farmers, processors, distributors, retailers and food service operators know the risks that come with their raw ingredients, processes and final products and how to manage them. If there are problems, it’s industry’s job to fix them. And if they can’t, they face the repercussions.

The FDA announced yesterday that it will begin a multi-year Tomato Safety Initiative to reduce the incidence of tomato-related foodborne illness in the United States. 

FDA investigators in coordination with their respective state counterparts will visit tomato farms and packing facilities in Florida and Virginia to assess food safety practices and use of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs).

It’s clear that the FDA thinks, as do I, that  the produce industry must do more to ensure that everyone from farm-to-fork recognizes food safety risks and take concrete actions to reduce the risks of dangerous microorganisms. And in the absence of verification from within, government is stepping in.

Regulators and the industry in the past have have released food safety guidelines for tomatoes, but there is a lack of verification; it is unclear if all growers are actually following the guidelines. The FDA announcement is a good step, but the industry should have been able to do this themselves.

Guidelines are a first step, but we need more creative ways to compel everyone, from the person harvesting to the person distributing, to take food safety seriously, even in the absence of an outbreak.

A list of North American tomato outbreaks can be found here.

Check out our papers below:

Luedtke, A., Chapman, B. and Powell, D.A. 2003. Implementation and analysis of an on-farm food safety program for the production of greenhouse vegetables. Journal of Food Protection. 66:485-489.

Powell, D.A., Bobadilla-Ruiz, M., Whitfield, A. Griffiths, M.G.. and Luedtke, A. 2002. Development, implementation and analysis of an on-farm food safety program for the production of greenhouse vegetables in Ontario, Canada. Journal of Food Protection. 65: 918- 923.

We also published a book chapter entitled Implementing On-Farm Food Safety Programs in Fruit and Vegetable Cultivation, in the recently published, Improving the Safety of Fresh Fruit and Vegetables

Bill Warren of CBS 7 television in Texas reports that no one has to get sick from E. coli O157:H7 contaminated meat, as long as, "you keep everything clean, and cook the meat thoroughly."

Cross-contamination and cooking a hamburger to 160F are not simple tasks. Most of food safety is not simple.
Warren also says that plastic cutting boards are safer than wooden, and that if the juice is still pink, "it’s not done yet. If it’s clear, it’s done." Not so.

The only way to ensure that hamburger has reached such a temperature is to use a tip probe, instant-read digital meat thermometer. Research has shown that colour is a lousy indicator of doneness — some burgers turn brown prematurely before 70 degrees C is reached, others can remain pinkish well beyond 70.

 
To further complicate matters, an individual hamburger will cook at different rates throughout the burger depending on thickness and fat content.

In one study it was found that when the outer temperature of hamburgers reached a temperature of 71.1ºC, the inside was only at a temperature of 56.7ºC. To check a burger, grab it with tongs, insert the thermometer sideways into the middle of the burger and wait a few seconds. As Pete Snyder of the Hospitality Institute in Minnesota has documented, when done correctly, one can observe the hot temperature at the surface and, as the probe is pushed into the hamburger, the temperature goes down. As the probe passes through the cold spot, the temperature goes up again. It is critically important that temperature not be taken with a stationary thermometer, but in a dynamic manner by pushing  through the hamburger, so that a few Salmonella or E. coli in the middle of the hamburger are reduced.

Scotland on Sunday reports that Nick Nairn, one of the UK’s foremost celebrity chefs, who has cooked venison for the Queen’s birthday, pops up regularly on television screens and charges guests up to £300 a day to master the culinary arts has been forced to eat an exquisitely prepared portion of humble pie by a team of health and hygiene inspectors.

Unannounced visits to the chef’s cook school at Port of Menteith near Stirling between 2003 and last year resulted in no fewer than 13 recommendations to improve standards of cleanliness, equipment and food storage.

Perhaps most embarrassing of all, officials invited the Aston Martin-driving chef and his staff to attend a cleanliness seminar.

Nairn last night insisted the criticisms were minor and did not affect food safety, and revealed his cook school was shutting for a week this summer for a major refurbishment that would exceed health standards.

In 2004, my laboratory reported that, based on 60 hours of detailed viewing of television cooking shows, an unsafe food handling practice occurred about every four minutes, and that for every safe food handling practice observed, we observed 13 unsafe practices. The most common errors were inadequate hand washing and cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat foods.

Massachusetts lawmaker James Valle, Democrat, has filed legislation that would require all new public bathrooms built in the State to have doors that open outward without doorknobs.

Valle was quoted as telling ABC News, "It makes pretty good sense. You go into a men’s or lady’s room, you clean yourself up, you wash your hands, and then you have to touch a doorknob that everyone else who just used the bathroom touched. It could be seen as paranoia, but it makes perfect sense to me."
Valle is carrying the legislation on behalf of a friend and fellow member of the Massachusetts National Gaurd, Douglas Flavin, who brought up his sanitary "pet peeve" during weekend training together.

Flavin was quoted as saying in an interview that, "You wash your hand and you’ve got to grab the knob that some guy just had his pissy hand all over. It’s been annoying me for some time."

Valle said the law, if signed by the governor’s pen, would not require existing bathrooms to retrofit their doors to remove doorknobs and re-hang the doors — a grandfather clause that might stave off opposition from the building unions. "Maybe the the doorknob lobby, but not the builders," he said.

Bathroom innovations can be seen in many places, from the all-in-one handwashing units frequently found in Kansas and Missouri (and have serious problems)

to the retractable toilet seat in a woman’s washroom in a Marseille, France restaurant.

Visit donteatpoop.com for an inventory of handwashing materials.

As part of the small town news segment of the David Letterman Show on CBS Monday, June, 4, 2007, Dave told Paul, "Here’s good advice, take a look at the headline, ‘Researchers advise, don’t eat poop.’"

The story comes from extensive wire coverage about the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University in recent months, and can be summarized by:

Don’t-eat-poop T-shirts, barfblog, and a group of individuals passionately committed to making the world’s food safer. That’s the International Food Safety Network (iFSN) at Kansas State University.

Dr. Douglas Powell , scientific director of iFSN leads a team of researchers who want to make food safety a pop-culture phenomenon and change the way the world thinks about food, from farm-to-fork. They comment daily on food safety happenings at barfblog, which includes categories such as celebrity barf and yuck factor. At the height of the E. coli O157:H7 spinach outbreak in 2006, Powell noted that people who got sick were eating cow feces, and advised, Don’t Eat Poop. T-shirts to encourage proper handwashing — and not to eat poop — are available in English, French, Chinese and Spanish.

For further information:
foodsafety.ksu.edu
 donteatpoop.com
http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu

 Thanks to Dan Thomson at K-State for alerting us to the Letterman broadcast.

Four-year-old Erin Jacobs of Jeffersonville, Penn. went to Merrymead Farm in 2000 to pet the animals and learn about farm life. Her learning experience included contracting E. coli O157:H7 and an eventual kidney transplant.

At the 2005 Florida Strawberry Festival, a 7-year-old Tampa girl and a 53-year-old St. Petersburg woman who visited the petting zoo acquired E. coli O157:H7, required extensive medical treatment and settled lawsuits for millions of dollars.

Last month, several cases of cryptosporidium, which causes severe diarrhea, were diagnosed across Greater Manchester (U.K.) after people visited local farms on educational trips.

There have been over 20 outbreaks of severe illness from petting zoos in the past decade.

And now, Canadian researchers have reported that operators and visitors at petting zoos in Ontario aren’t doing what they are supposed to be doing.

Scott Weese, a clinical studies professor at the University of Guelph, and colleagues report in the July 1 edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases that in a study of 36 petting zoos in Ontario between May and October of 2006, they observed infrequent hand washing, food sold and consumed near the animals, and children being allowed to drink bottles or suck on pacifiers in the petting area.

So seven years after 159 people, mainly children, were thought to be sickened with E. coli O157:H7 traced to a goat and a sheep at the 1999 Western Fair in London, Ontario, and seven years after all Canadian fairs were urged to adopt 46 recommendations to enhance petting zoo safety, many are still doing a lousy job.

In commenting on the Florida settlement last month, Seattle attorney Bill Marler said, "It’s a hard lesson for petting zoos and county fairs to learn, but they really need to do more than what they have been doing."

Weese noted that risk can be significantly reduced by locating hand-washing stations at the exit of a petting zoo, posting signs promoting good hygiene and educating people about the risks of bringing food, beverages or items that may end up in a child’s mouth into the zoo.

Such measures echo recommendations issued in 2001 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unfortunately these reports and recommendations do not offer advice on how to ensure that fair operators are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing.

In 2003, U.S. researchers, in a study of livestock at 29 county and 3 large state agricultural fairs, found E. coli O157:H7 in 13.8 per cent of beef cattle, 5.9 per cent of dairy cattle, 3.6 per cent of pigs, 5.2 per cent of sheep, and 2.8 per cent of goats. Over seven percent of pest fly pools also tested positive for E. coli O157:H7.

The bad bugs are there and handwashing may not be enough to get rid of them.

The E. coli O157:H7 that sickened 82 people in 2002 at the Lane County Fair in Oregon appears to have spread through the air inside the goat and sheep expo hall. In a case-controlled study, health investigators found that the percentage of sick people who washed their hands after leaving the Lane County animal barns — 31 percent — was only slightly lower than the percentage of healthy people who washed their hands — 36 percent. In other words those who washed their hands were at almost the same risk of contracting E. coli, O157:H7. One child sickened at the fair, 23-month-old Carson Walter of Eugene, spent a month at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital before coming home.

These learning experiences raise questions: how best to motivate fair managers to provide petting zoos that are microbiologically safe? Should the urban public be allowed to interact with livestock at all? Should petting zoos be inspected, as restaurants are, and the results displayed?

Prof. Hugh Pennington of the U.K. has gone so far as to say that children under five (who are more vulnerable because of their still-developing immune systems) should be banned from visiting livestock farms because of the serious risk of acquiring E. coli O157:H7 infection from farm animals. Such a ban already exists in Sweden.

There is much to learn from interacting with animals, farms, the world. The challenge is to do so in a microbiologically safe manner.

Douglas Powell is scientific director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University
foodsafety.ksu.edu
dpowell@ksu.edu

Marijuana has a bad public image in the US, no question there; but is spinach just as bad now? 

In this article, all about the double standard of pot smoking, comes a resurfacing of the comparison of pot and spinach (not something I’d want to see if I was in the spinach business, well maybe, depends who your target market is I guess).  Even fark.com has a link to the story, with the headline More people died last year from eating spinach than from smoking pot

This is another reference to spinach being worse than pot, following up on what Willie Nelson reportedly said last year after being charged with pot possession:

"It’s a good thing I had a bag of Marijuana instead of a bag of spinach. I’d be dead by now."

This example is a reminder of what happens when you make people sick and don’t have verification of all the things you are doing to reduce risk.  An do a good job talking about all of your measures that are in place. People manage outbreaks all the time, fix problems that lead to them and get on with business.

The discussions that occur on the internet on outbreaks (especially the spinach and peanut butter outbreaks) provide a template for how rapidly interested consumers engaged in discussions around food safety. It used to be at the dinner table that these discussions happened, and damage was limited because it was small pockets of discussion.  Now we have many people globally instantly discussing food safety issues and stories get big. Fast.

If I was involved of the risk management or communications at a spinach or leafy green company (or any company that makes a food product that might be linked to an outbreak) I’d have a plan together on how to manage these types of discussions, to get my messages out in places like youtube , myspace, facebook, wikipedia and the blogs (and use the comment fields to discuss and respond) and put a face on who is managing things.  Be rapid, relevant, reliable and repeat your messages. I’d give my outbreak a myspace page, put my press conferences on youtube and generate a place for discussion where I could respond. And I’d be ready to do it now, not when the outbreak hits.

As demonstrated by the legs of this story, it’s too late now.

For Germany’s beer drinkers, their beloved beverage — often dubbed ‘liquid bread’ because it is a basic ingredient of many Germans’ daily diet — is, according to a wire story, getting more expensive as farmers abandon barley to plant other, subsidized crops for sale as environmentally friendly biofuels.

Helmut Erdmann, director of the family-owned Ayinger brewery in Aying, nestled between Bavaria’s rolling hills and dark forests with the towering Alps on the far horizon, was quoted as saying, "Beer prices are a very emotional issue in Germany – people expect it to be as inexpensive as other basic staples like eggs, bread and milk. With the current spike in barley prices, we won’t be able to avoid a price increase of our beer any longer."

The story notes that in the last two years, the price of barley has doubled to about US$270 per tonne as farmers plant more crops such as rapeseed and corn that can be turned into ethanol or biodiesel. As a result, the price for the key ingredient in beer — barley malt, or barley that has been allowed to germinate — has soared by more than 40 per cent, to around 385 euros or $520 per tonne, from around 270 euros a tonne two years ago.

Ben and I share the German’s frustration.

As do many of us at the International Food Safety Network (iFSN).