Tag Archives: Testing

Incomplete multiple non-O157 shiga toxin E. coli testing triggers Texas beef recall

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PFP Enterprises, a Fort Worth, Texas, establishment, is recalling approximately 15,865 pounds of beef products because they may be contaminated with E. coli O103, E. coli O111, E. coli O121, E. coli O145, E. coli O26 and E. coli O45, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today. 

The following products are subject to FSIS recall:

10.5-lb. boxes of Beef Outside Skirt Steak, with a pack date of “12/13/13”

recall20-lb. boxes of Studio Movie Grill Beef Tenderloin Sliced, with a pack date of “12/05/13”

15-lb. boxes of Preseasoned Beef for Fajita, with a use by date of “1/13/14”

40-lb. boxes of Southwest Style Beef Skirts, with a pack date of “12/5/13”

20-lb. boxes of Patterson Food Processors Beef Skirt Seasoned, with a pack date of “12/9/13”

10-lb. boxes of Preseasoned Beef for Fajitas, with a pack date of “12/9/2013”

40-lb. boxes of Preseasoned Beef for Fajitas w/Binder, with a pack date of “12/9/2013”

12-lb. boxes of Seasoned Beef for Fajitas, containing 6 2-lb. packs, with a use by date of “1/15/14”

12-lb. boxes of Mexican Style Beef for Fajita, containing 6 2-lb. packs, with a use by date of “1/11/14”

The products subject to recall bear the establishment number “Est. 34715” inside the USDA Mark of Inspection. The products were produced on Dec. 5, 2013, and distributed to retail stores and restaurants in Arizona, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico and Texas.

FSIS personnel became aware of the problem during a Food Safety Assessment when they discovered that beef trim tested presumptive positive for multiple non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) strains through the company’s testing program. The company inadvertently did not carry the test out to confirmation, and not all affected product was held.

FSIS and the company have received no reports of illnesses associated with consumption of these products.

Many clinical laboratories do not test for non-O157 STEC, such as STEC O26, O103, O45, O111, O121 or O145, because it is harder to identify than STEC O157. People can become ill from STECs 2-8 days (average of 3-4 days) after consuming the organism.

Food fraud: If verification is now standard, why isn’t it marketed at retail so consumers know?

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Almost a year later, can we be confident that the beef burger is a horse-free foodstuff, asks Alison Healy in The Irish Times.

Every week seems to bring new scares: if it’s not fox masquerading as donkey meat in China, it’s the discovery of donkey, water buffalo and goat in sausages and burgers in o-HORSE-MEAT-COSTUME-570South Africa.

The chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, Alan Reilly, believes burgers and processed-meat products have never been safer, because of the range of tests and regulations that have been introduced in response to the scandal.

“The industry will never be caught on the hop again, like it was with horse meat,” he says. Laboratory certification has become standard for anyone selling or buying meat, and testing the authenticity of meat products is the industry norm now. “So from a consumer perspective, that’s a hugely positive step.”

Both ABP and Tesco Ireland point to a range of tests and standards they have introduced to ensure that a meat-contamination scandal cannot happen again. ABP says it believes it has the most comprehensive testing regime of any European meat processor, including DNA testing of cattle and a strict supplier-approval process.

Tesco Ireland says it now has a world-class traceability and DNA-testing system across its food products. “The initial focus of our testing programme was on products containing beef, but things have evolved during the course of the year to include pork, lamb, chicken, fish and processed meats,” a spokesman says.

Tesco is also looking at ways of using tests to help identify the likely origin of some products. “For example, it can be very difficult to identify the provenance of products such horse-hamburgeras olive oil, rice or coffee by sight, smell and taste alone. Using our authenticity testing, which looks closely at the chemical make-up of a product, we can verify that what is in the pack is exactly what it says on the label.”

That’s all nice, but consumers have heard all this before, only to be eventually disappointed.. Over time, or bad economics, or both, someone will cut corners. The best producers should be marketing the authenticity of their products and make the testing to validate those claims available for public review.

Nestle to boost foodborne pathogen research

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Nestle SA, the world’s biggest food and drink company, is, according to Associated Press, boosting research to tackle the threat of ever-stronger strains of bacteria and germs in food manufacturing.

The Vevey, Switzerland-based company said Thursday it will initially focus on several types of foodborne bacteria — particularly a dangerous strain nestle-of bacterium E. coli that infects people and pumps out a poison called Shiga toxin — and Norovirus and Hepatitis A.

Company officials and industry experts looked over more than 20 new microbiology labs that Nestle opened Thursday within its research center outside Lausanne, the last time they will be shown publicly before sealing them off and restricting access to scientists in protective clothing.

They described the spotless new labs as among the world’s most advanced microbiology research facilities, and the most sophisticated in the food industry, some at biosafety containment level three, on a scale of one to four.

John O’Brien, a former chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland who is now head of food safety at Nestle’s research center, said the company “cannot afford errors” as it aims for better ways of processing food that kills germs but keeps as much of the nutrients and taste as possible. That requires a lot of genetic and enzymatic testing.

“With the increasing problem of emerging food-borne pathogens, such as the Shiga toxin-producing strains of E. coli, a risk assessment is only possible once we know what genes are carried by that organism,” O’Brien told officials. “So we need to get down to the genome level increasingly. Now, that requires a lot of molecular detective work, which is why we are investing so much in molecular tools.”

Food laboratory accuracy remains a concern

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Food microbiology laboratories continue to submit false negative results and false positive results on a routine basis. A retrospective study of nearly 40,000 proficiency test results over the past 14 years, presented today at the 113th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, examined the food.lab.testingability of food laboratories to detect or rule out the presence of Escherichia coli O157:H7, Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, and Campylobacter.

“There is concern when laboratories report that pathogens are not found in a food sample, when in fact they are there,” explained Christopher Snabes, lead author on the study. “This is known as a ‘false negative’. Similar concerns arise when a laboratory reports a ‘false positive’ suggesting that pathogens are in the food sample, when indeed they are not.” The study found that, on average, food laboratories report false negatives of 9.1% for Campylobacter, a bacterial foodborne illness that may cause bloody diarrhea, cramping and fever, and 4.9% for Salmonella, a bacteria that may cause diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps sometimes leading to hospitalization or death. The false positive rate, on average, is 3.9% for Salmonella, and 2.5% for both E. coli and L. monocytogenes.

This study was conducted by the American Proficiency Institute (API) located in Traverse City, Michigan. API is a private institute that supplies proficiency testing programs for food laboratories and clinical laboratories. API offers proficiency testing (PT) as an objective method for measuring the accuracy of a laboratory. Participants use API PT up to three times a year to examine the accuracy of their laboratory personnel and their testing methods. The purpose r-MEAT-DNA-TESTING-large570of PT is to determine if the laboratory professional can properly respond to API with correct answers as to what API places in a food sample. PT may test for presence or absence of a substance in a qualitative test, and sometimes PT may require an enumeration response, or quantitative test.

Currently, food laboratories are not required to assess the accuracy or quality of their tests. Laboratories that utilize API PT are doing so voluntarily. Some laboratories use API services to obtain and maintain accreditation. API food microbiology PT programs are used by over 700 food laboratories in 43 countries. Proficiency testing is an objective means for measuring laboratory accuracy. “Improved accuracy in our nation’s food laboratories will lead to a safer food supply,” noted Snabes. The Food Safety Modernization Act, passed in 2011, included sweeping changes to the country’s food safety requirements. Model laboratory standards and laboratory accreditation are addressed as important components of the law. Once rules are promulgated, it is anticipated that all food laboratories will need to ensure that their personnel, and the test methods they use, are in compliance with the law. Yet, food laboratories may start using proficiency testing now to help ensure a safer food product.

More E. coli testing, labels for tenderized beef, but questions remain in Canadian food safety plans

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Canada is strengthening its E. coli testing in summer months and will mandate labeling of mechanically or needle tenderized beef, but some omissions are notable.

• The changes only apply to meat produced at federal plants inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. How do consumers know which is which?

• The labeling requirements only apply to cuts that are tenderized at a CFIA-regulated slaughterhouse. What about cuts that are treated further down the supply system? Health Canada says it’s working on it.

• Most notable, the expanded testing for E. coli only applies to the O157:H7/NM serotype (details of the changes are at http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/fssa/meavia/man/ch4/annexoe.shtml). There is no mention of testing for other shiga-toxin producing E. coli (STECs) such as the big six (O26, O45, O103, O111, O121 and O145) which were declared adulterants by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I’m fairly sure that those slaughterhouses that want to continue exporting to the U.S. will have to meet U.S. testing requirements. As a consumer I’d like to know which meat has been produced under such a system of testing.

The changes follow an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 last fall that sickened 18 people. Contaminated product was produced at XL Foods of Alberta and led to the largest meat recall in Canadian history. Several of those sickened were tenderizingPage-282x300thought to have consumed needle-tenderized product (with this technique, outside becomes inside, like hamburger, so should be cooked to 165F for safety reasons; I don’t know anyone that spends on the expense of a roast and then cooks to 165F).

Ritz said, “Canada has a world-class food safety system and our Government is committed to taking real steps to make it even stronger.”

Uh-huh.

Ritz said of labeling of mechanical tenderization beef, “It’s common sense, but it needs to be out there.”

Uh-huh.

“Can we guarantee there’ll never be anymore (outbreaks)? No. Anybody that tells you you can is lying to you. It wouldn’t matter how much money, how many people you have on the lines, there’s too many moving parts to Chicago_meat_inspection_swift_co_1906-268x300guarantee an absolute. But at the end of the day, we want to take every precaution we can.”

Uh-huh.

A table of non- E. coli O157 STEC outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/nonO157outbreaks

Horse meat scandal leads to tighter rules: Ireland food safety chief

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Excerpts below from an op-ed in in the Irish Times by Prof Alan Reilly, chief executive of Food Safety Authority of Ireland.

Over three months have elapsed since the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) uncovered the practice of replacing processed beef with horse meat. Initial inquires put the spotlight on three processing plants, o-HORSE-MEAT-COSTUME-570two in Ireland and one in the UK. Soon, it became evident the problem was not confined to these islands, as most countries in Europe became involved.

It is disturbing that in Europe where, in the wake of food scares, the food control systems have undergone extensive review and renewal, a scandal of large proportions went unnoticed and undetected.

The scale of the scandal is astounding. Numerous foods, beef burgers, beef meals, pies, meat balls, kebabs and remarkably, even chicken nuggets were removed from sale. One recall alone in the Netherlands involved 50,000 tonnes of meat – over 500 million burgers. Leading international food brands and retailers were caught in a web of deception perpetuated in Europe for at least a year, possibly longer.

Some businesses have ceased, others lost market share, and consumer confidence eroded. Brands and reputations carefully nurtured over years will take a long time to recover their association with quality and trust. Apart from reputational damage, the scandal resulted in the regrettable waste of considerable quantities of food.

What is clear is the risk to public health from this incident is low, as most evidence to date suggests the horse meat used came from approved abattoirs. All products in Ireland that tested positive for horse DNA, tested negative for the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone, or “bute”.

Nevertheless, the practice of replacing processed beef with horse meat and failing to inform consumers is unacceptable. The primary motive is profit.

Already changes are coming. Global standards for the trade in beef trim will become more stringent. It will no longer be the industry norm to purchase frozen beef blocks on face value. Laboratory testing for horse.o.brotherspecies authenticity will be commonplace. DNA testing of meat products will be standard for major retailers. Verification of the authenticity of meat species will underpin product labelling.

As ever with food incidents, an important lesson is how risk communication minimises damage to reputations and brands. There were interesting contrasts in how food companies responded to the crisis, from denial to full acceptance of responsibilities.

Our experience is that the more a food company is open and transparent , the less likely it will be accused of cover up or lack of due care. The horse meat scandal demonstrated again how proactive risk communication and acceptance of responsibility increases public trust and minimises reputational damage.

Peacocks and turkeys at petting farm test positive for Salmonella in Malta

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Normally we’re going on and on and on about how some petting zoo outbreak made a bunch of kids sick and the operators should have known better.

We’ve got a whole table of the outbreaks at at http://bites.ksu.edu/petting-zoos-outbreaks.

But in a story of prevention, Malta Today reports the government has closed down the peacock-new-zealand_10933_990x742birds section at the Petting Farm in Ta’ Qali after peacocks and turkeys tested positive to Salmonella Enteritidis.

The analysis was carried out by the Veterinary Department as part of its process to certify that no danger exists when persons come into direct contact with the birds.

The parliamentary secretariat for agriculture said the section will be reopened once the area has been disinfected and further tests would result in the negative. 

Yup, I said that: ‘porn industry more responsible than food industry’ here’s why

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Who doesn’t like to wake up to porn.

Food porn.

Someone over at Food Production Daily, a web news service that seems to have an alarmingly more number of readers than I do, decided to watch a doug.braun.sorenne.capitalsvideo of a talk I posted last week and recorded three weeks ago.

 “… I would argue the porn industry is more responsible than the food industry, ‘cos the food industry says, ‘well you have got to cook your pot pies’ or ‘you have to cook your hamburger.’

“The porn industry says ‘just use a condom’ and they shut down if they get a positive [indicator of a fault], just like that.”

Not quite, but transcribing can be challenging.

To the food industry types who e-mailed me with outrage, here’s what I did say, with surrounding context:

“Bacteria don’t care; there are outbreaks at big places, there are outbreaks at small places, there are outbreaks in local food, there’s outbreaks in food from around the globe. People either know about bacteria and take steps to reduce the risk, or they don’t. And what I want to be able to do is buy from the people that take those steps, and let me know about it, because at the supermarket, it’s all faith-based (safety).

“In fact, I would argue the porn industry is more responsible than the food industry. Because the food industry says, you have to cook your pot pies, or you have to cook your hamburger, or you have to cook your eggs. That’d be like the porn industry saying, use a condom, when, they shut down when they get a positive just like that. The whole food safety message is sorta lost in the overwhelming amount of messages involving food porn.

“What do we learn from all these outbreaks? Food safety begins on the farm and goes all the way through the systems; these are biological systems, not conspiracies; any system is only as good as its weakest link; and, stop blaming consumers.”

(I’m much more efficient with words when writing than babbling at a computer in the early morning).

I also compared food safety to coaching girls’ hockey, and wondered why is it I needed 30-something hours of training to coach a travel team of 9-year-old girls, but needed nothing to prepare food in Ontario, Canada?

My food industry critics didn’t mention that comparison.

While still awakening to the love letters about 4 a.m., another arrived, via Gustavo Arellano of OC Weekly, that I had nothing to do with.

“Kansas State professor Doug Powell is a legend in the food safety industry, and not just because his blog is called barfblog. He’s someone who always criticizes anyone in food–whether celebrity chefs, food producers, government inspectors, and others–who dismiss bacteria as harmless microorganisms, who doesn’t have safety on the top of their list.

“And in a video he recorded last week, Powell took it further: he stated that the porn industry is “more responsible” than the food industry. …

“For those of you who don’t know your porn: producers in California always immediately shut down all productions whenever there’s a report of a performer with HIV–no exceptions. Powell’s argument was that the food industry, when confronted with outbreaks, puts the blame on the consumers, not themselves, while porn does the opposite. …

“This isn’t the first time the profe has stated his golden quote. Back in 2010, he said the same on his blog. Powell’s blurb starts at around 21:17, but listen to the whole thing: not only is it informative, it’s HILARIOUS!”

Writing in all caps and with exclamation marks scares me. But as an obituary, Gustavo’s got it pretty much right, although Amy pointed out I’m not just that way with food safety types, it’s with everyone, and the real reason we don’t get invited to dinner (Journey sucks).

I tried to be reflective and said, “the problem with legends is they usually die young.”

Amy said,”You’re not young.”

Lowering loads: Salmonella in animal feed increases risk throughout food system

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Food safety friend Lynn McMullen, a professor of microbiology at the University of Alberta, told CBC News she was the victim of severe salmonella poisoning.

“I came home from California on a Sunday, and by about 7 o’clock Sunday night, my body was aching. By midnight I couldn’t decide which end of my body should be over a toilet,” she recalled.

McMullen said her doctor initially would not requisition a test for food poisoning, insisting that the problem would take care of itself.

McMullen pushed for the test, which came back positive for salmonella.

Because she was likely exposed while travelling, McMullen was not able to find out how she was infected.

McMullen said salmonella poisoning was one of the worst things she has ever gone through.

“I would never wish this on my worst enemy…I actually was at the point where I was ready to die, it was so bad,” she said.

I have no idea why this anecdote is buried in a story from CBC about Salmonella in animal feed, other than to illustrate Salmonella is prevalent.

Canadian food inspectors find salmonella in more than 10 per cent of commercial animal feed they test despite a zero tolerance stance.

Food safety friend Rick Holley at the University of Manitoba told CBC, “We’ve got to do something about the presence of salmonella in the animal feed. It’s just insane to think we are going to be able to prevent [outbreaks] from happening unless we do something about it.”

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) told CBC News it does not accept any amount of salmonella in animal feed, and takes any detection seriously.

However, the agency has confirmed that it finds salmonella in 13 per cent of the feed it routinely tests.

“Reducing the potential for animals to be infected with salmonella reduces the potential that those animals will shed the organism and, as a result, contaminate animal-derived foods,” said Paul Mayers, the CFIA’s vice-president of policy and programs.

However, Mayers also said the CFIA takes a “risk-based” approach after it detects salmonella.

One Manitoba feed producer says the CFIA is only concerned with six of the more than 2,500 strains of salmonella, and it lets the feed enter the market normally if it doesn’t detect one of those six strains.

As late as in 2010, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, like the CFIA, enforced a zero-tolerance policy for salmonella in animal feed.

This led to an import alert against four Canadian canola processors in 2009 and 2010, after several shipments of canola meal — a byproduct of the canola oil industry and a popular ingredient in animal feed — tested positive for salmonella.

For more than a year, the FDA effectively shut the U.S.-Canadian border to canola meal from Bunge, Viterra, ADM and Cargill plants in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.

Hundreds of shipments were stopped during this period.

But in late 2010 and early 2011, the import alert was lifted after stakeholders petitioned the FDA to relax the way the regulator deals with salmonella in feed.

Some European countries take the threat of salmonella in the food chain much more seriously than Canada does.

Ola Magnus Loemo, a spokesperson for Norway’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food, says Scandinavian countries “established strong national [salmonella] surveillance-regimes” in the mid-1990s and fought to implement tight controls on salmonella while negotiating European Union treaties.

Loemo said as a result, salmonella outbreaks are very rare in Norway, and “the majority of those cases [almost all] could be traced to contamination abroad.”

Holley said he would like to see Canada take similar steps, and he sees cleaning up our act when it comes to feed as being part of that.

“We can’t possibly hope to reduce the frequency to which these animals that we use as food shed salmonella with the hope that [our food] will not be contaminated unless we stop feeding [salmonella] to our animals,” he said.

Costco’s E. coli-testing procedures rival government inspection efforts

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I don’t really know Craig Wilson, but the head of food safety at Costco and I have met a couple of times, and if I ever write something too sanctimonious, he’s one of the first to point it out.

I like that.

According to the Kansas City Star, Costco’s 250,000-square-foot beef plant in California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley is not your typical meat plant.

It’s relatively new and spotless. There are high-tech, hand-wash sanitation stations scattered throughout the plant connected to counters that allow plant officials to make sure each employee uses them at least four times daily.

The massive meatball cook room is built entirely of stainless steel. Even the loading docks, where trucks deliver raw beef, is sanitized regularly to prevent contamination.

Plant manager Kevin Smith was a pre-med student in college who majored in physics. And Craig Wilson, who is in charge of Costco’s food quality assurance program, has a long history of working to solve pathogen problems in meat.

“We do not have customers,” explained Doug Holbrook, Costco’s vice president for meat sales. “We have members, and we are responsible to those members, our shareholders and employees to do things differently, to take a different approach.”

The plant has a decided advantage over Big Beef’s slaughter plants because they don’t kill cattle here, so there are no manure-covered hides or intestines to contaminate raw beef products.

But just the same, Costco’s approach is different.

All meat arriving at the Tracy plant comes with a certificate from the supplier pledging that pre-shipment tests showed no E. coli contamination, something other companies are also doing now. But Costco tests it anyway, and if it tests positive, it’s shipped back to the supplier. Less than one percent is shipped back.

Then the finished products — hot dogs, hamburger patties, ground beef, Polish sausages and meatballs — are tested again before they leave the plant.

In fact, Costco officials boast that, until recently, they did more E. coli testing in the company’s lab than the USDA does nationwide at all other beef plants combined.

In discussing the federal meat inspection program, Wilson said, “food safety is an oxymoron…we (Costco) are results-driven and more nimble than the government.” He stopped short of claiming that Costco procedures are more effective than those enforced by federal meat inspectors.