Tag Archives: Training

Food safety and public hygiene officers in decline in Australia too

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Public health is often on the front-line of budgetary restrictions.

And there’s indifference.

Same in Australia.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that students seeking to work for local government as environmental health officers to monitor public health laws such as food safety, water contamination and hygienic practices, are in decline, according to Curtin University.

The trouble has been competition with the mining sector, according to a university spokeswoman (the money sector, in Australia).

Environmental Health Australia’s state president Vic Andrich acknowledged the decline, saying local government as the prime employer of environmental health graduates had not provided competitive salary packages and promoted careers in environmental health.

He said the lack of action by the Department of Health in maintaining local government EHO numbers was questioned by the Auditor General in 2004 in the Food Safety Report, and raised again at the EHA WorkForce Summit 2007.

Mr Andrich however argued that any removal of Western Australia’s only fully accredited environmental health degree course will further compound the shortage of degree qualified EHOs to safeguard public health in WA.

The university has been reviewing the need to run the environmental health major in its bachelor of science (health, safety, and environment) course, as well as the health and safety major.

"At this stage Curtin University can confirm that there is no final decision to cancel this major," the spokeswoman said.

"The university is currently investigating the feasibility to review the content of the two majors to develop a single degree that may meet the standards of the professional bodies.

The university has also not accepted any new enrolments for the master of environmental health and postgraduate diploma in environmental health this year.

More training? Do more of same thing expecting different results crazy; Ottawa hospital cited for food-safety violations

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Public Heath found seven “critical” food-safety deficiencies at the Ottawa General Hospital this year, three of them in the last week.

On both Monday and Wednesday this week, inspectors found the hospital failed to “separate raw foods from ready-to-eat foods during storage and handling.”

The hospital also earned a critical deficiency for not having paper towels in a dispenser at a hand basin in the food-preparation area on Monday this week and on Aug. 19 of this year. On April 15, the citation was for having no soap in the dispenser at the washing station.

Frances Furmankiewicz, director of nutrition for the hospital, said the latest problems were due to “employee error.” Though all the employees are trained and certified to handle food, they were given more training as a result of the inspections.

A number of people at the hospital Thursday said they were concerned when they learned about the poor inspection results and said they would no longer eat there, including Cindy Gilman, who was at the hospital to pick up her daughter.

“I thought the hospital would have been great at following regulations — it’s a hospital,” she said.

Church lady law means food safety training for meals in Minn

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The Duluth News Tribune reports that when Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Duluth served free breakfast to its Hillside neighbors on Saturday, it had all the needed ingredients: eggs, milk, bread, cereal … and food-safety training.

The latter is the result of the so-called “church lady law” that went into effect Aug. 1. The law exempts faith-based organizations that serve food to groups of people from routine health inspections. But the people who prepare the food must have state-approved training.

That requirement doesn’t apply to funeral dinners, wedding dinners and potlucks as long as they are on the church’s property, said Deborah Durkin of the Minnesota Department of Health.

It does apply to Gloria Dei’s breakfasts, your Boy Scout troop’s meatball fundraiser and Our Savior’s Lutheran Church’s lutefisk dinner. In the case of the latter, the law is fine with Christina Kadelbach, youth minister and small group coordinator at the Cloquet church.

“Working in a church and also being a mother, I think it’s important that we pay attention to the safety of food preparation and serving it,” Kadelbach said.

“We are also the state of 10,000 churches,” Durkin said. “It takes a long time to get down to the 30-member church in Yellow Medicine River.”

Fr. Timothy Sas, priest of Twelve Holy Apostles Greek Orthodox Church in the Hillside neighborhood, said he hadn’t dealt with the law. But he was confident that the church, whose parishioners include several restaurant professionals, meets all requirements for its fundraising meals and its annual Taste of Greece Festival.

Faith-based food safety.

Coaching hockey requires mandatory training, so should food preparation

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Ottawa Public Health is debating whether to force all food handlers in the city to take a mandatory food safety course.

Parenting and preparing food are about the only two activities that do not require some kind of certification in Western countries. For example, to coach little girls playing ice hockey in Canada requires 16 hours of training. To coach kids on a travel team requires an additional 24 hours of training.

Anyone who serves, prepares or handles food, in a restaurant, nursing home, day care center, supermarket or local market needs some basic food safety training.

Sherry Beadle, Ottawa health department’s program manager of food safety, said, "The difference with this certification program is it allows a greater in-depth look at food handling practices. Training is always a good thing."

Not if the training is mind-numbingly dull, trying to transform line cooks or servers into microbiology or HACCP experts. That’s why training needs goals and continual evaluation.

There could be mandatory food handler training, for say, three hours, that could happen in school, on the job, whatever. But training is only a beginning. Just because someone is told to wash the poop off their hands before they prepare salad for 100 people doesn’t mean it is going to happen; weekly outbreaks of hepatitis A confirm this. There are a number of additional carrots and sticks that can be used to create a culture that values microbiologically safe food and a work environment that rewards hygienic behavior. But mandating basic training is a start.

Eight of Ontario’s 36 health units currently require mandatory certification.

The course should be mandatory, and then should be evaluated and improved so that food service employees actually use what they allegedly learn, with the ultimate goal of reducing the number of foodborne illnesses.

And the best establishments won’t wait for government. Ottawa restaurant owner Daoud Ahmadi, who has been in the food industry for 13 years, told CBC News it should be a mandatory course for anyone who handles food and that he expects all his new employees to take the course even though it is currently voluntary.

"It is really important for people that are working on the food," Ahmadi said.
 

Crisis management at 40,000 feet

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Manhattan (Kansas) to Dallas, Dallas direct to Brisbane, what could be easier. Save hours off the door-to-door travel and bestest of all, no rechecking in at the dreaded Los Angeles International airport.

Four hours later, we’re on the tarmac at LAX.

About 90 minutes into the flight, an elderly woman sitting in the row behind me looked like she had lost consciousness … she looked dead. Stewards were summoned an oxygen was applied. Nothing.

Then a message came from the cockpit that no one on a plane wants to hear: not the, “Do any passengers have experience flying a jumbo jet,” but the other, “Are there any medical professional aboard the flight?”

What looked like a husband and wife time of physicians attended to the woman.

After about 10 minutes she seemed to be revived. They located a bunch of medical papers and medications she was travelling with, and quite professionally brought the woman back from the brink.

But, rather than risk flying the Pacific Ocean, the plane was diverted to LAX and paramedics arrived to take the woman to the hospital. And then we had to go to New Zealand because the crew had reached the legal maximum for hours working (20). So arrangements were made for a new crew and flights in New Zealand to finish the journey to Australia. Hours saved now hours gone.

Up until that point I had been finishing marking final assignments for my food safety risk analysis students, which included a crisis management component. The best producers, processors and retailers are trained and prepared to handle crisis situations.

Later in the flight I spoke with one of the stewards and asked him how much they were prepared for this sort of ting, especially on a schedule 16-hour flight.
He told me they have standard procedures and there is a medical professional on the ground at all times and is the only person who can authorize in-air treatment. So the doctors who happened to be on the place were providing observations and carrying out instructions

I asked the steward how often passengers had died on flights he was working; he gave me a couple of examples.

Stuff happens: be prepared.
 

Wal-Mart Frank encourages food companies to develop food safety culture

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Before we had lunch last month, Wal-Mart Frank told the 2011 American Meat Science Association Reciprocal Meat Conference in Manhattan (Kansas), “If you did food safety this year the way you did it last year, you’re going to lose,” and that food processors should go beyond traditional approaches to managing risk and work to develop a culture of food safety.

Yiannas, vice president of food safety for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., said that processors must go beyond the traditional strategies based on training, inspection and microbiological testing, which the industry has employed for years. While those strategies have improved over time, it’s important for companies to take new approaches.

“HACCP is a step in the right direction, but it’s not the final destination,” said Yiannas of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system that companies use in their food safety programs. He cited data showing that in cases of food-borne illness from 1993-1997, 37 percent were due to improper holding temperatures, 11 percent were due to inadequate cooking, and 19 percent were due to poor hygiene, noting that all of those cases were linked to human behavior.

“Scientists often think of behavior as the soft stuff (unlike microbiology), but the soft stuff is the hard stuff,” he said, adding that scientists tend to focus on the science when they should also be looking at the organizational structure of a company.

“Knowledge does not equal behavior change. Food safety culture is a choice,” Yiannas said. The companies who are good at it:

Create food safety expectations;
Educate and train their food employees;
Communicate food safety messages frequently;
Establish food safety goals and measurements; and
Have consequences, including rewards, for food safety behaviors.

“It’s a simple thing but recognizing people for doing the right thing is effective,” he said.

Abu Dhabi blames outdated food safety attitudes for problems, mandatory training for all food handlers by 2012

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To coach little girls playing ice hockey in Canada requires 16 hours of training. To coach kids on a travel team requires an additional 24 hours of training. ?

So it seems reasonable to have some minimal training for those who prepare food for public consumption.

Some U.S., Canadian and Australian states or municipalities require at least one person at a restaurant or food outlet to have some food safety training, even if that person is at home in bed. Others require training for everyone who touches food; others require nothing.

So the Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority (ADFCA) is way ahead when it announced that all employees who handle food must be trained in hygiene by the end of 2012.

The food safety watchdog was straightforward yesterday when it said outdated attitudes to food safety are to blame for food workers failing hygiene tests.

The National reported that so far 40 per cent of workers, about 17,000, have been trained, and 60 per cent of those have failed the exams. Eleven per cent of all the emirate’s food workers have passed.

Earlier, the authority partially blamed language barriers for the problem, but yesterday it said the absence of a culture of hygiene and food safety in restaurants and food outlets was also a major cause.

Mohammed al Reyaysa, the authority’s spokesman, said,

“Unfortunately a lot of people think going into the kitchen and dealing with food does not need any science and anyone can do it. This is an old way of thinking and it is changing after the requirements and regulations being implemented.”

Mr al Reyaysa’s comments came after the release of a wide-ranging annual report, which detailed the agency’s programmes, draft laws, financial status and the total number of inspections and food establishment closures last year.

The high failure rate on hygiene exams raises questions as to why ADFCA’s spending of almost Dh1 billion in 2009 has not led to better results. Passing the tests is currently not a requirement, but Mr al Reyaysa indicated that it may eventually be obligatory for food workers in the emirate, posing a potentially protracted problem for employers.

It’s excellent Abu Dhabi is getting serious about requirements and puts them way ahead of many North American jurisdictions. Unfortunately, what constitutes a certified food safety course is often crap. So figure out what the barriers are to effective training and figure out what works and what doesn’t – what kind of training actually translates into food service staff practicing safe food preparation.

The best restaurants will not wait for a government edict and will go ahead and improve their training and compliance — today.

Lack of food safety costly for diners, eateries; Alabama training center tries to fix errors

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Here’s a common scene from many of the mom and pop restaurants I’ve visited: a towel used to sop up juice from raw hamburger meat also is used to wipe down counters.

Phyllis Fenn, a standardization officer with the Alabama Department of Public Health’s bureau of environmental services, has seen the same thing – too often.

The Montgomery Advertiser reports today the Food Safety Training Center on Atlanta Highway is an attempt both to help restaurant owners avoid bad inspections and to protect their customers’ health.

When Alabama adopted the 2005 Food Code, one provision was that at least one person in restaurants where raw foods are handled, including fast-food eateries and sushi bars, would become food safety certified. When the state adopted the code, it opted to go with a lead-in time — Jan. 1 of this year.

The classes can help restaurants improve their health department inspection scores, which is exactly what they are designed to do, Fenn said.

She said the certification class helps restaurants reduce food-related illnesses as well as teaching them about the proper temperatures to cook and hold food (the temperature of food that sits out at a buffet) and proper hygiene.
 

Albert Amgar: Mandatory training in food service?***

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Our French colleague Albert writes recently on his blog,

I’m no expert on the commercial and institutional restaurant business, just a simple user.

I’m also not a fan of guides to good practices of which, in my opinion, we shouldn’t expect so much. The guide shouldn’t be a white cane for the blind when it comes to matters of hygiene and food safety. But I also know that some people have been waiting, according to a message published on la liste Hygiène on July 3, 2010, “…for at least 8 years, [for] the probable publication date of the Guide to Good Hygiene Practices for the food services industry.”

As such, le blog HysaConseil from Quebec tells us that, “Mandatory training in hygiene and safety, who does it concern?”

On November 21, 2008, a modification to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food of Québec’s (MAPAQ) food regulation requires all business owners who are or are not licensed with MAPAQ to undergo training in hygiene and safety. Whenever food handling is done in his/her business, the owner must comply with regulations (convenience stores, pharmacies, bars, bed & breakfasts, butcheries, supermarkets, selling meat on the farm, etc…).

You can refer to the available guide to the application of regulations on MAPAQ’s website for more information on this regulation. All information is found at this site.
At a time when France has launched its Food Operation Holidays (see “The return of Operation Thunder”), here’s a measure that would be welcome for us! Is this obligation applicable for us? I don’t believe so according to certain reports we see (see “Hygiene in the food service industry”).

In the words of one AFSCA administrator (Belgium), “I currently use the carrot with the subcommittee on language simplification (referred to as cellule de vulgarisation). Now there is a stick behind the door: not only the administrative fines or the temporary closures, but we could also put the results of our inspections on the Internet, clearly online for the consumers.”

Mandatory training, scores or grades on the doors and online inspection results are the answers that Albert suggests to advance food safety in restaurant businesses.

bites, barfblog and food safety need your continued support

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There’s no shortage of food safety news; there is a shortage of evidence-based, incisive approaches that challenge food safety norms and may eventually lead to fewer sick people.

The International Food Safety Network evolved into bites.ksu.edu over the past year as a way of consolidating and making food safety news delivery more efficient. In addition to the web repository, the bites-l electronic newsletter is distributed 2-3 times a day to a dedicated subscriber base of some 10,000 in 60 countries; a list that has been focused and refined by offering continuous, daily food safety news since 1994. barfblog.com – averaging well over 10,000 unique hits a day — along with weekly food safety infosheets (available in multiple languages), and videos, are now prominent food safety resources.

Sponsorship opportunities are now available for bites.ksu.edu, barfblog.com, and the bites-l listserv (as well as the infosheets and videos; how about a movie?).

In addition to the public exposure – why not stick your company logo on the bites-l newsletter that directs electronic readers to your home site or whatever you’re flogging that week — and reaching a desired audience, you can receive custom food safety news and analysis. We’ve also resurrected the food safety risk analysis team – assessment, management and communication – and offer 24/7 availability and insanely rapid turnaround times. If your group has a food safety issue — short-term or long-term — work with us, rather than having us write it up in barfblog.com, book chapters and scholarly papers as another case study of what not to do.

The money is used to support the on-going expenses of the news-gathering and distribution activities, and to develop the next generation of high school, undergraduate and graduate students who will integrate science and communication skills to deliver compelling food safety messages using a variety of media. Research, training and outreach are all connected in our food safety world.

If you have a sponsorship idea, let’s explore it. Feeling altruistic? Click on the groovy new donate button in the upper right corner of bites.ksu.edu. Want to just send a check? Make it out to:

K-State Olathe Innovation Campus, Inc.
18001 W. 106th St., Ste 130
Olathe, KS 66061
913-541-1220
913-541-1488 Fax
tbogina@kstateoic.ksu.edu
http://kstateoic.ksu.edu
and send to the attention of Terri Bogina

Here’s some additional information.

bites.ksu.edu is a unique comprehensive resource hosted at Kansas State University for all those with a personal or professional interest in food safety. We find credible, current, evidence-based information on food safety and make it accessible to domestic and international audiences through multiple media. Sources of food safety information include government regulatory agencies, international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), peer-reviewed scientific publications, academia, recognized experts in the field and other sources as appropriate.

All bites activities emphasize engaging people in dialogue about food-related risks, controls and benefits, from farm-to-fork. bites strives to provide reliable, relevant information in culturally and linguistically appropriate formats to assist people in identifying, understanding and mitigating the causes of foodborne illness.

bites LISTSERV
The bites.ksu.edu listserv is a free web-based mailing list where information about current and emerging food safety issues is provided, gathered from journalistic and scientific sources around the world and condensed into short items or stories that make up the daily postings. The listserv has been issued continuously since 1995 and is distributed daily via e-mail to thousands of individuals worldwide from academia, industry, government, the farm community, journalists and the public at large.
The listserv is designed to:
•    convey timely and current information for direction of research, diagnostic or investigative activities;
•    identify food risk trends and issues for risk management and communication activities; and
•    promote awareness of public concerns in scientific and regulatory circles.
The bites listserv functions as a food safety news aggregator, summarizing available information that can be can be useful for risk managers in proactively anticipating trends and reactively address issues. The bites editor (me – dp) does not say whether a story is right or wrong or somewhere in between, but rather that a specific story is available today for public discussion.

barblog.com
barfblog.com is where Drs. Powell, Chapman, Hubbell and assorted food safety friends offer evidence-based opinions on current food safety issues. Opinions must be evidence-based – with references – reliable, rapid and relevant. The barfblog authors edit each other – viciously.
 

TWITTER
Breaking food safety news items that eventually appear in bites or barfblog are often posted on Twitter (under barfblog or benjaminchapman) for faster public notification.

INFOSHEETS
Food safety infosheets are designed to influence food handler practices by utilizing four attributes culled from education, behavioral science and communication literature:
•    surprising and compelling messages;
•    putting actions and their consequence in context;
•    generating discussion within the target audiences’ environments; and
•    using verbal narrative, or storytelling, as a message delivery device.
Food safety infosheets are based on stories about outbreaks of foodborne illness sourced from the bites listserv. Four criteria are used to select the story: discussion of a foodborne illness outbreak; discussion of background knowledge of a pathogen (including symptoms, etiology and transmission); food handler control practices; and emerging food safety issues. Food safety infosheets also contain evidence-based prescriptive information to prevent or mitigate foodborne illness related to food handling. They are now available in French, Spanish and Portugese.

bites bistro videos
A nod to the youtube generation, but we don’t really know what we’re doing.

These are the various information products we deliver daily, in addition to research, training and outreach. If you or your group is interested in sponsoring any or all of these food safety activities, please contact me directly.
dp

Dr. Douglas Powell
associate professor, food safety
dept. diagnostic medicine/pathobiology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS
66506
cell: 785-317-0560
fax: 785-532-4039
dpowell@ksu.edu
bites.ksu.edu
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