The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service is providing consumers with key recommendations they can use to help reduce the risk of foodborne illness during the Thanksgiving holiday.
09.nov.06
Commentary from the Food Safety Network
Brae Surgeoner
www. foodsafety.ksu.edu
Life is so unfair.
Like on MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, the mesmerizing show that follows Christian Dior-obsessed rich kids about to come-of-age as they plan their own outlandish birthday parties, and which has teenagers (and adults) across America questioning whether their parents really do love them.
Or, apparently, for independent restaurant owners in Topeka, Kansas, where rumors of biased restaurant inspections and critical violation drama have appeared following the popularity and apparent influence of publicly posting inspection reports -- a practice that is growing across North America. Since 1998 when Los Angeles began requiring restaurants to display letter-grade cards corresponding to the result of their most recent food safety inspection, over 100 North American jurisdictions have started to disclose inspection results using an array of methods.
Last month, Dean Yee, the owner of China Inn, the oldest Chinese restaurant in Topeka, announced that he would be shutting down on Nov. 19 -- the result of an ongoing dispute with fussy health inspectors.
Mr. Yee alleges the health department put an end to his food preparation with unwarranted fines and a notice of intent to suspend his license. For the health-conscious, restaurant-going public who cut-off their patronage, the slaps on the wrist did not go unnoticed.
Since the end of last February, China Inn has been inspected on seven different occasions. According to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s restaurant inspection website, only one of these was routine; the rest were complaint-related and resulted in a total of 38 critical violations. A critical violation means a provision of the Kansas Food Code that, if left uncorrected, is more likely than other violations to contribute to food contamination or illness, or environmental health hazard. In the U.S. there are 76 million cases of foodborne illness and 5,000 related deaths every year.
Some restaurant managers say that publicly available inspection reports motivate them to avoid the stigma of a bad report; they work vigilantly to ensure safe food and flaunt inspection information as a coy marketing ploy to lure people into their restaurants. This past summer, for example, a flashy ad in an in-flight magazine for American Airline caught my eye. Brazilian steakhouse, Churrasascaria Plataforma, featuring the bold headline, “Golden Apple Award Winner for Excellence in Food Safety” -- no small feat considering that to qualify for the award, a food service establishment must not have any critical violations during their past two consecutive inspections, and must demonstrate the implementation and active use of a food safety management program.
Still, other restaurateurs snub this era of public disclosure and constructive dialogue -- reacting with the same conviction of a wronged teen whose parents threaten to take away their license. Those who can’t get the public image that they want without hard work complain, "I don't really care what the health department thinks, we keep this place spotless," as did Mr. Yee to a Topeka Capital-Journal news reporter. Note to restaurant-goers: the human eye cannot detect the microbial agents that cause foodborne illness.
In the last three years, KDHE news releases show the majority of Topeka restaurants fined since January 2003 have been mom and pop operations. The findings mirror suspicions of many independent operators that inspectors are making nice with the big chains.
The national chains may not be making the press releases because they’re actually doing a good job in terms of food safety. As some of the biggest chains have already learned (think Jack-in-the-Box and Chi Chi’s), they have a great deal at stake.
In the spirit of the public’s right-to-know, the disclosure of restaurant inspection results creates powerful economic incentives, for all types of restaurants, to improve public health. Resistance is futile: reward those establishments that embrace food safety, and punish the others through loss of reputation, customers and suspended or revoked licenses.
Brae Surgeoner is a research assistant with the Food Safety Network at Kansas State University.
bsurgeon@uoguelph.ca
www.foodsafety.ksu.edu
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today announced that it is seeking a permanent injunction against Worldwide Fish & Seafood, Inc. (Worldwide Fish), Suzanne Weinstein, its president and owner, and Timothy A. Lauer, its general manager. Worldwide Fish does business as Coastal Seafood, a seafood processor located at 2330 Minnehaha Avenue, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The firm distributes seafood products to restaurants in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and North and South Dakota.
With many Americans switching to a more health-conscious diet that includes fresh vegetables, the nation must do a better job against food-borne illnesses.
The most recent outbreak — salmonella poisoning linked to contaminated lettuce and tomatoes — sickened 171 people in 19 states, including Georgia, and came not long after a deadly and more serious outbreak of E. coli that caused spinach to disappear from menus and grocery shelves.
Federal responsibility for food safety is spread across at least 15 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture. When a crisis erupts, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention swoops in to determine what went wrong.
The Executive Intelligence review has a great article on the FDA cutbacks leading to more US food poisoning.
WASHINGTON — Contaminated fresh tomatoes served in restaurants were the cause of a recent salmonella outbreak that sickened dozens of people in 21 states, health officials said Friday.
The outbreak, now over, sickened at least 183 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were no reports of deaths, although 22 people were hospitalized. Interviews with victims, including detailed surveys of what they had eaten and where before falling sick, led investigators to suspect restaurant tomatoes as the cause.
"We have identified tomatoes eaten in restaurants as the cause of this outbreak. We don't have any information that a name or a certain type of restaurant is involved. As far as we can tell, it's across the board,"said Dr. Christopher Braden, a foodborne outbreak and surveillance expert with the CDC.
The C. difficile outbreak at a Quebec hospital in St-Hyacinthe has killed another person, bringing the death toll to 10 since the bacteria emerged at the health centre in July.
A total of 25 people have been infected with C. difficile, which causes severe diarrhea, at the Centre hospitalier Honoré-Mercier in St-Hyacinthe, an agricultural town southeast of Montreal.
The hospital announced in late October that it had introduced several measures to contain the infection, including restricted visiting rules and a massive disinfection campaign.
From the FDA's website
As it investigates an outbreak of illnesses that may be related to Salmonella typhimurium bacteria in produce, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reminding consumers of steps they can take to keep their food safe.Salmonella can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems. Healthy persons often experience fever, diarrhea (which may be bloody), nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. In rare circumstances, infection can result in the organism getting into the bloodstream and producing more severe illnesses.
Based on information currently available from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the investigation shows a peak in cases of illness in September. This suggests that the outbreak is no longer ongoing. The agency believes that contaminated food products that caused the illnesses have at this point been consumed, destroyed or thrown out because they are perishable. Therefore, FDA does not believe a consumer warning about produce on store shelves is warranted at this time.
FDA is working closely with states and CDC to identify the most likely food item(s) that caused the current outbreak. If and when a food item is identified, FDA will investigate where the product came from and what may have gone wrong during its production, packing or distribution that could have led to contamination with Salmonella.
This is a quick Q & A from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the effectiveness of washing your fruits and vegetables to prevent food poisoning.
This is a Power Point (in pdf) about how the spinach E. coli outbreak is only part of a larger problem of safe produce.
GRAND RAPIDS TOWNSHIP -- In the cold room at Forest Hills Foods, workers prepare fruit trays, ever mindful of customer concerns over the recent outbreak of food-borne problems such as E. coli and salmonella.
Everything the produce comes into contact with in the room is sterilized.
"It's cold during the preparation process. And it's cold when it gets on our shelves. So the product never has a chance for any bacteria growth," said produce manager Chris Gould.
The first rule of public health is one most of us learn in kindergarten: Don't eat poop.
But that's what the people were eating who were struck down with E. coli in the late summer outbreak tied to bagged spinach, California health officials now say.
There was deadly E. coli O157:H7 in water samples taken on the Salinas Valley ranch where the spinach was grown, in wild pigs that rampaged through the fields, in cattle and calves that grazed nearby, and on cow manure in adjacent pastures, says Kevin Reilly, deputy director of prevention services for the California Department of Health Services.
"It's not unusual or unexpected that we'd find O157:H7 in the environment where those species exist," Reilly says. Three people died and more than 200 others were sickened in the outbreak that spread to 26 states.
Read More Here
For starters, the problem has been accelerated by the American appetite for fruits and vegetables — much of it raw as the market grows for packaged fresh greens.
Americans ate 10 times more spinach in 2005 than in 1970, with much of the growth in ready-to-eat bagged spinach and baby spinach, according to the Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.
Americans have increased consumption of all produce — up 25% between 1970 and 2004.
Raw produce skips what Linda Harris, an expert on food safety at the University of California-Davis, calls "the kill step." That's cooking that knocks out any pathogens that may have hitched along.
And that's a problem, because fruits and vegetables are more likely to carry disease than they were 30 years ago, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "In the 1970s, it was two outbreaks a year. In the 1980s, it was seven a year. And in the 1990s, it was 16 a year," says Patricia Griffin, a doctor who studies food-borne and diarrheal illnesses at the CDC. Figures for the past five years are being compiled, she says.
A salmonella outbreak potentially linked to produce has sickened at least 172 people in 18 states, health officials said Monday.
Health officials think the bacteria may have spread through some form of produce; the list of suspects includes lettuce and tomatoes. But the illnesses have not been tied to any specific product, chain, restaurants or supermarkets.
No one has died in the outbreak, which stems from a common form of salmonella bacteria. Eleven people have been hospitalized, health officials said.
By Barbara Anderson
FRESNO BEE
http://www.insidebayarea.com/food/ci_4509920
CONSUMERS WORRIED about contaminated spinach and lettuce from California's Salinas Valley may have a threat closer to home: bacteria breeding in their kitchen sink.
We live in a germ-filled world.
Millions of microbes live in kitchens, setting up house on kitchen counters, cutting boards, stove tops and tabletops.
More than 250 different food-borne diseases have been identified, and E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter are only three of the most common bacteria that cause infections.
As state and federal food investigators continue to comb fields in California for clues to the E. coli outbreak, health experts say people play a role in food safety.
Outbreaks of food poisoning that are linked to a single food product get the public's attention, but bacteria hitch rides into kitchens every day on a variety of sources, including the dirty hands of food shoppers.
Two food safety technologies for detecting and killing pathogens can cut costs for produce, fruit and vegetable processors, say researchers, according to foodqualitynews.com.
The first method uses a laser to detect and identify many types of bacteria, and is about three times faster and one-tenth as expensive as current technology, they claim. A second innovation uses chlorine dioxide gas to kill pathogens on produce, fresh fruits and vegetables. Both have been developed by researchers at Purdue University in Indiana.
Patents are pending on both technologies, and the laser technology is available for licensing.
Full Article here
WESLACO - Parents say they were never informed about a food poisoning incident at their children's school.
It reportedly happened at the OSM Charter School in Weslaco, where meals are catered.
According to the school superintendent, as many as 11 kids got sick on September 15th.
"She was vomiting. She was pale, weak, diarrhea. It was bad," says Iliana Gomez. She says her daughter missed three days of school and the doctor says it was possible food poisoning.
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