Monthly Archives: September 2008

Sarah Palin: what will you do about sandhill cranes pooping on peas and giving Alaskans campylobacter?

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We can’t kill all the birds. That’s my usual response when talking about the practicality of on-farm food safety systems for fresh produce. Yes, birds are salmonella and campylobacter factories. But, as a farmer, you do what you can to reduce risk.

It now appears that the 18 people in Alaska sick with campylobacter got it from eating raw peas from a farm, where apparently sandhill cranes were crapping all over the peas.

The Anchorage Daily News says that Joe McLaughlin, state epidemiologist with the state health department, said Thursday afternoon the likely culprits in spreading the illness in Mat-Su are sandhill cranes.

Apparently the migratory birds love the peas in Mat-Valley Peas’ fields. And what geese can do to a sidewalk, cranes do to a field.

"The farmer thinks that’s the likely scenario," McLaughlin said. "He has another field with cattle nearby, but it’s highly plausible that the cranes’ poop is the cause."

Duane Clark, who markets the peas for longtime grower John Hett, said, "They don’t have proof we’re the ones, and we don’t have proof we’re not."

"I’ve been farming for over 30 years," Hett said, "and never had a problem."

Shayne Herr, Hett’s son-in-law and manager of the farm, said, "If DEC’s concerned, we’re concerned." He said his family eats raw peas all the time, "and we never get diarrhea. We wash them and we’re fine. If we don’t like them, we don’t sell them."

It’s a new marketing slogan: our food is fine cause we don’t get diahhrea.
 

Ladies Tea outbreak linked to Country Cottage

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An E. coli O111 outbreak linked to Country Cottage, a Locust Grove, OK buffet restaurant, has expanded to a church gathering in Broken Arrow, OK (not to be confused with Neil Young’s home, the Broken Arrow Ranch in Northern California). 

According to KFSM, Tests show at least one person at the tea, which was catered by Country Cottage, has E. coli O111. There are four additional probable cases and 10 suspected cases.

The Country Cottage outbreak was the inspiration for the latest iFSN infosheet, which you can download here.

Delay in diagnosing listeriosis outbreak ‘inexcusable;’ inspectors union plays politics

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I’m in Kansas now, and while the InterTubes are sometimes broken, we’ve generally progressed beyond the stagecoach. UPS is a frequent guest at our mini-mansion on the hill.

I’ve taken to describing the delay in public advisories and test results in the Canadian listeria outbreak as being due to the time it takes to send samples by stagecoach to the national lab in Winnipeg. Unfortunately, a story in the K-W Record confirms this.

Dr. Don Low, medical director of Ontario’s provincial lab in Toronto, has finally joined me in calling the delay in test results when listeria emerged in mid-July, “inexcusable.”

"It is inexcusable to wait that number of days in order to get an answer back. The (Ontario) public health lab should be doing it. That has to change."

Meat samples travelled first from Toronto to a Health Canada lab in Ottawa, arriving on July 24, where they were tested for listeriosis.

It took until Aug. 5 — 12 days — for results to come back positive.

The samples were then shipped to Winnipeg’s national lab for "genetic fingerprinting" to determine whether the same strain of listeriosis in the meat matched blood samples from the victims.

Those test results, essential for tracking the source of the outbreak, took another 10 days to reach Toronto Public Health, says Dr. Vinita Dubey, the city’s associate medical officer of health.

When a salmonella outbreak hit the Southern U.S. only a month before Canada’s meat outbreak, testing was completed and public warnings were issued in a few days.

Meanwhile, Canadian politicians and bureaucrats were congratulating themselves on how well the system worked. What an embarrassment.

But don’t expect to hear any such criticism from the meat inspectors union. Instead, they launched a website and some public campaign during the Canadian election to hire 1,000 more meat inspectors who apparently will have listeria vision goggles which will allow them to better manage microbial risks. They have a bunch of other political points, all about securing jobs for inspectors, but not once did they mention, hey, people are dead and dying here. There’s too many sick people and we’re interested in having fewer sick people. Nope. Both the political and union leaders protect their own constituencies for political gain.

As Dr. Low says, it’s inexcusable.
 

Clean the damn car once in a while and stop leaving food on the dashboard

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I drove a Nissan Quest for about 8 years. Put on a lot of miles driving to Florida, saw a lot of vomit with four kids.

So for 6 a.m. hockey practices – and I was often the coach so I and whatever lucky kid was on that specific team had to be there at 5:30 or something stupid – I would often microwave an egg or two, slap it between some bread and away we’d go. I even sometimes put it on the dashboard.

Apparently I wasn’t alone. A poll by insurance.co.uk of 1376 car owners found that British motorists spend more than three years of their lives behind the wheel and over a quarter eat en route every week.

The poll also (…) revealed some startling hygiene calamities some drivers have faced.

Some motorist admitted finding dead mice, dog poo, fishing maggots, a three-year-old sandwich, a joint of beef, a partner’s [or] ex’s knickers, a used condom, child’s vomit in a door pocket, and mushrooms growing in the floor.

My van wasn’t that bad.

What would Sarah Palin do? Peas in Alaska source of campylobacter, 18 sickened

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My mom was a hockey mom. She and dad drove me all around Ontario to play hockey. I still remember the brawl between some of the hockey moms when we played Galt (before it was Cambridge). The cops were called. I may have been 13. My mom wasn’t involved (at least she won’t admit she was involved).

I coached and helped out with my four girls playing hockey, so I guess I was a hockey dad. I’m not a pit bull and don’t wear lipstick.

Sarah Palin may be a hockey mom who thinks the Flintstones are an accurate representation of human-dinosaur co-habitation and is open to war with Russia, but what I’d really like to hear about is how the vice-presidential candidate responds to foodborne illness in her own backyard.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that a farm in the Matanuska Valley has been called the focal point of a campylobacter outbreak that has sickened at least 18 people in Southcentral Alaska after they ate raw peas.

Mat-Valley Peas in Palmer sells the peas in 5- and 10-pound bags with cooking instructions that would have prevented the outbreak, but some retailers and sellers at farmers markets have repackaged the peas in smaller quantities and left out the cooking instructions, said Joe McLaughlin, state epidemiologist with the health department.

The first of the 18 cases, including one person who was hospitalized, occurred Aug. 1.

And my mom, she never had to brag about being a hockey mom. She was the real deal.

Stay away from the Chinese baby formula – dozens of babies sick in China cause of melamine in baby formula

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Elizabeth Weise reports in the USA Today today that Chinese newspapers are reporting that infant formula has been linked to kidney problems and kidney stones in babies there because the formula contains melamine — the same industrial contaminant that poisoned and killed thousands of U.S. dogs and cats last year.

No baby formula approved for use in the United States is manufactured in China, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"We want to reassure the public that there’s no contamination in the domestic supply of infant formula," says Janice Oliver, deputy of operations for FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

In addition, no U.S. manufacturers or marketers of infant formula receive ingredients from China. "We contacted all of them,’ says Oliver.

"Chinese-manufactured infant formula is illegal in the United States and should not be coming into the United States, and we have controls at the borders to insure that infant formula products don’t come in," says Oliver.

However, the agency is concerned that illegal infant formula may be sold in Asian and ethnic markets. That happened once before in 2004, when fake infant formula from China, which killed dozens of babies in that country, was found in at least one U.S. store.

The FDA is working with state officials to make sure that all Chinese, Asian and ethnic markets are aware of the problem, Oliver says. The agency is also alerting the Chinese community to avoid using China-produced formula.

Reports in the Chinese media from several provinces say that as many as 60 babies have been admitted to hospitals with kidney stones and that the illnesses have been linked to use of a specific brand of powdered infant formula.

Melamine is a by-product of plastic manufacturing. It can be used to mimic high-protein additives such as wheat and rice gluten. Adding melamine to ordinary wheat flour, for example, makes it test as if it is the higher protein, higher cost wheat gluten.

Handling of the listeriosis outbreak is a disgrace

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That’s the headline from this morning’s Globe and Mail, Canada’s self-proclaimed national newspaper.

Veteran medical reporter Andre Picard writes,

“In Canada, we have developed a perverse fondness for commissions of inquiry and their retrospective self-flagellation and contrition.

Inquiries are explicitly forbidden from laying blame, criminal or civil. They invariably make wonderful recommendations – most of them glaringly obvious – and many of which will never be implemented.

“What ever happened to people actually doing their jobs? What happened to taking responsibility? And what about the quaint notion that governments should govern?

Before we spend $10-million or $20-million or $50-million on an inquiry into luncheon meats, let’s step back for a minute and examine what we know about what happened, what went wrong and how we can do better. …

Nor do you need an esteemed judge and hours of cross-examination by top-notch legal counsel to know that the response to suspected contamination of mass-produced meat products was far too slow and secretive.

People started dying in June, and it took until mid-August to trace the problem to the plant. On Aug. 13, when the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was in the plant looking for the source of listeria monocytogenes, Maple Leaf started warning distributors to stop shipping some meats. But nobody told the public to stop eating them.

By Aug. 17, there were positive lab tests and it was abundantly clear a number of deaths were due to the contamination. Yet it wasn’t until Aug. 20 that the public was really warned of the extent of the problem. And products were still being recalled, in piecemeal fashion, into September. …

The way the CFIA warns the public of food-borne threats and manages recalls is a disgrace. Transparency and good communication are essential in responding to any public health threat but, at the CFIA, information is released in dribs and drabs, without coherence or context, and almost always on a voluntary basis by manufacturers.

In this case, thankfully, Maple Leaf was, after some initial foot-dragging, quite open. CEO Michael McCain gave the public more information and explanation than all government agencies combined. He also had the backbone and decency to apologize.

Federal cabinet ministers contented themselves with uttering a few platitudes.
Gerry Ritz, the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Foods, had this to say more than three weeks after the outbreak was discovered: "Our professionals are working to resolve this situation as quickly as possible." Instead of an apologia for second-rate work, he should have been kicking CFIA butts around the block.

Health Minister Tony Clement, for his part, was gushing with pride about the actions of the Public Health Agency of Canada even before the final body count was in.

We don’t need more reports to gather dust on shelves. … And above all, you need to take responsibility for your actions (and inaction).

That is something government agencies like CFIA and PHAC, and in particular their political masters, seem unable to grasp.

That willful blindness and aversion to leadership is a bigger threat to the health of Canadians than bacteria in luncheon meats."

Mystery meat

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A barfblog fan from Washington, D.C. writes with this tale:

A few weeks ago, I had an alarming experience at a Washington, DC
Chinese takeout restaurant. I normally avoid these sketchy-looking
dives, which are on every corner of this city, but in a moment of
weakness (insanity) decided to inflict some Kung Pao chicken on
myself.

I went into Yum’s (ironic name right?) and got in line behind a couple hipsters and a man in filthy clothes with scraggly hair, who looked like he hadn’t bathed or slept indoors in some time.

The not-clean-man had placed three large, bloody styrofoam Safeway containers of some kind of raw meat on the counter. The old Chinese lady behind the counter was saying “Ten dolla! I give you ten
dolla!” and the improperly-sanitized-guy said that was fine. The hipsters and I exchanged wide-eyed glances as it dawned on us that this dude was *selling* meat to the restaurant, meat that he had
somehow obtained from Safeway… probably in an unsavory manner…
anyway needless to say, I left Yum’s, never to return.
 

Almond growers want to keep it raw — with salmonella

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I really just wanted an excuse to post this pic.

And the Cornucopia Institute, the defenders of all things raw and contaminated, provinded the excuse by announcing that a group of fifteen American almond growers and wholesale nut handlers filed a lawsuit in the Washington, D.C. federal court on Tuesday, September 9 seeking to repeal a controversial USDA-mandated treatment program for California-grown raw almonds.

 

Pregnant woman miscarries because of listeria in Quebec cheese

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Public health officials in Quebec say a pregnant woman in the province has lost her baby, possibly because of listeriosis.

Officials are still awaiting test results to confirm whether the woman who lost her baby was infected with the bacteria, said Dr. Horatio Arruda, Quebec’s director of public health protection.

She didn’t lose the baby. It’s not like she misplaced the baby somewhere. The baby died because of listeria. Pregnant women should not eat a whole bunch of refrigerated ready-to-eat foods, but in the rush to promote raw milk cheese and food porn, those in charge forgot to remind those who are vulnerable of the risks.

Max Dubois, the owner of L’Échoppe des Fromages in St. Lambert, wants to know who will compensate him for the $40,000 worth of cheese inspectors seized and destroyed from his store on Saturday.

"Why could they not have organized a voluntary recall, as they do in France. Each cheese would have been sent away for analysis. We would have better been able to trace the spread of the bacteria. But now all the evidence has been destroyed. We’ll never know if it was spread through a distributor, or on the paper it was wrapped in, or in some other way."

Uh, France is no better. Here is the latest French cheese recall due to listeria.

Microbiologist Jacques Goulet, a cheese specialist in the food science department at Université Laval, says he, too, believes the government over-reacted.

"Listeria is present everywhere. But for most people, the risk posed by listeriosis is very low. Healthy people are rarely affected by the bacteria," he said, noting that the annual average of listeriosis cases in Quebec is about 50. (The public health department reported 63 cases in 2007 and 49 in 2006.).

Way to cite statistics. The people who got sick are real people who thought they were eating safe food.