Does wearing gloves mean safer food?

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A number of fast food restaurants insist their staff wear gloves when preparing food, just like Michael Jackson when performing. However, wearing gloves does not necessarily mean safer food. A study conducted by University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, indicates that levels of heterotrophic bacteria, which is one way of determining level of hygiene, were essentially higher on staff wearing gloves than on bare hands. Perhaps this may be due to food service staff wearing gloves for an extended period of time without changing them and without handwashing in between. Also, there seems to be this mentality that wearing gloves signifies less handwashing because bare hands are not in contact with food. This notion is false and should never replace handwashing.

 

Food safety culture more fashion than fact for posers

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On Aug. 23, 2008, Maple Leaf CEO Michael McCain took to the Intertubes to apologize for an expanding outbreak of listeriosis that would eventually kill 22 people. As part of his speech, McCain said that Maple Leaf has “a strong culture of food safety.”

On Aug. 27, 2008, McCain told a press conference,

“As I’ve said before, Maple Leaf Foods is 23,000 people who live in a culture of food safety. We have an unwavering commitment to keep our food safe, and we have excellent systems and processes in place.”

As laid bare in the Weatherill report on the 2008 listeria shit-fest, McCain’s invocation of food safety culture was as credible as the politicians and bureaucrats who lauded the workings of Canada’s food safety surveillance system, when it didn’t actually work at all.

Andre Picard, the long-time health reporter for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, picked up on this theme today when he wrote,

“the root of the listeriosis outbreak in Canada in 2008 was not two dirty meat slicers but rather a culture – in government and private enterprise alike – in which food safety was not a priority but an afterthought.”

Picard says Ms. Weatherill’s most important recommendation – one that has been largely glossed over in media coverage of the report – is for a culture of safety or, as is stated bluntly in the report: “Actions, not words.”

Really, Canada, this is nothing new. There is a long history in developed countries of negligence, followed by remorse, promises to do better and … minimal changes. Didn’t Canada go through all this after E. coli O157:H7 entered the municipal water supply in Walkerton, Ontario in 2000, killing 7 and sickening 2,500 in a town of 5,000?

In 1985, 19 of 55 affected people at a London, Ontario, nursing home died after eating sandwiches infected with E. coli O157:H7.  On Oct. 12, 1985, in response to an inquest, the Ontario government announced a training program for food-handlers in health-care institutions, “stressing cleaning and sanitizing procedures and hygienic practices in food preparation.” That training apparently didn’t include the food safety basic – don’t give unheated cold cuts to vulnerable populations, like old people, ‘cause they may die from listeria.

These days, food safety culture is the buzz. The same recommendation – to embrace and enhance food safety culture —  was embraced by the U.K. Food Standards Agency last week following an inquiry into the death of 5-year-old Mason Jones and the illness of 160 other schoolchildren who consumed E. coli O157:H7 contaminated cold cuts in Wales in 2005.

Sixteen years after E. coli O157:H7 killed four and sickened hundreds who ate hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box chain, the challenge remains: how to get people to take food safety seriously? ??????Lots of companies do take food safety seriously and the bulk of Western meals are microbiologically safe. But recent food safety failures have been so extravagant, so insidious and so continual that consumers must feel betrayed.??????

Culture encompasses the shared values, mores, customary practices, inherited traditions, and prevailing habits of communities. The culture of today’s food system (including its farms, food processing facilities, domestic and international distribution channels, retail outlets, restaurants, and domestic kitchens) is saturated with information but short on behavioral-change insights. Creating a culture of food safety requires application of the best science with the best management and communication systems, including compelling, rapid, relevant, reliable and repeated, multi-linguistic and culturally-sensitive messages.

Frank Yiannas, the vice-president of food safety at Wal-Mart writes in his 2008 book, Food Safety Culture: Creating a Behavior-based Food Safety Management System, that an organization’s food safety systems need to be an integral part of its culture.

The other guru of food safety culture, Chris Griffith of the University of Wales, features prominently in the report by Professor Hugh Pennington into the 2005 E.coli outbreak in Wales.

I’ve maintained for 16 years that, despite high-profile outbreaks and unacceptable loss of life, food safety in Canada is, as Weatherill stated, an afterthought.

Forget government. Michael McCain, you want to be a leader, lead, don’t just talk about it by throwing around words like food safety culture because they are suddenly fashionable.

The best food producers, processors, retailers and restaurants will go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent — whether it’s live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website — to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.

And the best cold-cut companies may stop dancing around and tell pregnant women, old people and other immunocompromised folks, don’t eat this food unless it’s heated.

Weatherill says, action not words.

14 sick with Salmonella in Colorado; beef recalled

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King Soopers, Inc., a Denver, Colo., establishment, is recalling approximately 466,236 pounds of ground beef products that may be linked to an outbreak of salmonellosis, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.

As a result of an ongoing investigation into an outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium DT104 associated with ground beef products, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) notified FSIS of the problem. Epidemiological investigations and a case control study conducted by CDPHE and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) determined that there is an association between the fresh ground beef products and 14 illnesses reported in Colorado. The illnesses were linked through the epidemiological investigation by their less common pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) pattern found in PulseNet, a national network of public health and food regulatory agency laboratories coordinated by the CDC.

FSIS would like to remind consumers of the importance of following food safety guidelines when handling and preparing raw meat. Ground beef should be cooked to a safe minimum internal temperature of 160° Fahrenheit.

I would like to remind FSIS that it ain’t so easy to handle contaminated ground beef and not spread it around a home or food service kitchen.
 

OHIO: Boris thinks the health inspector sabotaged his restaurant

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It’s the blame game again. Boris and Tatiana Vilenchuk, owners of Hawa Russia restaurant in Columbus, Ohio are upset at the health department’s decision to revoke their license, reports The Columbus Dispatch.

The Columbus Board of Health took away their licenses yesterday, citing persistent, unresolved food-safety problems. At the Russian restaurant on the North Side, problems reported by inspectors included foods held at improper temperatures, the absence of a hand-washing sink and employees inadequately trained in food safety.

[O]wners of Hawa Russia, argued that inspectors have been unfair and unreasonable and accused a food inspector of planting an insect in the restaurant to prompt a violation.

Health officials said they have gone above and beyond to work with the Hawa Russia owners and staff. Only after several failed attempts to bring the restaurant into compliance did officials recommend revoking the license.

The Vilenchuks have closed the restaurant and said they don’t plan to appeal the order.

Oh, Boris. Already Columbus Public Health Online reports the establishment as closed (see below).

Inspection results in Columbus are available online and at the premise in the form of colored cards, and the Healthier, Safer People Honor Award, described below:

‘Food safety in Canada is on the upper end of mediocre’

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As a Canadian in America, watching the health-care advertisements, warning that any new U.S. system will be socialized like in Canada is as informative as watching a Michael Moore documentary.

Both are widely inaccurate.

Same with the orgy of listeria-in-Canada coverage following the release of the Weatherill report yesterday. Almost all of the commentary and analysis borders on the banal (the dictionary says banal means “so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring,” so for once I used a word properly) but a few things stand out:

Weatherill zeroed in on a "vacuum in senior leadership" among government officials at the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that caused "confusion and weak decision-making."

Like a risk communication vacuum; covered that in the 1997 book, Mad Cows and Mother’s Milk.

Rob Cribb of the Toronto Star got things right when he summarized things this way:

Twenty-two dead.
Hundreds sickened.
Six months of inquiry.
Nearly $3 million in public money.

That’s $3 million in addition to all the publicly-funded salaries of bureaucrats sitting around figuring out what not to do and how to cover their own assess. The Prime Minister could have called the bureaucrats on the carpet and said – stop messing around, come clean on who knew what when and fix this. Instead, stand-up comedian wannabe and Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz got to make jokes about the 22 dead people. And he still has his job.

The front-line public health types at the local and provincial levels seemed to know what they were doing. The feds at three different agencies – Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Health Canada, and the Public Health Agency of Canada – continually got in the way and messed things up.

Of course that didn’t stop the politicians and bureaucrats from praising the Canadian food safety system in the early days of the outbreak – when they had no clue what they were talking about. Like health care, it seems that the Canadian model is to tell citizens repeatedly they have the best system in the world, and they believe it.

Or, as Cribb said this morning in the Star,

At virtually every stage of the outbreak, it seems things could have – should have – gone differently in a food safety system repeatedly hailed by government officials as "one of the safest in the world."

Rick Holley, a microbiologist at the University of Manitoba and member of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s external advisory panel, responded with,

"I get so annoyed when I hear them say that. The food safety system in Canada is on the upper end of being mediocre."

Like health care.

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UK caterer closed after making 44 cops barf

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Birmingham City Council said Monday the Meal Machine was closed under Food Hygiene regulations amid concerns over cleanliness and cross contamination of foods.

Earlier this month it was reported that at least 44 police officers suffered the effects of what appeared to be food poisoning, including severe diarrhoea and vomiting, as a result of packed lunches issued to the officers by … Meal Machine.

It is known a number of officers ate a chicken and stuffing sandwich supplied to them as part of a packed lunch prepared by an outside contractor.

A spokesman for Birmingham City Council’s environmental health department said the decision followed checks into processes and procedures, including “food handling, cross contamination, temperature control and general cleanliness”.

Six children infected with E. coli in Colorado

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The Mountain Mail reports that local and state medical officials Tuesday confirmed six children in Chaffee County have been infected with Escherichia coli in the incident that began earlier in July.

With the incubation period for the bacteria nearing its end, Chaffee County Public Health Nurse Susan Ellis said Tuesday no new cases have been reported since about July 14.

She said 30 people will have been tested by Friday as investigators continue to seek the source of contamination.

Ellis said DNA from stool samples is being examined at the state laboratory in Denver. DNA samples from two of the children, she said, were identified as matching.

Improving sampling and risk communication at FSIS

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Chuck Dodd is dreamy – as a student, that is.

What teacher wouldn’t be proud when a student does a class assignment, and it eventually gets published in a peer-reviewed journal?

Chuck took my graduate course, Food Safety Risk Analysis, in the early part of 2008. For the final assignment, students are required to take a food safety risk issue of their choosing, and develop a risk analysis report for an audience, like a regulatory agency, integrating risk assessment, management and communication.

Chuck’s report – after editing and thoughtful comments from colleagues – was recently published in Foodborne Pathogens and Disease, entitled, Regulatory management and communication of risks associated with Eschericia coli O157:H7 in ground beef.

The Kansas State University press release that went out this morning says, in part,

What consumers may not be finding out about recalls and the inspection process, however, could make them doubt the effectiveness of what is actually a pretty good system to keep food safe, according to Kansas State University researchers.

Charles Dodd, K-State doctoral student in food science, Wamego, and Doug Powell, K-State associate professor of food safety, published a paper in the journal Foodborne Pathogens and Disease about how one government agency communicates risk about deadly bacteria like E. coli O157 in ground beef.

Publications, Web pages and recalls are all used in this risk communication.

Dodd said that although the Food Safety and Inspection Service generally does a good job of keeping meat safe, it’s easy for consumers to think the opposite, particularly when a recall tells them that the food in the fridge or pantry may be dangerous. In their study, Dodd and Powell looked at what information consumers can take away from the Food Safety and Inspection Service’s Web site, and suggest government agencies can more clearly communicate their role in keeping the food supply safe.

"We as Americans tend to expect more from regulatory agencies than we should, so we set ourselves up for disappointment," Dodd said. "Occasionally, regulatory agencies may create unrealistic expectations by the way they communicate with the public. The message of our paper is to say that the Food Safety and Inspection Service is doing a good job, considering the amount of resources it has. We are trying to open up dialogue about how its role could be communicated more effectively." …

Testing is just one tool that the Food Safety and Inspection Service uses. Its role is to monitor what other stakeholders are doing to keep food safe. "As a regulatory agency, the Food Safety and Inspection Service is monitoring food safety, not necessarily testing it themselves," Dodd said. "I think that’s what a lot of us consumers misinterpret. We need to remember that regulatory agencies allocate, not assume, responsibility."

He got an A in the class. And he collects his own cow pies for sampling (left).

Dodd, C.C. and Powell, D.A. 2009. Regulatory management and communication of risks associated with Eschericia coli O157:H7 in ground beef. Foodborne Pathogens and Disease, 6(6): 743-747.

Abstract

Foodborne illness outbreaks and ground beef recalls associated with Escherichia coli O157:H7 have generated substantial consumer risk awareness. Although this risk has been assessed and managed according to federal regulation, communication strategies may hamper stakeholder perception of regulatory efforts in the face of continued E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks associated with ground beef. To mitigate the risk of E. coli O157:H7 contamination in ground beef, the beef industry employs preharvest and postharvest interventions, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) provides regulatory oversight. Policy makers must understand and clearly express that regulation allocates, not assumes, responsibility. The FSIS role may be poorly communicated, leading consumers, retailers, and others in the farm-to-fork food safety system to misrepresent risks and creating unrealistic expectations of regulatory responsibility. To improve this risk communication, revisions may be needed in FSIS-related documents, Web pages, peer-reviewed publications, and recall announcements.

Hepatitis A debacle in Illinois

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Who knew what, when? A common theme in foodborne illness outbreak management is how was the essential information managed and responded to (whether it was knowledge of a contaminated product, linked illnesses or reporting an infected food handler). As more information trickles out about a food handler-linked Hepatitis A outbreak in Milan, Illinois it gets more confusing as to when the operator knew about the illness. Today a customer came forward and claims overhearing the discussion:

The woman says she was waiting in line to order at the McDonalds in Milan on June 25th, when she heard employee Cheryl Schram approach a manager behind the counter.
”She came out and she said Michelle, I was diagnosed with Hepatitis A”, said the woman who doesn’t want her name used. ”I was in there and I heard her say that”.
The customer says she knows what she heard that day. ”I swear on my mothers grave”.

This week’s food safety infosheet is all about the Hep A outbreak. Download it here.

Doo doo in the Soo

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Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario is a very unique place. Lovingly called the Soo, home of the Bon Soo winter carnival and Greyhounds Ontario Hockey League team, many, including myself, call it home.

Today, while creeping on a fellow Saultite’s Facebook photos, I came across this picture (right). My workmate asked if cartwheeling was Canadian slang for something – I’m pretty sure it refers to the gymnastics move.

If you cartwheel in doo doo, wash your hands.