Along the lines of the inspirational "Dude, wash your hands" campaign, and Jack Black's Step Off from School of Rock (right), Northern Ireland's safefood has urged people unhappy about food hygiene standards in public eateries to speak out if they are not satisfied.

The Speak Out campaign aims to raise the overall standards of food hygiene in food outlets in Ireland.

Martin Higgins, chief executive from safefood, said,

"Food safety is a right, not a privilege and consumers should not settle for anything other than the highest standards. Our campaign provides consumers with information on what to watch out for in relation to food safety. … We know from recent safefood research that over half of consumers on the island of Ireland were reluctant to speak out if they were unhappy with food hygiene standards. In the last six months, we have seen a positive shift in consumer's attitudes with more people feeling empowered to speak out if they are not happy. We would like to see this trend continue, as ultimately, consumer demand for proper hygiene standards will result in improvements."

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Dude, wash your hands.

Proper handwashing with the proper tools -- soap, water and paper towel -- can significantly reduce the number of foodborne and other illnesses.

An audio public service announcement is available here.

People should be washing their hands before handling food and, for example:?

• after using the toilet;
• when entering the kitchen to prepare food;
• before handling ready-to-eat food;
• after handling any raw food;
• after changing diapers;
• after playing with or cleaning up after pets; and,
• after handling garbage.

The steps in proper handwashing, as concluded from the preponderance of available evidence, are:

• wet hands with water;
• use enough soap to build a good lather;
• scrub hands vigorously, creating friction and reaching all areas of the fingers and hands for at least 10 seconds to loosen pathogens on the fingers and hands;
• rinse hands with thorough amounts of water while continuing to rub hands; and,
• dry hands with paper towel.

Water temperature is not a critical factor -- water hot enough to kill dangerous bacteria and viruses would scald hands -- so use whatever is comfortable.

The friction from rubbing hands with paper towels helps remove additional bacteria and viruses.

Next time you visit a bathroom that is missing soap, water or paper towels, let someone in charge know. And next time you see someone skip out on the suds in the bathroom, look at them and say, “Dude, wash your hands!”

And Don't Eat Poop.

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State health officials said that a staph bacteria may have sickened more than 137 people who ate an Easter buffet at Claudia Sanders Dinner House in Shelbyville.

Preliminary results from the Kentucky State Lab suggested that staphylococcus aureus might be the culprit in the food poisoning, although it's not definitive since it was found in some stool samples and not others.

The restaurant served 3,100 people on
 aster Sunday. Ham is the chief suspect in the case, although officials are also exploring other possible contaminated food.

Claudia Sanders and her husband, Col. Harland Sanders, moved into a large white house on four acres on U.S. 60 in Shelbyville in 1959. They initially used the house as the headquarters for Kentucky Fried Chicken, but later put up a building next door for that purpose.

When the fast-food franchise was sold in the 1960s, the couple turned the building next to their home into a restaurant. Now owned by a former employee, the restaurant serves country-style food, including fried chicken.

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A three-month-old U.K. baby contracted salmonella from her family's pet snake.

Amanda Vry found out from research on the Internet that her daughter Gabriella could have contracted Salmonella from reptiles and is now looking for a new home for Reg, a Colombian Rainbow Boa.

Reg was bought as a present for her son's ninth birthday and the family carried out research on keeping reptiles beforehand as Ms Vry was heavily pregnant at the time.

Apparently they didn't use the Salmonella search term, and it's unlikely most purveyors of reptilian pets talk about the Salmonella issue.

Ms Vry told BBC News,

"When they said it was salmonella I just did not know how she could have caught it. I went to the hospital's information centre and typed in 'salmonella' and it said it can be caught quite easily from reptiles. We were all shocked after we had carried out the research before. If I had been given this information before we bought it, we would never have bought it and my daughter would never have been ill and my family would not have gone through this."

As Samuel L. would say, "Get those mother***ing snakes away from those mother***ing babies."

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Herb Peterson, the man who invented the Egg McMuffin, died at his Santa Barbara home on Tuesday at the age of 89.

Peterson came up with idea for the signature McDonald's breakfast fare in 1972.

Best thing McDonald's has come up with. Many a morning on the road has been fueled with Egg McMuffins. Thanks, Herb.

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In the midst of the U.S. presidential race and the on-going sage in Iraq, the New York Times devotes some major ink to vegan strippers.

Johnny Diablo of Portland, Ore., decided to open a business to combine vegans and strippers at his Casa Diablo Gentlemen’s Club, where soy protein replaces beef in the tacos and chimichangas and the dancers wear pleather, not leather.

However, since the strip club opened last month, Portland's young feminists have been complaining  “all over the Internet,” according to the aptly named Diablo. “One of them came in here once. I could tell she had an attitude right when she came in. She was all hostile.”

Mr. Diablo, who hasn’t worn or eaten animal products in 24 years and is worried about cruelty to animals says he isn’t concerned with the “feminazis,” adding, “My sole purpose in this universe is to save every possible creature from pain and suffering."

The Times says that in Los Angeles, some frown at the scantily clad Vegan Vixens — a kind of animal-loving Pussycat Dolls — who perform songs like “Real Men Don’t Hunt” at fund-raisers for animal welfare groups.

And many vegans who want to publicize cruelty within the fur industry are nonetheless dismayed by the new “Ink, Not Mink” advertising campaign from peta2, the youth arm of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It features members of the Internet-based pinup group the Suicide Girls, sporting little more than tattoos and body piercings.

Many vegans have long criticized PETA for using naked celebrities in its advertising campaigns and for staging stunts like naked protests.

As an aside, the Times says that Mr. Diablo put the club up for sale last week, although not because of the criticism. He may have underestimated the appeal of stripping to vegans, or of vegan cuisine to striptease fans; an earlier vegan restaurant he ran was poorly received.

The aside is the most important feature of this story.

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Rapid, reliable, repeated and relevant. That's been the food safety mantra at iFSN for over a decade. Here's why.

Dr. Carol Byrd-Bredbenner of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and colleagues reported in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association that many college students engaged in eating behaviors that could make them sick.

Based on surveys of 4,343 students at 21 colleges and universities across the U.S.,

53 percent reported eating raw homemade cookie dough (which contains uncooked eggs), 33 percent said they ate fried eggs with soft or runny yolks, 29 percent ate sushi, and 28 percent consumed raw sprouts. Eleven percent said they ate raw oysters, clams or mussels, and 7 percent said they ate pink hamburger.

I won't begin to get into all the faults with these kinds of measures or the near futility of drawing any meaningful conclusions from self-reported surveys.

Even so, the authors figured that,

"current food safety education efforts may not provide the information and/or motivation needed to compel individuals to change their consumption levels of risky foods. … Health professionals should focus creative efforts on developing safe food consumption behaviors in this group and thereby help safeguard the health of this population and enable them to fulfill the role of protecting the health of their future families."

Don't eat poop.

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The Sydney Morning Herald reports that 81-year-old retiree William Hodgins died just 12 hours after dining with his wife, Audrey, at the upmarket Tables restaurant in Pymble on Friday, January 12 last year (right, pic from Sydney Morning Herald).

Inspector Dean Lindley of Hornsby police told Westmead Coroners Court yesterday that an investigation by the NSW Food Authority discovered Bacillus cereus in an asparagus cream sauce served to Hodgins and 14 other customers that night who had ordered the fish of the day, snapper.

It is alleged the sauce was up to 48 hours old when it was served to him.

Inspector Lindley said he was contacted by food inspector, Bryan Biffin, who said he had taken a sample of cream asparagus sauce he had found in the restaurant after police left. It had been served with the fish of the day.

"The sauce had subsequently been analysed by the Division of Analytical Laboratories and had been found to contain the pathogen Bacillus cereus at a level of 9.8 million parts … Mr Biffin informed me that the toxic level of this pathogen is 1 million parts … Biffin further stated that in his experience this pathogen thrives in an environment where the food is heated and cooled over a period of time. During the course of the investigation I came to the opinion that the deceased William Hodgins had eaten the asparagus sauce. The sauce at the time of consumption was contaminated by the pathogen Bacillus cereus after having been repeatedly subjected to temperature abuse in that it was heated and cooled a number of times over 48 hours by restaurant staff."

The restaurant co-owner and principal chef Kim de Laive told the court he had been holidaying on the South Coast that day and that his fellow chef, Douglas Gunn, had prepared the sauce dishes, including the cream asparagus, the night before for use that Friday.

He said it was the restaurant's practice to dispose of asparagus sauce if it was exposed to room temperature for more than four hours, and was unaware that the Australian food standards required it to be disposed after two hours. Mr de Laive said he could only assume that one of the apprentices had put the sauce back into the fridge after its use earlier in the day and it had been taken out again that night but he had not asked any of the apprentices about it.

Way to blame the underlings, chef, especially since you apparently didn't know the basics.

When the restaurant's co-owner, Daniel Brukark, entered the witness box counsel for the Food Authority counsel, Patrick Saidi, revealed the authority was prosecuting Mr Brukark's company, Dan Brook Investments, for failing to place labels with dates on its sauce containers, an offence which carries a two-year prison term if a director or chef is convicted.

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On Friday March 14, 2008, Healthinspections.com published their ranking of the most dangerous states for eating out.  The ranking was based on an analysis of 2006 foodborne outbreak surveillance data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).   The five most dangerous states for eating out, according to this analysis, were Florida, California, Minnesota, Ohio, and New York.   Florida and California were cited as having the most dangerous restaurants for the third year in a row.  This is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Florida, California, and New York are three of the four largest states in the nation.  Ohio ranks 7th.  More people mean more restaurants.  More restaurants mean more outbreaks in restaurants.  It really is that simple. 

If you turn the number of outbreaks into a rate that compares outbreaks per million population, or outbreaks per 1,000 eating and drinking establishments (see table below) the rankings change.



As you can plainly see from this table, Minnesota is twice as dangerous for eating out as any of the other states, right? Wrong again.

Minnesota has the highest rate of reported outbreaks because it has the most aggressive and effective public health surveillance system for foodborne illnesses.  This is an example of the tree falling in the woods problem.  Falling trees generate sound waves, but if no one is there to hear them, they don’t generate any sound.  In Minnesota, we may not actually have more falling trees, but we’re out there listening for them.  

One important source for hearing about outbreaks in restaurants is from the restaurants themselves.  Because many environmental health specialists in Minnesota view themselves as teachers rather than enforcers, they take the time to get to know the restaurant operators and listen to their problems.  This, in turn, fosters a relationship of trust where restaurant operators actually report illness complaints to the local health department.  Outbreaks are identified, problems are corrected, and we all learn a little bit more about the constantly changing challenges of making food safe. 

In this ranking, being at the top of the list is a good thing.
--
Craig Hedberg is a foodborne disease epidemiologist and Associate Professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

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