Basketball is interminably dull.

The first college game I ever went to on Jan. 30, 2008, Kansas State beat the University of Kansas – who went on to win the national crown – for the first time in 24 years.

All games should be like that. They’re not.

But I’ll watch tonight as K-State goes up against Xavier in a sweet-16 showdown, the first time K-State has been to that particular dance since 1988.

What would be a great storyline is if West Virginia met K-State for the final. Bob Huggins was rescued from career oblivion when they hired him as coach a few years ago. Huggins repaid K-State’s generosity by leaving after one year.

Locals are still upset.

But he left behind assistant coach Frank Martin, who’s turned K-State into a national competitor. The prodigy going up against the mentor. It would be like me and Chapman going on an all-nerd food safety Reach for the Top (trivia note: Chapman was actually on Reach for the Top or whatever the Ontario version was called when he was in high school).

In other NCAA news, the start of the Men's Swimming and Diving Championships has been delayed 24 hours to Friday after 18 student-athletes and a coach were treated for a possible gastrointestinal illness since arriving in Columbus, Ohio.

K-State’s Bramlage Coliseum would make an excellent hockey arena.
 

The Louisiana state Department of Health and Hospitals has closed a large section of east bank Plaquemines Parish waters to oyster fishing through at least mid-April, after 11 people in Mississippi – at a seafood conference, repeat, at a seafood conference -- became sick after eating oysters believed to be traced to that area.

The Times-Picayune reports the state has also issued a recall of any oysters harvested from that area since March 6, meaning wholesalers must review their records and contact any restaurants, brokers or other buyers who bought oysters from those waters. Under Food and Drug Administration and state health guidelines, oyster dealers are required to have a recall plan in effect.

Risk comparisons can be risky: they usually offend the target audience and make the author sound like a jack-ass.

James Wesson, oyster scientist with the Virginia Marine Resource Commission, told the Daily Press that the overwhelming majority of oysters sold in the United States are not contaminated, adding,

"More people die each year from eating Cheetos than from eating oysters.”

No data was provided.

The comment was made as part of a story about Virginia regulators requiring stiffer rules to prevent the sale of contaminated oysters harvested from the Chesapeake Bay during warm-water months.

Each year about 15 people die from eating contaminated oysters, according to the agency. Most of the problem oysters come from the Gulf of Mexico, but at least one has been linked to Virginia waters since 2000, said Robert Croonenberghs, director of the state Health Department's shellfish sanitation division.

If the FDA finds another contaminated oyster sold by Virginia seafood suppliers, the agency could prohibit shipping raw oysters outside state lines, he said. Such a ban could stifle the industry and cause thousands of dollars in losses to suppliers, watermen, and oyster farmers.

The number of deaths may be statistically trivial – unless it happens to you or someone you know. And this risk can be managed.

The spirit of a crazed Glenn Beck has been transferred to the Sacramento Bee where the paper reports how 10-year-old Diego Bartolome just wanted to start a salsa business to help his mom after she lost her job and instead got a crash course in red tape.

The story says that Bartolome co-founded a hot little salsa company, grossing $1,000 from his Diego's Awesome Salsa by December and landing accounts at grocery stores. The salsa boy also got a taste of the media spotlight, with a profile in The Bee and an appearance on Channel 31's "Good Day Sacramento."

Then the food police paid him and his mom a visit. An inspector from the state Department of Public Health noticed in a TV segment that Diego's Awesome Salsa wasn't labeled properly, and there were possible temperature-control issues.

Diego's Awesome Salsa got accounts at grocery stores? Who was the third-party auditor that approved a supplier that hadn’t passed even basic health code requirements?

WRAL in Raleigh reported today that the Shereton Hotel (at right, exactly as shown, with ambulances taking kids away), the focus of an outbreak investigation about a month ago (150+ teenagers ill at a statewide YMCA youth leadership conference) was not likely the source of the illnesses, nor was norovirus likely the pathogen of concern.

The updated information released by Dr. Megan Davies, , state epidemiologist,  was that students who ate at a banquet on Feb 12 were more than 3 times more likely to have symptoms than those who didn't attend. Best guest of investigators conducting a follow-up study reviewing all the symptoms, is that a foodborne toxin (likely due to temperature abuse) was the likely culprit.

“The timing of the outbreak and the fact that most sick attendees had only diarrhea and not vomiting make it unlikely that norovirus was the main cause of the outbreak,” Dr. Megan Davies, state epidemiologist, said in a statement. “Still, some students might have had norovirus when they arrived at the conference in Raleigh.”
The short time between the dinner and the onset of illness makes it more likely that bacterial toxins, a common cause of food poisoning, were to blame, officials said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conducting tests to pinpoint the toxin that caused the illnesses.

Convention Center Director Roger Krupa was quoted as saying "At this point, it's hard to accept the report. All of the evidence is statistical and circumstantial. There are no lab results, no food samples, nothing factual."

Epidemiology and statistics are pretty powerful; science isn't used to prove or disprove anything, but to provide best guesses. And the best guess in this situation, with the current info, was that the banquet facilities were the likely source.
 

New York Chinatown legend, Great NY Noodletown, was forced to close on Friday night.

A February inspection turned up evidence of insects, roaches and mice in the Noodletown's food and/or non-food areas, and, according to Eater NY, pinged the restaurant for its storage of delicious meats that hang behind the counter.

Where the DOH finds fault, Noodletown's devoted customers find flavor. The 50 violation points from February required a follow-up visit, which apparently didn't go so well, and the restaurant remains closed. Luckily, the shut down is happening now and not during soft-shell crab season, one of Noodletown's specialties.

I find fault. Shut them down.
 

Professor Hugh Pennington is apparently unstuck in time, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

In November 1996, over 400 fell ill and 21 were killed in Scotland by E. coli O157:H7 found in deli meats produced by family butchers John Barr & Son. The Butcher of Scotland, who had been in business for 28 years and who was previously awarded the title of Scottish Butcher of the Year, was using the same knives to handle raw and cooked meat. That's a food safety no-no.

In a 1997 inquiry, Prof. Pennington recommended, among other things, the physical separation, within premises and butcher shops, of raw and cooked meat products using separate counters, equipment and staff.

In 2008, Prof. Pennington heard in a new inquiry how John Tudor and Son, the Butcher of Wales, used the same machine to vacuum package both raw and cooked meats, leading to an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak beginning in Sept. 2005, which sickened some150 children in 44 schools in southern Wales and killed five-year-old Mason Jones.

This morning, a consumer watchdog said food hygiene services in Wales need an extra £2.5m a year to help prevent a repeat of a fatal 2005 E. coli outbreak.

I’m not sure extra money is going to change anything. If someone wants to clearly skirt with food safety, as butcher William Tudor did, bad things will happen. And the local councils were already turning a blind eye to Tudor’s most egregious actions.

The Butcher of Wales was shown to have:

• encouraged staff suffering from stomach bugs and diarrhea to continue preparing meat for school dinners;
• known of cross-contamination between raw and cooked meats, but did nothing to prevent it;
• used the same packing in which raw meat had been delivered to subsequently store cooked product;
• operated a processing facility that contained a filthy meat slicer, cluttered and dirty chopping areas, and meat more than two years out of date piled in a freezer;
• a cleaning schedule at the factory that one expert called "a joke;"
• falsified crucial health and safety documents and lied about receiving hygiene awards; and,
• supplied schools with meat that was green, smelly and undercooked.

Professor Chris Griffith, head of the food research and consultancy unit at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, told the inquiry the culture at the premises was “dominated by saving money.”

So who allowed Tudor to operate under such conditions?

Government inspectors.

Prof. Pennington heard that Tudor and Son was visited several times in the months leading up to the Sept. 2005 outbreak, that inspectors knew there was only one vac-pac machine being used for both cooked and raw meats but, despite Pennington's 1997 recommendation, inspectors decided the business did not pose "an imminent risk" to human health.

"There was a failure in the series of inspections to identify poor hygiene and working practices and a failure to take action."

The inspectors also took on "face value" explanations offered by Tudor and his staff for various food safety failures.

Among the recommendations in the report issued this morning is that,

The Food Standards Agency should issue clear guidance to inspectors that the use of the same equipment to process raw and ready-to-eat foods is totally unacceptable.

Does anyone need extra money to clearly state food safety basics?

I started picking people up about 7 p.m. Amanda, Sarah, Janis, Lynn and Marty.

Marty was last and not ready, as usual.

Marty had no reason going to the first food safety educators conference in Washington, D.C. in 1997. He was working as a student life advisor or something but, I had gotten in the habit of taking Marty along on the 12-hour D.C. road trip from Guelph –got lost once in some New York mountains in the middle of the night and thought we were going to die – for fun and driving chores.

The 1996 Nissan Quest minivan still had the new car smell, and as a new prof with a carload of students, I decided driving all night was better than dishing out non-existent cash for an extra night of hotel rooms.

We arrived in Georgetown about 7:30 a.m., ate at a dive, and found the on-campus conference room. People looked at us like we had just rolled out of a vehicle and been driving all night.

We had.

Most of us went and changed into fresh clothes, while Marty crashed somewhere until the room was available.

The conference started and we were pumped.

I may have fallen asleep.

I remember that Peter Sandman gave a keynote and was treated like a rock star – I thought he was ineffectual, especially when it came to the hazard and outrage around foodborne illness.

There were descriptions of many food safety education programs but the evaluation components were either non-existent or sucked.

There was a big deal about social marketing, presented to the attendees like we had all arrived on the short bus.

I remember going out to a Georgetown bar later that night, watching The Truth About Cats and Dogs in the hotel room while Marty farted, and commenting that Janis looked like Janeane Garofalo. I remember the drive home.

I don’t remember much about the conference.

Which is why I haven’t gone back.

Tomorrow, the International 2010 Food Safety Education Conference kicks off in Atlanta and its focus is to identify “communication and education strategies to increase the public’s knowledge of the causes of foodborne illnesses and improve food safety practices.”

Admirable goals. But what has happened since 1997?

I’m all for providing food safety information in a compelling, creative and critically-sound manner. However education is something people do themselves. Lewis Lapham wrote in Harper’s magazine in the mid-1980s about how individuals can choose to educate themselves about all sorts of interesting things, but the idea of educating someone is doomed to failure. Oh, and it’s sorta arrogant to state that others need to be educated; to imply that if only you understood the world as I understand the world, we would agree and dissent would be minimized.

These may be subtle semantics – to communicate with rather than to; to inform rather than educate – but they set an important tone.

At least it’s not a consumer food safety education conference. With outbreaks in pizza, pot pies, pet food, peanut butter, bagged spinach, carrot juice, lettuce, tomatoes, canned chili sauce, hot peppers, cookie dough, and white pepper, I’m not sure what consumers have to do with it.

Chapman is going, apparently as part of a southeast IKEA tour for his wife, and also to present a paper we wrote entitled, I updated my Facebook status to ‘I just got food poisoning:’ using social networking services (SNS) to communicate food safety risks. The abstract is below.

Bill Marler says he’s gong to educate consumers by handing out refrigerator magnets at the conference.

Me, I’ll be hanging out somewhat east of the 100th meridian, wondering why Americans don’t understand The Tragically Hip (especially the early stuff). 

Chapman, B. and Powell, D. 2010. I updated my Facebook status to “I just got food poisoning”: using social networking services (SNS) to communicate food safety risks. FSIS/NSF Food Safety Education Conference. March 24, 2010. Atlanta Georgia.

Up to 30 per cent of individuals in developed countries become ill from the food and water they consume each year. Recent outbreaks of foodborne illness involving produce, peanut butter and potpies have further elevated the public discussion of microbial food safety risks. With the expansion and ease-of-use of non-traditional, Internet-based communication tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube and blogs, individuals are discussing high-profile food crises online. As an estimated 60 per cent of online American adults use SNS, an opportunity exists to utilize these communities to engage individuals around foodborne risks by providing information and establishing relationships, to prepare for or mitigate potential catastrophic incidents. The rapid dialogue between individuals with common food safety interests can impact belief formation and affect food decisions. Using case study methodology and media analysis of the coverage of recent outbreaks of E. coli O157 linked to spinach and Salmonella linked to fresh tomatoes and peppers, a catalogue of mediums and will be presented. Through examples gleaned from barfblog.com and bites.ksu.edu an online food safety communication template and strategies for food safety communicators will also be presented. Understanding target audiences, using communication technology while providing rapid messages can enhance both risk management awareness and trust with stakeholders.  Communicators developing food risk behavior change programs can be more effective by monitoring and utilizing diverse media to adjust strategies and maintain message relevance.

In a new take on faith-based food safety, Jeff Brown, owner of the Dungeness creamery in Washington state which produces raw milk and was linked to three cases of E. coli illness in Dec. 2009, was quoted as telling the Seattle Times this morning,

"Everything God designed is good for you."

I don’t know who designed small pox, but I don’t want it.

Not sure who designed aflatoxins in food, but don’t want that either.

And I don’t want pathogens in milk, especially when there is an easy technological fix – pasteurization.

The story cites the state Department of Health as saying between 2005 and 2009, 395 Washingtonians with lab-confirmed cases of foodborne pathogens reported consuming raw-milk products shortly before getting sick.

Brown maintains the government has unfairly damaged his farm's reputation.

"You know how you can tell they're lying? Their lips are moving. … God designed raw milk; man messed with it. You draw your own conclusions."