Every time I’m interviewed about food safety stuff, the reporter will ask, “What can consumers do to protect themselves?”

Nothing?

It’s a lousy answer but often the truthiest one.

In that ConAgra Banquet Pot Pie outbreak that sickened 400 with Salmonella, Amy Reinert said she cooked the pot pie – at the time proclaiming ‘Ready in 4 minutes’ -- for her daughter for 7 minutes in the microwave, then 10 minutes in a conventional oven to make the crust crispy. Yet Isabelle still got sick.

Now, the company says, consumers need to use a meat thermometer to ensure their 50-cent pot pie won’t make them barf.

These stories and more are covered in a food safety feature in the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s Nutrition Action publication this month. It’s a comprehensive retelling of some food safety lowlights of the past four years that ends, as usual, with a bunch of things consumers can do to protect themselves.

I said,

“Everyone in industry and government says consumers have to do more, which is just silly. Controlling these kinds of contamination shouldn’t be a consumer problem. Producers and industry need to do better.”

The story is soft on spinach and leafy green producers – why did it take 29 outbreaks before industry took microbial food safety issues seriously – and appropriately harsh on the Ponzi scheme of food safety audits.

Mansour Samadpour said,

“These third-party inspections have become an industry that churns out meaningless certificates. Companies pay somebody $1,200 to come in and look at this paper and that paper and then give the company a certificate that says they passed by 96 percent.”

Top Chef host, producer and owner of the Craft series of restaurants Tom Colicchio talked to Anderson Cooper about food safety today on CNN. Tom gets some things right (temperature is really important for ground beef because of the surface area) but gets some stuff wrong (frozen burgers are worse than fresh because they are from big packers; go to a butcher for safe meat).

Regardless of source Tom, you need to stick it in. Measuring the temperature of your burger (160F, or 155F for 15 seconds) with a digitial tip-sensitive thermometer in multiple spots is the best risk-reduction practice.

Your Local Guardian reports that 13 people from Feltham Hill Infant and Nursery School, in Bedfont Road, Feltham, have been confirmed to have E. coli O157, along with one pupil from nearby Feltham Hill Junior School.

Environmental health officers completed a “deep clean” of the site to eliminate traces of infection and only children who have had the all-clear from the Health Protection Agency are being allowed back into class.

Books, toys, plants and equipment were thrown out as part of the clean-up.

Winter is the hottest time for hospitals, retirement residences, cruise ships and restaurants when it comes to norovirus outbreaks. Here in North Carolina, the Department of Public Health distributed a press release referencing recent outbreaks that has made the rounds on local TV and in small town papers.

With as little as just a few virus particles needed for infection and a high rate of secondary illnesses, a noro problem can escalate quickly (just ask Heston Blumenthal).

And everyone is looking for quick solutions to replace handwashing with soap and water, including the ever-present alcohol-based hand sanitizer. They just don’t exist.

Recent research, the first to evaluate alcohol-based hand sanitizers against a human strain of norovirus, shows that the squirtable and ubiquitous-in-public liquid isn’t a magic bullet. A report in the January Applied and Environmental Microbiology (76:394-399) by Liu et al demonstrates that commonly available alcohol-based sanitizers are less-than ideal against noro (despite many of the sanitizer producers proclaiming magic with Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah’s-couch-like exuberance).

As David C. Holzman of the American Society for Microbiology's Microbe says:

Moe, Liu, and their collaborators (including my friend Lee-Ann Jaykus) compared the effectiveness of liquid soap and alcohol hand sanitizers in removing or killing viruses on finger pads, following methods developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials.

After finger pads were inoculated with norovirus and then washed, the researchers used quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR to measure viruses that remained. In another set of tests, sodium hypochlorite (bleach) eliminated virus, while ethanol, regardless of concentration, did little to reduce virus titer. In vivo rinsing either with water or with antibacterial, triclosan-containing soap proved about equally effective in reducing viruses on finger pads.

These results suggest that protection comes from mechanically removing the virus from the hands, rather than from inactivating the virus, says Stuart Levy of Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Here’s the rub (no pun intended): sanitizer alone isn’t even close to being effective as handwashing on noro but what happens in systems (like kitchens) where handwashing compliance is consistently shown to be less than 20 per cent (and other pathogens also exist). In a study we completed, to be published soon, we report that handwashing attempts can be close to zero at busy times. Best practice, until a better option is found is, soap and water but, as barfblog-favorite Don Schaffner has suggested, there might be a public health benefit by providing sanitizer in low-handwashing compliance situations as replacements for handwashing.
 

At least eight people are sick with Shigella and the common source appears to be a Subway restaurant in Lombard which has now been closed by the DuPage County Health Department.

Maryann O'Neill, principal of nearby Montini Catholic High School in Lombard, told the Chicago Tribune two students called in sick Wednesday with what she said was diagnosed as food poisoning, and it was her understanding they had eaten at Subway. One of the students was taken to a hospital emergency room.

One of my favorite songs of all time, Friday I’m in Love, by The Cure, pretty much states that Friday is the best most awesome day of the week. This is true, except for this past Friday, when my wife and I were woken up at 3 a.m. by a foul stench coming from our kitchen.

Our lovely puppy – 56-pound yellow lab – decided to go for an all-poop-that-you-can-eat buffet in our backyard, when she was just supposed to be frolicking and enjoying the cold weather after having dinner. So, if your dessert consists of poop, you will most likely barf it all out, unless you are a rabbit, in which case you are fine. That’s what our dog did. She barfed all that poop all over our kitchen floor.

The question is, besides whether you still love your dog or not, how to clean all that poop?

- If you own a pair of disposable or rubber gloves, now is a good time to put them on.

- Tie the dog outside somewhere, so that she won’t keep stepping on poop and spreading it.

- Remove the dog’s bed, which is covered in poop and place it in the washer, with detergent and if available, bleach.

- Collect excess poop with paper towels and put them in a leak-proof trash bag.

- Once all the excess is gone, spray everything with the disinfectant of your choosing.

- Wipe with paper towels and repeat.

I went a step further and cleaned the whole floor with a swiffer and bleach, and then I even polished it, just to try to get rid of the smell from my hardwood floor. By the time I was done cleaning this mess it was around 4 a.m.

Don’t eat poop. And wash your hands. Often.. Often, like this banner at 810 Zone in Kansas City states, means after every use of the bathroom, every time you touch raw foods, and every time you touch your pet or its food or its barf.

There’s this Joint Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition at the University of Maryland where U.S. Food and Drug Admin. types go to be trained in all matters related to food risk.

A few years ago, I shook hands with one of the directors and said, sure, I’ll help you out on risk communication stuff, cause he said they sorta sucked at it.

I never heard back, despite several e-mails.

And they still suck at it.

JIFSAN’s spring symposium is, Risk Communication - Communicating Science to the Public.

Risk communication 101: talk with people, not to them. If any of you had kids you would know this.

When people ask if I speak other languages, I say, sure, I speak Canadian and American.

But from my WASPy roots I’ve grown to appreciate the role different languages have in making a global citizen. I took the lazy solution and travel with someone who knows languages.

In Dubai, more than 60 per cent of food workers in the capital who took hygiene training courses last year failed them, many because of language barriers.

Sure, most food safety training sucks, trying to make HACCP experts or microbiology geeks out of line cooks, but language can be a huge barrier. That’s why we have food safety infosheets in French, Spanish and Portuguese. We can do a bunch of other languages if someone wants them.

Stephen Pakenham-Walsh, a food-service consultant based in Abu Dhabi said relying on English was “short-sighted” on the part of food tutors.

Indians make up 65 per cent of the food industry workforce. Other Asian nationalities comprise 20 per cent of workers, with Arabs making up 12 per cent. The results indicate that the large majority of workers are not getting effective hygiene training.

I’ve been to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Amy and I were driving south through NM on our way to Tuscon, Arizona, and had to pee, so why not in a town that changed its name to honor the NBC radio program in 1950. We stopped in at the local historical society or museum, and were endlessly asked if we were going to stay overnight.

No. Where’s the bathroom.

Topeka, the state capital of Kansas, has changed its name to Google, Kansas, for a month, in hopes to get some new fiber optic cables to replace the stagecoaches.

The unusual move comes as several U.S. cities elbow for a spot in Google's new "Fiber for Communities" program. The Web giant is going to install new Internet connections in unannounced locations, giving those communities Internet speeds 100 times faster than those elsewhere, with data transfer rates faster than 1 gigabit per second.

As 79-year-old Topeka mayor, Bill Bunten, told CNN, the name change will not be permanent, adding,

"Oh, heavens no, Topeka? We are very proud of our city and Topeka is an Indian word which means 'a good place to grow potatoes.' We're not going to change that."

Do people grow potatoes in Topeka these days?

"I don't think we grow that many potatoes anymore. The crops we have out here are wheat and corn and soybeans and alfalfa. And, did I say soybeans?"

He's the first to say outsiders probably view Topeka as "another Midwestern town with not a lot going on," but he's been making efforts to change that. He’s trying to revitalize downtown with a bar and music scene.

Google would add to all that, making the city more attractive to youngsters, he said.

Now if Manhattan (Kansas) will officially change its name to (Little) Apple, maybe we’ll all get free iPhones.