ConAgra is continuing with its blame-the-consumer strategy when crappy pot pies make people sick with salmonella – like the 30 confirmed ill with Salmonella Chester linked to Marie Callender‘s Cheesy Chicken & Rice frozen meal.

Teresa Paulsen, a spokeswoman for ConAgra, said the company is investigating the contamination, adding,

"At this point, we are looking at an ingredient as the cause since all tests from our production environment have been negative.”

Some of the ingredients, in particular the protein such as the chicken, are precooked before packaging. She said the package has explicit instructions on how to cook the entree in a microwave or oven.

"If it's cooked according to package instructions, any pathogen would be killed," she said.

Explicit is not the same as practical. No matter how much the Marie Callender name is supposed to fancy things up, it’s still a pot pie tweens toss in the microwave.

How effective are explicit instructions to teenagers? And why are people the critical control point in the frozen chicken thingie food safety system?

Seattle lawyer Bill Marler, who is representing an Oregon man who was hospitalized four days in May after eating one of the implicated pies, said, "You can't expect the customer to be the kill step.”

A table of frozen, not-ready-to-eat chicken thingy outbreaks is available at:
http://bites.ksu.edu/Salmonella-outbreaks-frozen-raw-chicken-entrees.

I glance through celebrity blogs to find examples of America’s best and brightest suffering from food poisoning like mere mortals.

Really.

PerezHilton.com is reporting that Carrot Top – a bad comedian turned I-don’t-know-what, and who has his picture inexplicably splashed around Las Vegas -- was briefly hospitalized yesterday for an unspecified issue.

Carrot Top said in a statement today:

"It was food poisoning and the resulting dehydration that made him drive himself to the hospital. Fluids were put into his system for a few hours, and then he was released."

Perez says, Bullshiz! If you have food poisoning, you can barely move your body to the toilet, let alone drive yourself to the hospital!
 

I call Andrew McKenzie a friend, and he calls me a reprobate.

Fair enough. He certainly dresses better.

And has more tolerance for meetings.

Business Day in New Zealand has a profile of the 62-year-old retiring Food Safety Authority chief executive with all the old stories, probably told through certain filters.

What I remember best – through the fog of good scotch – was an outstanding lamb dinner a pregnant Amy and I had with Andrew and his wife at their home overlooking Wellington in 2008, followed by an All Blacks rugby match on the tube.

Andrew McKenzie could justly claim the title of the father of modern meat inspection conferred on him by a speaker at a European conference recently.

The retiring chief executive of the Food Safety Authority was a lowly government official in the mid-80s when he had the temerity to challenge the European-imposed rules governing meat inspection.

The actions that flowed from this led to savings of many millions of dollars to the meat industry and freed up international trade.

He encountered his first silly rule as a young Agriculture Ministry meat inspector in the mid-70s. It required the inspectors who worked with meat workers on the slaughter chain to inspect the heads of all sheep to look for signs of disease.

Dr McKenzie knew this was unnecessary because there were no signs of disease on a head that couldn't already be seen in the normal inspection of the carcass, but it was demanded by Britain as a requirement of accepting our exports.

The head had to be skinned, adding huge cost to sheep processing. Three or four extra butchers had to be employed on each chain, as well as one extra meat inspector. Ten years later he was in a position to do something about it.

He convinced the meat companies to run trials. In one day 325,000 animals were killed. No signs of disease were found on the heads that were not already uncovered by inspection of the rest of the carcass.

He presented the results to the British authorities and they agreed to change the rules.

It meant the loss of up to 500 seasonal jobs, but the industry estimated its savings at $10 million-$12m a year.

He went to the European Union headquarters and argued that many of the rules didn't make sense in the New Zealand context. "They asked me to list them. Three days later I came back with 200 examples. When I flopped this on the table, they said `Ah jeez, this is a bit hard'."

The result was an "equivalency" agreement between Europe and New Zealand.
"That agrees there's a bunch of basic things you need to do to make a difference to public and animal health, but there's also others that are just good meat manufacturing and hygiene practice and they can vary," he says.

"Since then our relationship has gone along really well."

The agreement cleared the way for trade and was used as a template by the United States and Canada.

Crucial to the ongoing success of the agreement, and those that followed, has been New Zealand's reputation for integrity and honesty in international trade.
"We've been scrupulously honest and people can rely on our word," Dr McKenzie says.

"And we're pretty good thinkers – putting new ideas on the table, and taking a lot of their ideas, building on them, trialling them, modifying them and feeding them back into the system."

That they are, as Katie has just returned from a year working with NZFSA, helping develop a national restaurant inspection disclosure system.

Car time used to be the best thinking time for me. While living in Guelph and working on my MSc I’d drive semi-weekly to the greenhouse vegetable capital of North America, Leamington, Ontario (that’s in Canada) to do some on-farm food safety work with the industry. I’d throw some tunes on, rock out and try to get stuff straight in my head. On the drive I’d dream up my next activity or op-ed idea; between Tim Horton’s stops and refinement conversations (I had just got my first cell phone) some salient ideas might have developed.

Today I spent 15 hours in the car driving from Port Hope, Ontario (also in Canada) to Raleigh, NC with Dani and  21-month old Jack in the vehicle (which is now a family friendly minivan equipped with a DVD player). Elmo and The Wiggles DVDs (4 and 6 viewings today, respectively) have replaced rock-out-friendly tunes and phone conversations have been replaced by pointing out buses, cows, planes and boats to Jack.

Regardless, I still had some time to think about some stuff.

Coverage surrounding our food safety infosheet evaluation paper last week has been pretty decent, with pick-up from Scientific American, AP and USA Today (which Doug has already mentioned) as well as a few blogs. The focus of the paper has been represented pretty well, but there have been a few things worth clarifying and addressing.

From Scientific American:

- And recent research by food safety specialist Ben Chapman of North Carolina State University found that meals prepared in commercial kitchens have been involved in up to 70 percent of food poisoning.

Our team didn’t look at tracing where contamination happens and how many meals have led to outbreaks in the study, although we reported in the intro that up to 70% of outbreaks have been traced to meals outside of the home. We grabbed that estimate from a few sources including a combination of CDC outbreak line listing summaries and Ontario, Canada outbreak statistics. 

A limitation of the data is that it is an estimate derived only from confirmed outbreaks, which are usually reported by year. We saw estimates as low as 14% (Lee, M., and D. Middleton. 2003. Enteric illness in Ontario, Canada, from 1997 to 2001. J. Food Prot. 66:953–961. ) and as high as 83% for one year. We settled on up to 70% after looking at all the papers and eliminating/combining sources with assumptions and averaging outbreaks data out over a 5-year timeframe.

Casey and Doug tackled this question in a much more succinct way in a Foodborne Pathogens and Disease paper last year (Where Does Foodborne Illness Happen—in the Home, at Foodservice, or Elsewhere—and Does It Matter?):  Current surveillance systems focus on the place where food is consumed rather than the point where food is contaminated. Rather than focusing on the location of consumption—and blaming consumers and others—analysis of the steps leading to foodborne illness should center on the causes of contamination in a complex farm-to-fork food safety system.

Colin Caywood at Marler Clark’s Food Poisoning Journal used the paper to make the point that cross-contamination in restaurant kitchens can magnify the impact of an outbreak:

With that in mind, a recent article by Nicole Norfleet caught my attention for its insight into the way that outbreaks such as Subway's can be made exponentially worse by poor food safety practices at the restaurant…. Among the risky behaviors cited were workers using aprons and other garments to dry hands, as well as using the same utensils and surfaces to prepare both raw and cooked foods.

I definitely agree with cross-contamination making things worse, but I’m not sure if the current Subway-linked outbreak, where illnesses have been associated with food at 46 outlets, making it appear to be a common supplier source is the best example. Several foodhandlers testing positive for Salmonella serotype Hvittingfoss is beginning to look like the 2009 Fat Duck outbreak.

From The AP story:

Joan McGlockton, a food policy representative for the National Restaurant Association, was cited as saying that while the study is disconcerting, the association doesn't feel it is representative of the entire restaurant industry.

Yeah, I agree and the study wasn’t built to allow for generalizations. Our aim was to evaluate the efficacy of the infosheets as a behavior-changing intervention. While we were also able to gain some data that can be used in risk assessments, it has to be used carefully with realistic assumptions, because it’s the only video data set out there. Based on the time, effort and resources committed by the company we worked with, what we saw might represent the best practices out there. But maybe it doesn’t. We’re both guessing and if the NRA has some behavior data that we can compare our findings to that would be great.

I'm back in NC and starting a couple of new projects with the NC State team (Audrey Kreske and Allison Smathers) over the next week, further measuring what people actually do when it comes to food safety. More on these as data starts rolling in.

Tomorrow’s USA Today asks, should restaurants make health inspection grades visible?

Yes.

And we’re looking at trying to make such disclosure more effective, efficient and fair.

Robert Pestronk, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told USA Today a growing number of health departments across the U.S. are initiating programs aimed at improving the transparency of restaurant inspections, and that many health departments are putting information online, and others are placing scores — in the form of letter grades, numerical scores or color-coded decals — in plain sight at restaurants.

The story also cites a study in June's Journal of Food Protection which suggests cross-contamination violations — which can lead to illnesses — may be more widespread than previously thought, and they may occur more frequently during peak hours.

Researchers from North Carolina State University used video cameras to monitor 47 food handlers at eight volunteering kitchens and found that the workers committed an average of one cross-contamination violation an hour.

"It really changes how we think about training," says Ben Chapman, the lead author of the study and assistant professor and food safety specialist in the Department of 4-H Youth Development and Family & Consumer Sciences at NCSU. Researchers from Kansas State University and the University of Guelph in Ontario co-wrote the study.

I’m not sure what that study had to do with disclosure, but we have other projects which are directly related to disclosure.

Katie Filion, a master's student in biomedical science at Kansas State University has just returned from a year researching New Zealand's options for a national food business or restaurant hygiene grading system.

Filion said,

“No one has determined the most effective way to present inspection results to the public but a good system has several characteristics. It should have clear guidelines about what earns a good or bad grade and should communicate to diners the risk of eating at a particular restaurant."





Filion, K. and Powell, D.A. 2009. The use of restaurant inspection disclosure systems as a means of communicating food safety information. Journal of Foodservice 20: 287-297.

Abstract


The World Health Organization estimates that up to 30% of individuals in developed countries become ill from food or water each year. Up to 70% of these illnesses are estimated to be linked to food prepared at foodservice establishments. Consumer confidence in the safety of food prepared in restaurants is fragile, varying significantly from year to year, with many consumers attributing foodborne illness to foodservice. One of the key drivers of restaurant choice is consumer perception of the hygiene of a restaurant. Restaurant hygiene information is something consumers desire, and when available, may use to make dining decisions.
 

There aren’t a lot of blue foods.

There was blue string soup in that Bridget Jones movie.

Food safety police in northern Italy seized a batch of 70,000 mozzarella cheeses that turned blue once they were removed from their packaging.

The agriculture ministry announced emergency control measures on the cheese, which was made in Germany for an Italian company that sold it to discount supermarkets in the north of the country.

The cool part is that a consumer alerted authorities in Turin by sending images from her mobile phone of the soft, white cheese immediately turning blue once it came into contact with air.

Those mobile image devices are everywhere and some people know how to use them (not me). So use them when food appears shoddy.

The name of the discount chain that sold the cheese was not disclosed, because it had "managed the situation well" and immediately removed the cheese in question from its shelves, a police statement said.

Managed it well after their cheese was fingered by a consumer with a camera?

The source of last month’s outbreak of an intestinal parasite at a charity food event in Sarnia (Ontario, Canada) remains a mystery.

Public health officials questioned 286 of the more than 300 people who attended the Chef’s Challenge and found 206 became ill, said Andrew Taylor, Lambton County’s general manager of public health services.

Taylor said they also spoke with the event’s caterers and tested food samples.

“We were awaiting lab results until the end of last week and we were hoping that would be the home run,” he said, adding the results weren’t conclusive.

“The perfect investigation is where there’s illness, you identify the parasite at the source of the illness and then you link it to the food,” he said. “We have everything except the link to the food.”

Cyclospora is usually found in imported produce and contaminated irrigation water is often to blame, Taylor said.

A barfblog.com reader previously noted cyclospora is more of an environmental contamination issue than a hygiene issue. If the suspect food was something like raspberries, they are difficult to wash; basil or lettuces may be easier to wash but have a very large surface area and cyclospora is very very sticky. As with many other fresh produce outbreaks prevention on the farm is the best way to reduce risk.
 

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Asian Food Imports are warning the public not to consume Green Cardamon described below because these products may be contaminated with Salmonella.

The following Green Cardamon packages, sold between January and March 2010 at Asian Food Imports store located at 275 Wyandotte Street West in Windsor, Ontario are affected by this alert. Green Cardamon is a product of Guatemala.

Product / Size / UPC
Green Cardamon / 100 g / 0 59011 41301 9
Green Cardamon / 200 g / 0 59011 41302 6
Green Cardamon / 400 g / 0 59011 41303 3

There have been no reported illnesses associated with the consumption of these products.
 

People like pretty pictures. That’s the conclusion of a new abstract in the journal Risk Analysis (it’s below).

But I prefer Colbert’s interpretation of risk communication on his show last night.

Understanding the positive effects of graphical risk information on comprehension: Measuring attention directed to written, tabular, and graphical risk information
17.jun.10
Risk Analysis
Chris M. R. Smerecnik, Ilse Mesters, Loes T. E. Kessels, Robert A. C. Ruiter, Nanne K. de Vries, and Hein de Vries
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123534228/abstract
ABSTRACT
Risk communications are an integral aspect of health education and promotion. However, the commonly used textual risk information is relatively difficult to understand for the average recipient. Consequently, researchers and health promoters have started to focus on so-called decision aids, such as tables and graphs. Although tabular and graphical risk information more effectively communicate risks than textual risk information, the cognitive mechanisms responsible for this enhancement are unclear. This study aimed to examine two possible mechanisms (i.e., cognitive workload and attention). Cognitive workload (mean pupil size and peak pupil dilation) and attention directed to the risk information (viewing time, number of eye fixations, and eye fixation durations) were both measured in a between-subjects experimental design. The results suggest that graphical risk information facilitates comprehension of that information because it attracts and holds attention for a longer period of time than textual risk information. Graphs are thus a valuable asset to risk communication practice for two reasons: first, they tend to attract attention and, second, when attended to, they elicit information extraction with relatively little cognitive effort, and finally result in better comprehension.