Contact: Dr. Doug Powell, dpowell@ksu.edu
785-317-0560
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Posting graphical, concise food safety stories in the back kitchens of restaurants can help reduce dangerous food safety practices and create a workplace culture that values safe food.

It’s the first time that a communication intervention such as food safety information sheets have been validated to work using direct video observation in eight commercial restaurant kitchens.

“The food safety messages we’ve looked at are as effective as those ‘Employees must wash hands’ signs in bathrooms.,” said Dr. Douglas Powell, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University and one of the co-authors on a new paper in the Journal of Food Protection. “They just don’t work.”

Powell and then graduate student, Ben Chapman, now an assistant professor of food safety at North Carolina State University, came up with the idea for food safety infosheets to promote discussion and improve food safety behaviors while playing hockey at the University of Guelph in 2003.

“Chapman and I were playing hockey a lot,” says Powell, “and there was a bar and restaurant that overlooked the one ice surface where we often engaged in after-hockey food safety meetings with our industry, provincial and federal government colleagues. We had all this food safety information, and the manager of the bar around 2003 was into food safety, so we thought, if daily sports pages are posted above urinals and on the doors of washroom stalls, why not engaging food safety information?”

As part of his PhD research, Chapman partnered with a food service company in Canada and placed small video cameras in unobtrusive spots around eight food-service kitchens that volunteered to participate in the study. There were as many as eight cameras in each kitchen, which recorded directly to computer files and later reviewed by Chapman and others.

The work built on other direct food safety observational studies conducted at Kansas State University and published in the British Food Journal in 2009.

Food safety inforsheets, highlighting the importance of handwashing or preventing cross-contamination, for example, were then introduced into the kitchens, and video was again collected. The researchers found that cross-contamination events decreased by 20 per cent, and handwashing attempts increased by 7 per cent.

Since September 2006 over 150 food safety infosheets have been produced and are available to anyone at www.foodsafetyinfosheets.com. The website has had a recent redesign, adding a search function, automatic email alerts and RSS feeds.

Katie Filion, who coded much of the video as an undergraduate student researcher, has moved from Canada and is now completing a Master’s degree with Powell at Kansas State University. She has just returned from a year of research with the New Zealand Food Safety Authority helping to design a national restaurant inspection disclosure system.

Dr. Tanya MacLurin, who collaborated on the research, was born on a farm/ranch in Kansas and received all her degrees from Kansas State University before joining the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Guelph in 1991, where she subsequently collaborated with Powell.

The study, “Assessment of food safety practices of food service food handlers : testing a communication intervention” was authored by Dr. Ben Chapman of North Carolina State University, Dr. Douglas Powell and Katie Filion of Kansas State University, and Tiffany Eversley and Tanya MacLaurin of the University of Guelph in Canada. The study is published in the June issue of the Journal of Food Protection.

“Assessment of Food Safety Practices of Food Service Food Handlers: Testing a Communication Intervention”
Authors: Benjamin J. Chapman, North Carolina State University; Douglas A. Powell, Katie Fillion, Kansas State University; Tiffany Eversley, Tanya MacLaurin, University of Guelph
Published: June 2010, Journal of Food Protection

Abstract: Globally, foodborne illness affects an estimated 30% of individuals annually. Meals prepared outside of the home are a risk factor for acquiring foodborne illness and have been implicated in up to 70% of traced outbreaks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called on food safety communicators to design new methods and messages aimed at increasing food safety risk-reduction practices from farm to fork. Food safety infosheets, a novel communication tool designed to appeal to food handlers and compel behavior change, were evaluated. Food safety infosheets were provided weekly to food handlers in working foodservice operations for 7 weeks. It was hypothesized that through the posting of food safety infosheets in highly visible locations, such as kitchen work areas and hand washing stations, that safe food handling behaviors of foodservice staff could be positively influenced. Using video observation, food handlers (n ~ 47) in eight foodservice operations were observed for a total of 348 h (pre- and postintervention combined). After the food safety infosheets were introduced, food handlers demonstrated a significant increase (6.7%, P , 0.05, 95% confidence interval) in mean hand washing attempts, and a significant reduction in indirect cross-contamination events (19.6%, P , 0.05, 95% confidence interval). Results of the research demonstrate that posting food safety infosheets is an effective intervention tool that positively influences the food safety behaviors of food handlers.
 

The Utah County Department of Health (that’s in the U.S.) reports the Campylobacter outbreak that left more than 300 people in Saratoga Springs ill and triggered a boil order appears to be receding.

Joy Holbrook, a nurse epidemiologist with the department, said,

"We're thinking that the outbreak is decreasing out there. It has been several days since we've had any new cases from Saratoga Springs."

Health department officials still are looking for the source of the contamination, which is responsible for 21 confirmed cases of Campylobacter and more than 300 probable cases. Holbrook said the small trace of organisms required to cause sickness and infection can be difficult to detect.

Roadside lemonade stands are from another era. But in California, business is booming, so police launched an investigation and charged two people with “hawking.” That’s the legal term.

“As a result of the operation two persons were issued citation for hawking infractions, 16 persons received citations for misdemeanor food violations, and one person received a citation for felony violation of dairy products. Three of the violators later returned to the area and were arrested and booked into the West Valley Detention Center for a Health and Safety Code.

“Samples of the food products that were confiscated will be tested at a State laboratory for any contamination. Food products confiscated from past details have tested positive for listeria, salmonella, E. coli, and other harmful bacteria.
This operation was part of an ongoing effort to address agriculture violations that present a significant health risk to the communities within San Bernardino County.”
 

Lifesoy Inc., a San Diego-based manufacturer of ready-to-eat soy products cited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for preparing, packing, and holding articles of food under insanitary conditions, has entered into a consent decree of permanent injunction in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

The consent decree requires Lifesoy to stop manufacturing and distributing food products until the company registers with the FDA and complies with federal laws regarding sanitary practices.

Lifesoy made sweetened and unsweetened soy milk, fried tofu, fresh tofu, soybean pudding, and other soy products for human consumption. The government’s complaint further alleges that Lifesoy did not hold and store the foods under proper refrigeration conditions to prevent the growth of microorganisms.
 

We visited with our neighbors yesterday and their baby, Luna Sofia, who is currently called baby Luna Sofia although that may pass, and the Columbian mother asked if I was going to watch the World Cup of soccer.

I said no, and tried to extol the virtues of ice hockey.When I think of watching World Cup soccer I have this image of Malcolm McDowell being rehabilitated in A Clockwork Orange.

But that doesn’t stop the civilized British soccer fans from using bad World Cup metaphors to spread their faith-based food safety.

Food Safety Week starts today, and with many people likely to have barbecues or be eating outdoors for World Cup matches, the Food Standards Agency is reminding everyone that food bugs can cause more misery than a penalty shoot-out.

The U.K. Food Standards Agency also has some top food safety tips for people planning barbecues this summer:

* always make sure chicken, pork, burgers, sausages and kebabs are cooked until steaming hot all the way through, none of the meat should be pink and any juices must run clear.

This is wrong. Color is a lousy indicator and steaming hot means nothing. Although after my last post, a U.K. dude wrote in to say,

Not every mother of three children rushing about with a full time job has the time to use your wonderful tip thermometer and so visual advice is both sensible and correct.

Nope, still wrong, and in this case, sexist. What about fathers with four daughters making meals and a full-time job? Did it for years, with a tip-sensitive digital thermometer.

I don’t let cats or dogs or lizards on my food prep area, and I don’t let anyone plant their behind on my food prep area – who knows where that behind has been.

That’s what I took away from Maple Leaf Foods latest attempt to woo wary customers back to their delicious deli flavor.

Maple Leaf CEO Michael McCain and some other food safety types from the company hosted a dine and lecture for bloggers on May 27 in the Toronto area, to update would-be social media leaders to go forth with the food safety crusade that has taken over Maple Leaf since the 2008 listeria outbreak which killed 22 people.

A number of bloggers have written about this event. They talk about the sweet food, the sincerity of the Maple Leaf types and the super swag. No one raised any hard questions like:

• why did Maple Leaf wait so long to issue a public recall of its killer products in 2008 when epidemiology clearly implicated the product;
• why aren’t listeria test results in Maple Leaf plants made public;
• why aren’t there warning labels on deli meats for at-risk populations, like pregnant women and all those old people that unnecessarily died; and,
• why aren’t Maple Leaf’s food safety efforts marketed at retail so consumers can choose?

Other companies that want to lead are already working in these areas, rather than wining and dining trendy bloggers.

In the U.S., Beef Products Inc. is figuring out how to make all its E. coli tests public, and Cargill is expanding the use of video in its slaughterhouses to enhance animal welfare and food safety.

The Publix supermarket chain in the southeast already labels its deli products to say,

“The Publix Deli is committed to the highest quality fresh cold cuts & cheeses.
 Therefore we recommend all cold cuts are best if used within three days of purchase.
 And all cheese items are best if used within four days of purchase.”

And not one of the bloggers mentioned, OMG, did you see that those nurses and doctors at Toronto Sick Kid’s hospital said pregnant women can eat all the cold-cuts and raw seafood they want, listeria’s not such a big deal after all.

But all I take away from reading all the blogs is this pic: dude, get your butt off the food prep area.

There are some new Fresh Express bagged salad commercials running on the television; they don’t mention anything about Salmonella or the many efforts Fresh Express takes to control dangerous pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli in its products.

Which is too bad.

There have been many reinterpretations of history regarding fresh produce and microbial food safety. We have argued the tipping point was 1996, involving both the Odwalla E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in unpasteurized juice, coupled with the cyclospora outbreak which was initially and erroneously linked to California strawberries (it was Guatemalan raspberries). This led to the first attempts at comprehensive on-farm food safety programs for fresh produce because, these bugs ain’t going to be washed off; they have to be prevented, as much as possible, from getting on or in fresh produce on the farm.

For the growers of leafy greens, things apparently didn’t tip until the 2006 E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in bagged spinach from California that sickened 200 and killed four.

Ultimately, investigators showed that the E. coli O157:H7 was found on a transitional organic spinach field and was the same serotype as that found in a neighboring grass-fed cow-calf operation. These findings, coupled with the public outcry linked to the outbreak and the media coverage, sparked a myriad of changes and initiatives by the industry, government and others. What may never be answered is, why this outbreak at this time? A decade of evidence existed highlighting problems with fresh produce, warning letters were written, yet little was seemingly accomplished. The real challenge for food safety professionals, is to garner support for safe food practices in the absence of an outbreak, to create a culture that values microbiologically safe food, from farm-to-fork, at all times, and not just in the glare of the media spotlight.

One of the responses out of California was to create the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement – after 29 outbreaks, at the time, linked to leafy greens and after years of warning from FDA. The most noticeable achievement since the Agreement has been the containment cone of silence that has descended upon outbreaks involving leafy greens, and an apparent shift in FDA policy that sets epidemiology aside and requires positive samples in unopened product – a ridiculous standard since no one routinely tests for other Shiga-toxin producing E. coli like O145. That was referring to the Freshway Foods E. coli O145 in romaine lettuce outbreak earlier this year that sickened some 50 people near colleges in Michigan, Ohio and New York.

These are all confirmed outbreaks. Every day, I receive a couple of messages about people sick here and there, and the public health types have dozens of potential foodborne outbreaks under scrutiny at any one time.

When to provide public information is a contentious issue: the public has a right to know about outbreaks of foodborne illness and rapid provision of information may prevent additional illnesses, but going too early and too often can be like crying wolf – especially if health types get it wrong and businesses are unduly harmed.

There is a lot of public and private frustration about the lack of guidelines for going public with information about outbreaks. Recent events won’t help.

An e-mail was circulated on May 12, 2010, asking food safety and public health types about a possible salmonella in lettuce outbreak in the Midwest U.S. with links to California.

On Thurs. May 20, lawyer Bill Marler speculated about a lettuce-related Salmonella outbreak in the "upper-Midwest, that appears linked to industry leader, Fresh Express. It is interesting that the Health Department and FDA remain silent on this one too.”

I didn’t publish anything because it was speculation – which I deal with everyday. We have guidelines for what we choose to publish or not. They are available at http://bites.ksu.edu/about-bites.

On May 24, 2010, Fresh Express publicly announced a recall of certain romaine-based ready-to-eat salads with the expired Use-by Dates of May 13th through May 16th and an "S" in the Product Code because they have the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella.

The recall notification is being issued out of an abundance of caution based on an isolated instance in which a single package of Fresh Express Hearts of Romaine Salad with a use by date of May 15 was confirmed positive for Salmonella in a random sample test conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

I immediately took to barfblog.com, having been sitting on all this lettuce-related poop for awhile, and asked, when was the sample test conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because there have been rumors of a positive circulating on the Intertubes? When was the positive confirmed? What strain of Salmonella is involved? Why go public now instead of earlier? How incompetent does the Fresh Express PR person have to be to ignore these questions in the press release? Sounds like the Sponge Bob leafy greens cone of silence.

Shortly thereafter, I got a phone call from Dr. Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota expert on infectious diseases and public health and a paid consultant to Fresh Express since 1999.

He didn’t like the post, and didn’t like the picture, which we use for every leafy green outbreak or incident (thank you Christian, former student who created it in my Guelph kitchen).

Osterholm and I bantered back and forth about going public and I stressed, if Fresh Express has a great food safety story to tell, they should tell it.

About 30 minutes later, Osterholm called me back and said, OK, Fresh Express says I can tell you whatever you want to know.

We talked at 6 a.m. central time the next day.

Osterholm repeatedly stressed how committed Fresh Express was to food safety and how that attracted him to consult for the firm. He talked about how the company had ‘boots on the ground’ rather than relying on outsiders for food safety audits, and that the safety culture trumped the legal culture that dominated other firms.

Good for them.

Osterholm stressed that Fresh Express tested irrigation water and product, but did not know if those results would be made public (although they were shared with regulators).

Osterholm told me he was informed a couple of weeks earlier – thereabouts to May 12, 2010 – there were eight people sick Salmonella typhirmirium linked to Fresh Express salad, but they had all consumed it several weeks earlier so there was no public health purpose in going public. The May 24, 2010 Salmonella recall was a completely separate incident. According to Osterholm, FDA types showed up at the Fresh Express office, didn’t know the Salmonella species, and yet Fresh Express executed a traceback and recall within hours and that showed how awesome the company was.

“Clearly having a salmonella positive in one of your bags is something you don’t want; here was a company that walked the talk, they had a traceback system and within hours could tell everyone about those fields.”

It didn’t say that in the Fresh Express press release, and it’s not up to me to tell their story.

On May 27, 2010, California’s organicgirl produce announced a precautionary recall of 10 oz organicgirl baby spinach with use-by date of May 22.

“organicgirl produce immediately conducted a traceability analysis and an appraisal of its food safety documentation, which were all in compliance. Additionally, organicgirl raw product testing records for the relevant time period did not show the presence of any pathogens.”

Not sure why Fresh Express couldn’t say the same. Maybe they need better PR people.

After talking with Osterholm, I sent an e-mail to the media relations folks at FDA regarding the May 24/10 Fresh Express Salmonella recall, and, after a few days, they responded:

Q. When was the sample collected i.e. when was the bag pulled?
A. May 5, 2010

Q. When was Fresh Express notified of the Salmonella positive?
A. May 21, 2010

Q. What kind of Salmonella was it?
A. S. Anatum

Q. Does FDA review and approve press releases such as the May 24/10 one from Fresh Express?
A. Recall press releases are reviewed at the District primarily.

I then sent a follow-up question, asking why so long between when the sample was pulled – May 5/10 – and the company informed of a positive – May 21/10.

No answer.

FDA, Fresh Express and the leafy greens folks all sorta suck at this communications thing.

FDA is responsive to – who knows, and has no policy for when or how to go public. Oh, they have some things they tell journalists, like this story in the Packer, but it’s full of fudge-factors. I understand there are uncertainties, but, like any good risk assessment, you go public and admit uncertainties rather than trying to act all-knowing.

FDA types also made a big splash in May when their transparency plan was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The task force also said the FDA should regularly share basic information about facility inspections it conducts and the result of each inspection. Routinely sharing the information could give the public a clearer understanding of the FDA's role in protecting public health and would make firms accountable not just to the FDA, but to the larger public.

The information would also give other firms more information about the companies they choose to do business with, the group said. "Market pressures may create incentives for firms to correct violations quickly or prevent violations from occurring in the future."

OMG, FDA is talking about marketing food safety.

But Fresh Express, you’re an industry leader and this year’s winner of the International Association for Food Protection’s Black Pearl award for food safety leadership. Forget government, lead by example. Make your test results public, market food safety at retail so consumers can choose, and if people get sick from your product, you better be the first to tell the public.

A table of leafy green foodborne illness outbreaks is available at:

http://bites.ksu.edu/Outbreaks%20related%20to%20leafy%20greens%201993-2010

Mike Myers, Canadian and voice of Shrek, what do you have to do with this?

McDonald's will recall about 12 million "Shrek" drinking glasses because federal regulators found they contain the toxic metal cadmium, which poses health risks.

The glasses have been sold for $2 apiece at McDonald's restaurants across the country as a promotional tie-in with the movie "Shrek Forever After." Purchasers will be advised to keep them away from children and to return them to McDonald's for a refund.

The recall, which will be officially announced Friday by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, was set in motion by an anonymous tip to Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) last week. She alerted the commission, which tested the glasses and confirmed the presence of cadmium in the paint used for the decorative characters. Cadmium is a carcinogen and can cause kidney, lung, intestinal and bone damage.

Speier's office said McDonald's voluntarily agreed to recall the glasses at the urging of the commission.

The Washington-state home day care identified as the source of an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that led to three children being hospitalized and the death of 4-year-old Ronan Wilson earlier this year has had its license revoked by the state.

The Columbian reports that Dianne and Larry Fletch had operated the day care for more than 20 years; their license was suspended in April while the state proceeded with an investigation.

The Department of Early Learning sent Dianne Fletch a seven-page letter explaining its decision to revoke her license. The letter was dated May 21, but the state announced the revocation on Thursday after receiving confirmation from the Fletches that they had received the letter, which had been sent by registered mail.

Larry Fletch said he and his wife will appeal the decision.