March 2011

  • Salmonella city: over 60 reptiles abandoned in North Carolina

    Posted: March 1st, 2011 - 7:38am by Doug Powell

    Investigators say more than 60 reptiles were left without water and heat in an abandoned warehouse in the Upstate.

    It's been more than three months since authorities made charges in the case, but the owner of the animals has still not been tracked down.

    Nigel Platt says an alligator was laying in rotting food and his own filth when he found him.

    Platt says, "I can only describe it as salmonella city, or it was a salmonella soup."

    The tortoises, some of the non-venemous snakes, and the alligator can all be taken to schools and churches to educate kids, and all of the animals will stay at Safe Haven and Educational Adventures, a non-profit organization, where they will continue to receive care.

    If the animals came from ‘salmonella city’ maybe taking them to a school isn’t the best idea.
     

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  • Banquete organizado por bomberos voluntarios causa brote de enfermedades alimentarias

    Posted: March 1st, 2011 - 6:38am by Doug Powell

    Traducido por Gonzalo Erdozain
    Resumen del folleto informativo mas reciente:
    - Por lo menos 50 enfermedades directamente conectadas al evento.
    - Eventos comunitarios, tales como bodas, picnics organizados por iglesias y cenas de caridad, son fuentes comunes de brotes de enfermedades alimentarias.
    - Dichos eventos, por lo general, son llevados a cabo en yacimientos transitorios y con 
empleados voluntarios.

    Los folletos informativos son creados semanalmente y puestos en restaurantes, tiendas y granjas, y son usados para entrenar y educar a través del mundo. Si usted quiere proponer un tema o mandar fotos para los folletos, contacte a Ben Chapman a benjamin_chapman@ncsu.edu.

    Puede seguir las historias de los folletos informativos y barfblog en twitter
    @benjaminchapman y @barfblog.
     

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  • Food safety culture in Dubai

    Posted: March 1st, 2011 - 6:23am by Ben Chapman

    Author: 
    Ben Chapman

    For the second straight year I'm hanging out in Dubai for food safety week. Between an international conference, workshops and technical meetings, the annual Dubai Municipality-run food safety happenings attract close to 1300 participants from all over the middle east and North Africa. I was invited to speak a bit about food safety culture and a paper I co-wrote with Doug and Casey earlier this year. Sometimes I get bored of saying the same stuff from talk to talk and figured I'd switch it up a bit and revisit some older food safety infosheets stories to illustrate food safety culture issues. You can download my slides here.

    I led off the talk with Dirty Finger Al, a story we used in the the Zappa-graced food safety infosheet in 2007. What's phenomenal about that story is that there was a dude who had a reputation in the Central Florida food service industry as being "grotesque in his hygiene because of filthy hands and fingers and open oozing sores while cooking".  And he went from job to job. He kept getting hired.

    A dude known as being gross, not knowing much about food safety and who had Dirty Finger Al as a nickname had no problem getting a job. And he ended up working at the NASA-run Kennedy Space Center. That's some bad food safety culture.

    The newest food safety infosheet, not as heinous as Dirty Finger Al, focuses on an outbreak of foodborne illness associated with a banquet for volunteer firefighters. At least 30 illnesses have been linked to the event so far. You can download the infosheet here.
     

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