A deadly outbreak of the E. coli bacterium has claimed its first victim in Germany, authorities confirmed Tuesday, following reports that at least 140 people had fallen ill after becoming infected over recent weeks.

Health officials said the 83-year-old from the northern state of Lower Saxony died Saturday after having suffered since May 15 with the bacteria.

The outbreak, thought to have been spread through contaminated vegetables, is unusual in that it has affected mainly adults.

Two victims of a potentially fatal strain of E. coli have been placed on artificial respiration machines, a Frankfurt hospital said Monday, while hospitals across Germany were reporting a surge in infections.

German media report that EHEC, or Enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli, is a virulent strain of gut bacterium which can cause stomach cramps and diarrhea, and can lead to anaemia and kidney damage.

The strain of E. coli is not specified in media reports, but the kidney failure bit makes it sound like a Shiga-toxin producing E. coli.

In Frankfurt, 10 people had been hospitalized, of whom four were in intensive care, while a further 50 people were ill with mild symptoms of EHEC.

A total of 40 people were being treated in Hamburg, most of whom were female, the city's health authorities said.

Around 800 to 1,200 cases of EHEC are recorded in Germany each year, predominantly affecting children. The current outbreak is unusual for causing severe symptoms in adults, primarily women.

The bacterium is commonly transmitted through contaminated raw or undercooked ground meat products or milk, but disease experts said there was evidence that uncooked vegetables might have helped to spread the latest outbreak.

Gerard Krause of the Robert Koch health authority responsible for epidemiology, said,

“Women prepare food more often, and it is there they could have come into contact with it, possibly while cleaning vegetables or other foodstuffs.”

In a German version of blame-the-consumer, the Robert Koch Institute has recommended people improve kitchen hygiene, making sure in particular that cutting boards and knives are clean.

It’s doubtful that all 80 sick people practiced lousy kitchen cleanliness at the same time across Germany.

That school in the U.K. that closed a couple of classrooms in response to an apparent outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 has now been completely closed until further notice.

Two four-year-olds and one five-year-old have so far been taken to hospital but were said to be recovering yesterday. One was treated and discharged, with the other two still in hospital.

This Is Bristol reports that in the past week, parents of 28 other children reported they had mostly milder symptoms, typically stomach ache and diarrhea, with some children experiencing more severe symptoms such as bloody diarrhea.

The HPA said all affected children were being tested for E. coli O157 and initial test results indicated there were probably three with the infection.

Dr David Hunt, consultant with the HPA's South West (North) Health Protection Unit, said: "We are working closely with Redfield Edge School and have now advised full closure of the school.

This is due to fact that the infection seems to have started to spread among older children, having started among year one and reception classes.”

Spiegel Online reports that Germany is about to implement a restaurant inspection disclosure system, based on the traffic-light – red-yellow-green pioneered by Toronto – but the crack journalists forgot to mention Toronto.

Consumers worried about filthy kitchens full of rotting food will soon know just how clean German restaurants are thanks to a new hygiene rating system set to begin in 2012. A "traffic light" scheme will show which eateries are spick-and-span -- and which have nasties lurking under the cupboards.

On Thursday, consumer ministers from Germany's federal states, with the exception of the southern state of Bavaria, agreed to institute a color-coded hygiene rating system that will be clearly posted at the entry of every restaurant in the country.

The "traffic light" scheme will indicate how closely each restaurant adheres to health standards. Green rankings will go to eateries with the highest marks for cleanliness. Yellow will indicate some concerns, and red will point to grave violations. The exact graphic incarnation of the ratings remains undecided, though.

The decision came after more than a year of internal wrangling over whether the scheme should mirror Denmark's food safety "Smiley system," which has been in place since 2001.

"Exemplary establishments can use their rating to advertize, while those that aren't as good have incentive to improve, and the black sheep have nowhere to hide," the national association of consumer initiatives said.

The German Federation for Food Law and Food Science (BLL) said the program could only work if states were willing to conduct more frequent tests and spend more money.

Meanwhile heavy criticism came from the national hotel and gastronomy association DEHOGA, which said current regulations are sufficient. "This system is built to endanger people's existence," they said in a statement.
 

Dr. Dean Otis Cliver, born March 2, 1935, died Monday, May 16, 2011, at his home in Davis, California.

A graduate of Purdue University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Dean completed his Ph.D. at Ohio State University in the spring of 1959. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the Food Research Institute from 1962 to 1995 and was a professor at UC Davis from 1995 to 2008, continuing as a professor emeritus until his recent illness.

Dean was a respected and widely published member of the worldwide scientific community, with his work taking him to countries in Europe, Asia, North and South America. In his work with foodborne diseases Dean was often called for information by members of the media, as he was known for his ability to make science understandable to non-scientists. He was a long-time IFT scientific communicator and regularly worked with the media providing information on food safety practices (particularly recognized for research on cutting boards), food irradiation, and BSE (mad cow disease).

He was known for his research on virology and from 1969 was a consultant to the World Health Organization on virus transmission in foods. He and his wife Carolyn opened their home to many foreign students who later became part of their extended family.

I didn’t know Dean that well, but he would e-mail me frequently about the food safety issues of the day. He contributed to barfblog.com in 2008, and came up with the most apt bio I’ve had the pleasure of publishing:

“Dr. Cliver officially retired October 1, 2007 and is winding down from 46 years in academia, battling infectious agents in food and water. His research career has led him to see the world as if peering outward through the anal orifice: this 'reverse proctoscopy' confers a unique viewpoint.”

He will be missed.

I’ve never listened to Black Lips, a self-declared flower-punk band from Atlanta, Georgia, but their next producer may want to pay attention to the food at the studio.

Producer Mark Ronson teamed up with the garage rockers last year to work on the band's sixth album, 'Arabia Mountain,' but was apparently struck down with potentially deadly food poisoning after some ill-advised thematic catering decisions.

"To get in the mood to record [album track] 'Raw Meat' we started eating all this liver sashimi," Lips singer Cole Alexander explained. "Then we all started getting sick from it. Mark had to go to hospital because his fever was so high. His brain was cooking, man."

"I thought maybe I was hungover or something," Ronson reported. "Then I started shivering uncontrollably. The next thing, the band are putting all these blankets over me. I wake up an hour later , just f---ing moaning and groaning.

"When I was there I was diagnosed with something with a lot of syllables in it. I almost died. But I don't think it was intentional on their part."
 

A saboteur who tried to poison a large strawberry crop in Queensland, Australia, has been foiled by tight security measures introduced after a similar attack in 2009.

Gowinta Farms at Beerwah, on the Sunshine Coast, would have been facing multi-million dollar losses if staff had not discovered poison in the farm's water stores.

Spokesman James Ashby said up to 170 acres of strawberries would have been lost and the incident, detected on Tuesday, was a lesson for all farmers about the importance of good security.

After the 2009 attack, which destroyed a greenhouse crop of tomatoes and cucumbers, the farm imposed a system to drain water tanks at the end of each day and regularly test water quality.

As a result, the presence of the poison was obvious to staff on Tuesday morning, Mr Ashby said.

Meanwhile, police are still trying to find those responsible for a crop sabotage incident at Bowen in north Queensland in June last year.

In that incident, Bowen Supa Seedlings lost more than seven million fruit and vegetable seedlings, destined to become crops for dozens of local growers, when its irrigation system was contaminated with herbicide.

A neighbouring property that shared the irrigation system lost more than 16,000 mature tomato plants.

Substance abuse in commercial kitchens isn't much of a secret. Maybe it's brought on by the repeated listening of Tom Petty or Pink Floyd or, as Tony Bordain chronicled in Kitchen Confidential, a cycle of cocaine and alcohol is often used by cooks to deal with the fast-paced nature of the back of the house.

A few years ago, while interviewing restaurant and kitchen managers about inspections and what they worry about when it comes to food safety I heard about dealing with drugs in the kitchen. One manager said blood getting on food was a concern of his. He relayed to me that his employees were more likely to wrap their hands in duct tape instead of going to the hospital if they cut themselves during service; his chain's insurance policy required a drug and alcohol test for medical coverage to kick in.

According to a study published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology and cited in the The Toronto Star, using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer numerous times throughout a day might lead to false positives in some tests that screen for alcohol abuse.

The impetus for the study came from an article in the Wall Street Journal, according to the study’s author Dr. Gary Reisfield, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Florida.
Resfield recounts the details of the story: It described a nurse who was in a professional monitoring program for alcohol dependence. She had to submit to random alcohol tests. In one of the tests she came up with a high level of an alcohol biomarker. She was accused of alcohol use and of breaking her contract. But she insisted she wasn’t drinking. She was put in a locked unit, used Purell and again she produced a high level of an alcohol biomarker.
Reisfield had seen the same thing at the Florida Recovery Centre, run by the University of Florida’s Department of Addiction Medicine. So he decided to conduct a study and see what would happen. The study looked at 11 individuals, who did not drink, but used the hand sanitizer Purell, which contains 62 per cent ethyl alcohol. The participants had to wash their hands every five minutes for 10 hours a day for three consecutive days. (Nurses in intensive care usually wash their hands every time they touch a patient, Reisfield pointed out.)
What Reisfield found confirmed what he had seen at the Florida Recovery Centre – hand sanitizer seems to affect alcohol tests.
In the study eight of the participants had levels of EtG (ethyl glucuronide is a biomarker used to assess the use of alcohol) that were greater than 500 nanograms per mililitre; four had levels that exceeded 1,000 and one individual had EtG levels in excess of 2,000 nanograms per mililitre.

Squirting sanitizer every five minutes for 10 hrs a day seems a bit high to be realistic for a food service setting but maybe that's happening somewhere.

“We are kind of rock stars in the public health world.”

Sylvanus Thompson, Toronto Public Health quality assurance manager, as quoted in the Toronto Star.

Sylvanus (below, left, exactly as shown, in 2005), you’re not a rock star.

No one in public health is a rock star. You can be a rock star in your own mind, you can be like Chapman and admit it now and then, you can be like Roy Costa and actually play in a rock band, but proclaiming you’re like a rock star in a major newspaper isn’t cool.

Next, you’ll be declaring, “I am a golden god.”

Sylvanus hung out in my lab a bit back in the Guelph days, and I supervised the final written report for his MS, and helped out as Toronto developed its red-yellow-green restaurant inspection disclosure system.

And congrats on that, because on the 10th anniversary of its groundbreaking restaurant inspection disclosure program, Toronto Public Health has become the first non-U.S. health department to win a prestigious award for “unsurpassed achievement in providing outstanding food protection.”

The city’s health department will receive the 56-year-old Samuel J. Crumbine Consumer Protection Award for DineSafe, an internationally recognized program that posts inspection results for Toronto eateries online and in their front windows.

The health department’s 63-page application includes references to the 2000 Toronto Star investigation, Dirty Dining, that sparked the creation of the program.

(Disclosure: it also includes a letter from me).

“We showed the turnaround from Dirty Dining to DineSafe,” said Thompson.

The system has been adopted by health departments in the U.S., U.K. and other areas of Canada. Health officials routinely travel to Toronto from Australia, Japan and China to study the model for their own cities.

Toronto Public Health officials will receive the award in Columbus, Ohio, on June 18.

But that doesn’t make you a rock star.