Who lets a chicken eat scones on a dining table?

Zoonotic dumbass Tori Spelling.

On the latest episode of Watch What Happens Live, a short clip from a new show that celebrity wannabe Tori Spelling is either part of, or makes an appearance has reinforced the fact that people in general have a poor understanding of the risks involved with animals in the transmission of zoonotic diseases.

Baby chicks and chickens have been linked to many salmonellosis outbreaks throughout the world. The most recent outbreak in the U.S., still ongoing, has already sickened 39 people in 15 states. Tori, cook the chicken or get it off the table.
 

At one restaurant in Italy, pork and relaxation are one and the same—and you can even experience a mortadella facial.

The Atlantic reports the treatment consisted of deep breathing, eating, and drinking. Participants were served a plate of choice salumi—sliced prosciutto, culatello, salami, and Tuscan head cheese from Simone Fracassi. Then we were given large cloth napkins, to be placed over one's head and the plate, deeply inhaling the porky perfumes, stimulating salivary glands and appetite. Remove napkin, taste salumi, and drink sparkling wine—Champagne, Italian sparklers, or Lambrusco. Then head for dinner. I felt renewed.

Main image: La Madia Travelfood/Gourmadia S.r.l.

A two-year-old boy on Tuesday became the first child to die in an outbreak of E. coli O104 in Germany, taking the death toll to at least 37.

Some 3,255 people have also fallen sick in 14 European countries plus the United States and Canada, according to the World Health Organisation. Of those, 782 are seriously ill with hemolytic uremic syndrome.

The agricultural ministry in Lower Saxony said Sunday that it is still not clear how sprouts from a farm in the state became contaminated with the bacteria.

"It is not clear whether an employee brought the bacteria into the company or whether it was brought in with seeds which then contaminated the worker," the ministry said in a statement.
 

The food safety bureaucrats who say cook food until it’s piping hot have come out with an entire publication about what it means to be science-based.

The U.K. Food Standards Agency says science is fighting back against pseudoscience and asks whether the Agency has played a role in this.

For an agency with multi-millions to spend on food safety communication, why can’t they get the science right, and stick it in?

Use a tip-sensitive digital thermometer. Color and piping hot are pseudoscience.
 

Elizabeth Weise of USA Today reports today that public health experts in the U.S. and elsewhere seem none too surprised that the Germans now say sprouts were definitely the vegetable that spread the virulent E. coli bacteria that has killed at least 35 people and sickened more than 3,000 in Europe.

The experts say that raw sprouts, and how they are grown, provide the perfect breeding ground for the growth of foodborne bacteria.

"I have not eaten sprouts for more than 15 years. I've always said eating sprouts as part of a healthy diet is like saying you smoke to reduce your weight," says Michael Osterholm, who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

"If we're in a restaurant and they've put sprouts on my sandwich, I will send it back," says William Keene, senior epidemiologist at Oregon's Public Health Division in Portland. "I've told family and neighbors for 15 years not to eat sprouts."

The Food and Drug Administration says "children, the elderly, pregnant women and persons with weakened immune systems should avoid eating raw sprouts of any kind."

The agency also suggests cooking sprouts thoroughly to reduce the risk of illness and requesting "that raw sprouts not be added to your food. If you purchase a sandwich or salad at a restaurant or delicatessen, check to make sure that raw sprouts have not been added."

That still doesn’t reduce the risk of cross-contamination.

An updated table of international sprout-related outbreaks is available at 
http://bites.ksu.edu/sprouts-associated-outbreaks


While chatting with Virginia, my hair artiste, during my annual visit yesterday, she asked if I knew anything about that sprout thing.

I said, “It’s one of the few foods I won’t eat.”

“But I love sprouts.”

“OK, that’s your choice. I’m just providing information.”

The media accounts and public health actions surrounding the German-based E. coli O104 outbreak that has killed 33 people and sickened over 3,000 have been abysmal.

Like the Walkerton E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in 2000, too many are using the filters of their own politics to advance their own causes and saying too many dumb things.

It’s really about the biology.

German hospitals are overwhelmed with the 3,100 sick people; more than 700 have developed hemolytic uremic syndrome. In normal times, hospitals need between 500 to 700 portions of blood plasma in 14 days, they used 12,000 portions in the last two weeks.

“Our staffers are used to seeing very severe cases. But to see those young, healthy girls break down from one day to the next, getting cramps and slipping into coma — that's been the most stressful thing ever.”

Today it was reported, “Around 100 patients have suffered such terrible kidney damage that they will require a transplant or have to undergo dialysis for the rest of their lives.”

We count at least 55 outbreaks related to raw sprouts beginning in the U.K. in 1988, sickening thousands.

The first consumer warning about sprouts was issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in 1997.  By July 9, 1999, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had advised all Americans to be aware of the risks associated with eating raw sprouts. Consumers were informed that the best way to control the risk was to not eat raw sprouts. The FDA stated that it would monitor the situation and take any further actions required to protect consumers.

At the time, several Canadian media accounts depicted the U.S. response as panic, quoting Health Canada officials as saying perhaps some were at risk, but that sprouts were generally a low-risk product.

That changed in late 2005, as I was flying back to reunite with this girl I met in Kansas and 750 people in Ontario became sick from raw bean sprouts.

Virginia had heard about the chasing-Amy tale, she knew nothing about the food safety risks with raw sprouts.

That’s normal: what food safety types think passes for common knowledge barely registers as public knowledge. It’s hard to compete against food porn.

Sprouts present a special food safety challenge because the way they are grown -- high moisture and high temperature -- also happens to be an ideal environment for bacterial growth.

Because of continued outbreaks, the sprout industry, regulatory agencies, and the academic community in the U.S. pooled their efforts in the late 1990s to improve the safety of the product, including the implementation of good manufacturing practices, establishing guidelines for safe sprout production and chemical disinfection of seeds prior to sprouting.

But are such guidelines actually being followed? And is anyone checking? Doubtful.

There’s a Jimmy John’s around the corner from where Virginia cuts my hair. Earlier this year, sprouts served on Jimmy John’s sandwiches supplied by Tiny Greens sickened 140 people with salmonella, primarily in Indiana.

In Jan. 2011, Jimmy John’s owner John Liautaud said his restaurants would be replacing alfalfa sprouts with allegedly easier-cleaned clover sprouts, effective immediately.

This was one week after a separate outbreak of salmonella on sprouts sickened eight people in the U.S. northwest who ate at Jimmy John’s that used clover sprouts.

Virginia said she’d never eat at Jimmy John’s again.

Sprout grower Bill Bagby, the dude who owns Tiny Greens and apparently imagines he has huge cast-iron balls, said in the context of the German outbreak that, for many like him, the nutritional benefits outweigh the risk.

"Sprouts are kind of a magical thing.”

"That's why I would advise people to only buy sprouts from someone who has a (foodsafety) program in place" that includes outside auditors, Bagby said. "We did not have (independent auditors) for about one year and that was the time the problems happened. The FDA determined that unsanitary conditions could have been a potential source of cross-contamination and so we have made a lot of changes since then."

Independent auditors? Like the ones who said everything was cool, everything was OK, at Peanut Corporation of America (7 dead, 700 sick) and DeCoster eggs (2,000 sick).

But with all the dead and sick and dying related to the German outbreak, why not make a political point.

Like Mark Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute, who suggested that concerned consumers might be better off choosing organic sprouts over non-organic varieties because the majority of outbreaks during the last three years came from conventional farms. Bagby, an organic farmer noted that their inspection process is more rigorous than conventional farms.

Organic is a production standard, not a food safety standard.

It’s not an organic-conventional thing; it’s a sprouts-make-people-barf thing.

Arm-chair epidemiologist and N.Y. Times writer Mark Bittman decided to share his vast food safety knowledge (again) in a June 7/11 piece titled, Don’t blame the sprouts, in which he decided to use the German outbreak to advance the cause of grass-fed beef.

It goes back to biology.

E. coli O157:H7 and its cousins are generally found in about 10 per cent of ruminants – cows, sheep, goats, deer. There are outbreaks of human disease related to all; the U.S. happens to have more cattle than other ruminants. There’s a lot of dangerous E. coli out there. But there are some basics when people start getting sick.

“I’m just staggered,” said William E. Keene, a senior epidemiologist of the Oregon Public Health Division. “This is basic outbreak investigation 101. This is on the high end of suspect vehicles. You always rule out raw milk, you always rule out ground beef, you always rule out sprouts. It just happens in the beginning steps.”

Virginia told me I had some mullet action going on and it had to go.

And she’d reconsider sprouts.

An updated table of international sprout-related outbreaks is available at :
http://bites.ksu.edu/sprouts-associated-outbreaks


Gonzalo already blogged about the last episode of the Real Housewives of New Jersey in which the ladies were preparing for Thanksgiving. I, however, am a bit behind on my television viewing and just got to the episode today on the DVR.

Caroline’s family went to visit their daughter Lauren’s boyfriend’s family at their Italian food store, Little Italy Deli. One of the men behind the counter handed Caroline a bowl of soup with a gloved hand, and then Marco (or Vito Jr’s brother) struck this pose (right, exactly as pictured). What’s the point of wearing sanitary gloves if you’re going to rub them on your unprotected hand? Apparently there is some cultural confusion about whom the gloves protect, the food handler or the client. In food safety language this is referred to as magic glove syndrome.

Seek and ye shall find.

But countries still won’t test their way to a safe food supply.

Testing is extremely useful for validating safety procedures and to have a sense of what’s out there.

There’s lots of various E. coli out there.

RNW reports for the second time this week the Dutch Food Quality Authority (nVWA) has found sprouts contaminated with the EHEC bacterium, although it is not the O104 variant. A spokesperson for the Authority said on Friday that the beet seed sprouts have been withdrawn from the market on the orders of Health Minister Edith Schippers.

Meanwhile, Thailand said on Saturday that it had detected E. coli in cabbage imported from Europe and was checking whether it was the lethal strain involved in a killer outbreak in northern Germany.

On Friday Thailand said that E. coli found in avocados a day earlier was not the deadly strain that has swept Europe in recent weeks.

Testing has a role -- make it meaningful.
 

Plus de 3000 personnes malades comprenant 795 cas d’insuffisance rénale dans l’une des plus grandes épidémies de l’histoire

Après des semaines d’enquête, les autorités allemandes de la santé ont dit le 10 juin 2011 que « ce sont des graines germées ».

Les autorités de l’Allemagne recommandent d’éviter de consommer des graines germées ; les conseils de santé à propos des réserves de consommation des laitues, des tomates et des concombres ont été levés. Même si les analyses des graines germées de la ferme mise en cause n’ont pas détecté la souche épidémique, l’épidémiologie a fait le lien entre la consommation de graines germées et la maladie.
Les graines germées crues ont été liées au moins à 55 épidémies de maladies infectieuses d’origine alimentaire depuis 1988.

Les maladies associées aux graines germées fraîches peuvent provenir de semences, de l’eau, ou du sol contaminés, ou d’une mauvaise hygiène.

La plus importante épidémie de maladies d'origine alimentaire en Allemagne que l’on n’ait jamais connu a commencé au début du mois de mai, et des malades, en particulier ceux souffrant d'un syndrome hémolytique et urémique (ce qui conduit à une insuffisance rénale), sont encore signalés. E. coli O104:H4, provoque une maladie semblable au sérogroupe le plus commun O157:H7. Cette souche semble être particulièrement dangereuse et a conduit à plus de décès et d'hospitalisations que ce qui est observé d'habitude lors d’une épidémie à E. coli pathogène.

La majorité des cas sont signalés dans le nord de l'Allemagne, mais il y a eu cas des cas de maladies au Royaume-Uni, États-Unis, Canada, Autriche, Danemark, Norvège, Suisse, Suède, Espagne, France et Pays-Bas. À l'exception de 2 cas seulement, toutes les personnes concernées avaient récemment visité l'Allemagne.

La source de l'épidémie a été difficile à déterminer car les indicateurs et les agents pathogènes ont été retrouvés sur plusieurs des aliments qui ont été étudiés, mais la souche épidémique n'a pas été retrouvée. Les données épidémiologiques publiées par les autorités sanitaires allemandes le 10 juin ont montré que les graines germées étaient la source de l’épidémie.