Aussie food types are slightly warming to the use of thermometers, following the U.S. and now Canada.

The New South Wales Food Authority (that’s the state agency where Sydney is) says in a new advisory about unsafe cooking temperatures that, “it’s not a bad idea to invest in a meat thermometer probe.”

“Different meats require different cooking temperatures to destroy harmful bacteria.

“For example, a steak need only be seared on the outside and can be rare inside, while minced meat must be carefully cooked to destroy bacteria. That’s because minced meat has far greater surface area than steak and therefore greater risk of bacterial contamination.

“One way is to simply cook minced meat, sausages and poultry until well done, right through to the centre. No pink should be visible and juices should run clear.

“Using this method should ensure your meat and poultry is free from harmful bacteria, although people’s idea of what constitutes "pink" and "clear running juices" might differ from person to person, that’s why it’s not a bad idea to invest in a meat thermometer probe.

“A meat thermometer helps you make sure all potentially harmful bacteria have been destroyed through proper cooking. A thermometer probe shows you the exact temperature inside the meat or poultry so you can be sure it’s cooked all the way through.”

Color remains a lousy indicator of meat safety and tenderness. Use a thermometer and stick it in. It’ll make you a better cook.

As the usual suspects weigh in with ol’ timey public relations strategies and superficial observations of social media in the , it’s good to poke fun at all things foodie. Satirical takedowns of the pretentious and pompous never go out of style, regardless of the medium.

From Eater, a cautionary tale for this modern life: the below anthem from The Key of Awesome! warns against the perils of tweeting before eating. A send up of Pet Shop Boys songs, it features "culinary paparazzi," a lobster and a cupcake posing like super models, and an unhappy ending. For the next time you think, "it's unthinkable to dine out and not record it/Want the world to know I can afford it."
 

The Minnesota Health Department says three people have tested positive for cryptosporidium and another six cases are suspected -- all had recently been swimming at the Edgewater in Duluth in March.

Of those nine possibly affected, seven are kids and two are adults.

The Edgewater responded to concerns by closing pools and super chlorinating them to kill any parasite, ahead of getting water testing results back.

"Our pools are the cleanest, you know, that they've been because of the super chlorination, and we do take it very seriously and are very controlled about how often we test the water and what to do with issues," said Leanne Joynes of ZMC Hotels.

"The people should not be changing diapers at poolside. They should take a shower before and after swimming and that when they're swimming, they should take frequent bathroom breaks," said Trisha Robinson of the Minnesota Department of Health.

The Minnesota Department of Health is also investigating a pool facility in Brainerd for the same parasite, but did not say which one.

One person who swam there was confirmed to be infected, while two others are suspected.

So far, officials believe the cases in Duluth and Brainerd are not related.

In Aug. 2011, Terry Brady, a spokesperson with Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources said that the lake at Cowan’s Gap State Park remained open, despite links to three cases of E. coli O157. “The beaches are open and actually there was a good turnout today. A link to the park has not been established."

The lake was closed the next day. Eighteen people, primarily kids, were stricken with E. coli O157:H7; 10 were hospitalized. An additional 24 people were classified as suspected cases.

Swimming can be risky.

Public Opinion reports today that Cowan’s Gap State Park beach will reopen May 5, and officials will be handing out a fact sheet urging swimmers to take precautions against germs that can contaminate lakes and pools. The source of the bacterial outbreak that sickened 14 people in July and August remains a mystery, but state officials suspect poopy pants may be the culprit.

"If people aren't careful, there are chances it would happen again," Mary Lorah, regional park manager with the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. "Our goal is to make them aware of steps they can take with their young children to prevent it."

DCNR spokesman Terry Brady, the same one, said, "It's not unusual for people to leave thoughtfulness and cleanliness at home and not bring them to the state parks.”

The park also has encased its wells that provide drinking water to visitors, according to Brady. During the E. coli investigation, authorities discovered that a well at the park was contaminated with a different E. coli strain. They suspect the well was tainted with runoff from heavy rains. The well was not fingered as the cause of the outbreak because the park's well water is chlorinated before it is sent to taps.

When a sports team fails, some players are shipped to the minors, maybe some assistant coaches, then the coach and eventually the person who made all those hires in the first place – the general manager.

I’m thinking of you, Toronto Maple Leafs (see the extremely vulgar, funny and accurate Leafs Beefs at www.leafsbeefs.com).

The immune-at-the-top philosophy also extends to food service, as the owner of the Ottawa franchise of The Lunch Lady, which provides meals to schools in dozens of Canadian communities, proclaimed today that an employee had been fired after not following proper food handling procedures.

With 50 people sick from salmonella, it’s too little, too late. Any food service operation should know they are only as good as their worst employee.

Jonathan Morris, who runs an Ottawa franchise, confirmed the news in a letter to parents Tuesday.

"The Lunch Lady Group guidelines on handling raw meat and poultry were not properly followed by one individual," the statement read. "This person had the responsibility for ensuring that safe food handling guidelines were followed to the letter. This person is no longer working in my kitchens."

Morris said the salmonella outbreak can be tracked to ground beef used in preparing the catered meals.

The boss sets the tone. And not just Morris. The Lunch Lady herself has said her franchises have strict food procurement, storage and handling guidelines, but has yet to provide any evidence, at least not publicly.

And if ground beef was the source of the salmonella, where did the beef originate? Where are those federal inspectors and veterinarians who are so necessary to ensure food safety?

I've got nothing.

Could be a useful human application.

The Portland Press Herald ran a two-part series on the Salmonella Typhimurium in ground beef outbreak linked to Hannaford grocery stores in Maine that sickened at least 20 people. Excerpts below:

On the night before Halloween, Danielle Wadsworth's boyfriend made tacos for dinner at her home in Lewiston. A week later, she was hooked up to two intravenous drips at Central Maine Medical Center as doctors debated whether she needed a blood transfusion.

Wadsworth, an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman, was one of 20 people known to have been infected with a rare antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella linked to ground beef sold at Hannaford stores in seven states last fall.

Severe stomach pain and near-constant diarrhea containing blood concerned Wadsworth enough to seek medical treatment. She was hospitalized for three days and missed two weeks of work.

"I wouldn't even wish it on my worst enemy," said Wadsworth, who's pursuing a claim against Hannaford supermarkets.

Federal and state investigators traced the "genetic fingerprint" of the salmonella to ground beef sold at Hannaford, prompting the Scarborough-based grocery chain to pull 17,000 pounds of meat from its shelves on Dec. 15, 2011, in the first health-related recall of a store-brand product in its 129-year history.

Investigators were never able to identify the source -- and possibly prevent more consumers from getting sick -- because of Hannaford's record keeping, even though it exceeded federal requirements. However, Hannaford's records, like most retailers, still fell short of USDA recommendations.

The first hint at Hannaford that something was wrong came in mid-December, when four investigators from the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service showed up at Hannaford's South Portland and Schodack, N.Y., distribution centers and a handful of Hannaford stores.

Without telling the company why, they collected copies of inventory records and grinding logs, according to Mike Norton, Hannaford's director of corporate communications. Hannaford employees were only told it was part of a foodborne illness investigation, one of 17 the agency conducted in 2011.

On the morning of Dec. 15, Norton said, Hannaford's director of food safety, Larry Kohl, called company executives to a noon meeting at the corporate office on Pleasant Hill Road in Scarborough. Federal food inspectors, working with public health officials, had made a connection between Hannaford's beef and a salmonella outbreak, he explained at the meeting. They'd hear more later that day, Kohl told the group.

The federal agents told company officials that a national database kept by the CDC had connected 14 people from seven states infected with the same strain of salmonella. Through interviews with the patients, public health officials found that 10 of them had eaten ground beef purchased at Hannaford. (The number of people known to have become sick later rose to 20, with 12 reporting having eaten Hannaford beef in the week before their symptoms appeared.)

Since the USDA doesn't have the authority to require a recall, it was up to company officials to decide what to do. At that meeting, they decided to recall all store-brand ground beef with a sell-by date of Dec. 17 or earlier -- meaning anything that was put on the shelves on Dec. 15 or before.

That set off a chain of events, starting with a message that appeared at 7:45 p.m. on monitors at store registers throughout the chain, telling clerks to alert on-duty managers to immediately check their computers for an important announcement.

Their inboxes contained a list of 10 varieties of ground beef carrying the Hannaford, Taste of Inspirations and Nature's Place labels that had to be removed from the shelves within an hour.

Meanwhile, the corporate communications staff was putting together a press release that was sent out around 11 p.m. to 675 media outlets and later emailed to 70,000 customers.

The major roadblock in the USDA's investigation, according to the agency, was the lack of information about ground beef that's made from "trim," the scraps of meat left over when steaks and roasts are cut in stores from larger slabs.

About 20 percent of Hannaford's ground beef packages are made from trim. The rest comes to the company in tubes of coarsely ground meat that's ground again in stores and packaged.

Every morning, Hannaford meat clerks grind beef with varying percentages of fat, depending on what's needed in their store that day. After every grind, they write down information about the meat on a paper log that's kept near the grinder -- fat content, the number of packages made and the sell-by date.

Clerks also write down the lot numbers for each box of tube meat but not the primal cuts whose trim was used for ground beef.

Complicating their ability to trace the source of any tainted beef, the stores didn't clean equipment between grinding the tube meat and grinding the trim, which created an opportunity for cross-contamination, company officials admit.

The USDA called those practices "high-risk" and pointed to them as the reason its investigation was unsuccessful.

Yet, there are no USDA regulations that require retailers to clean equipment between grinding beef from different companies, or to keep grinding logs at all.

The USDA only requires that meat retailers keep track of what suppliers they use, how much meat they receive and when it arrives.

Still, grocers are aware that the agency recommends a much higher level of transparency, said Daniel Engeljohn, an assistant administrator for the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service.

He said the Hannaford case proves that they're choosing not to listen.

"We've publicly been making statements and developing best practices for retail since at least 2007," Engeljohn said. "It's evidence that, industry-wide, there has not been good adoption of best practices."

Norton said halting the use of trim was a stopgap measure to simplify Hannaford's grinding practices and records right away. He said stores resumed grinding trim in the first week of February, but they now clean equipment before and after those grinds and record the source of all cuts of meat used.

Those additional steps have tacked on between one and two hours of work for an employee in every meat department every day, said Norton.

Retailers' approach to record keeping varies. Some keep detailed records, most don't. But that could change under a proposed rule that would require retailers to keep detailed grinding logs.

A three-sentence summary of the proposed rule released last month said it would require retailers to record "all source materials" going into ground beef.

Norton said Hannaford hopes the USDA will start holding all meat retailers to that standard and supports the agency's effort to upgrade record-keeping rules.

At Pat's Meat Market in Portland, butcher Nick Vacchiano grinds meat every two hours using only trim from cuts of beef sourced from three suppliers in the western United States.

No beef is ground before it gets to the store, and no logs are kept of what goes into the grinder. Vacchiano, whose father owns the Stevens Avenue market, said the operation is so small, there's no need for extensive records.

"We're watching everything that goes on," he said.

 Here’s an effective way to get at some of the 1%; bad food safety advice.

The Wall Street Journal ran a recipe extolling the virtues of steak tartare – “itsy bitsy pieces of raw red meat cling together and make for bold, blissful eating” – and came in with this nosestrethcher:

“It is critical to source your meat from a top-notch butcher. The chances of ingesting pathogens, such as E. coli, are higher than when eating cooked meat, so shop with care. Let your butcher know you’ll be eating the meat raw and make sure it is scent-free. Ask about who raised your meat—you want a purveyor known for extremely sanitary practices.”

Or a butcher with those UV-goggles that make dangerous bacteria visible to mere mortals. That’s an investment I could get behind, if it worked.

It doesn’t.

The disclaimer at the bottom of the recipe is probably as effective as those on restaurant menu; or on investment agreements.

“Note: The FDA recommends cooking beef to 145 degrees and avoiding food that contains raw eggs.”

There’s an apparent and on-going outbreak of Salmonella Poona that’s primarily affecting the elderly in the UK.

The Laboratory of Gastrointestinal Pathogens (LGP) has reported 49 non-travel associated, fully sensitive cases of Salmonella Poona with specimen dates on or after 24 October 2011 to 19 March 2012. This compares with 21 and 33 cases reported during the whole of 2009 and 2010 respectively. Those affected range from four months to 88 years of age with 65% of all cases aged over 60 years and a median age of 69.5 years; men and women are similarly affected.

Cases have been found across England and Wales, with most cases occurring in the South West (28%), South East (16%) and Wales (14%) regions. So far, no cases have been reported in London and the East Midlands and 14 cases have received treatment in hospital.

The Salmonella Poona isolates from 41 of the cases have been further typed by pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and all but one has the same PFGE profile XB.0003. This strain is indistinguishable from a strain seen in an outbreak in Sweden in 2010; however, a source was not been confirmed for that outbreak.

I did a little digging, but couldn’t find much about the 2010 Sweden outbreak. Anyone know? Suspect foods?