I don’t know any food microbiologists who eat raw oysters; they may exist, but maybe I only know the drunks and they know better than to play with Vibrio and its liver-specific toxins.

And every time we post something about raw oysters, producers and government-types say we have no idea what we’re talking about – and provide no data.

So this isn’t me, it’s from the Washington state department of health via Seattlepi, which is telling Washingtonians to thoroughly cook their oysters.

The department says that cooking shellfish until the shells open is not enough for kill harmful bacteria.

Summer's warmer temperatures mean that levels of the bacteria Vibrio parahaemolyticus increase in state waters. Eating an oyster with the Vibrio bacteria can lead to diarrhea, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, headache, fever, and chills. It says that symptoms usually appear within 12-24 hours after eating infected shellfish and usually last from two to seven days.

The department recommends oysters should be cooked to an internal temperature of 145 degrees for at least 15 seconds to thoroughly kill the bacteria.

Yes, I temp my oysters with a thermometer. Because I know a few drunks and don’t want to kill them.

People go to a cricket match to sleep, not barf.

An investigation has been launched after 30 people contracted food poisoning following eating food at a Sussex county cricket match.

Environmental health officers are investigating how recipients of hospitality at the Boundary Rooms suite at the PROBIZ County Ground in Hove became ill after eating at the match against Middlesex on June 22nd.

Tickets for hospitality at this part of the ground cost £120 and included a four-course meal, wine, beer and soft drinks as well as entry to the match.

Sussex County Cricket Club has confirmed that around 30 people out of 240 that were in that area of the ground have become ill. The club believes that people became ill from contaminated chicken parfait, although this has yet to be confirmed.

Kevin Berry, catering and hospitality manager for the club said that Sussex Cricket Club has a great relationship with its corporate clients and that he was sure this is an isolated incident, adding, "We have been serving this dish for four years and not had any problems."

Uh-huh.

This is what Homer thinks of baseball, which is as exciting as cricket, when he is sober for a couple of weeks.

Basketball would be more interesting with full body contact; although full vomiting counts.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports that on February 6, 2012, the Kentucky Department for Public Health was notified by a local health department of multiple cases of vomiting and diarrhea among participants in a statewide, 7th grade boys' basketball tournament that was held February 3–5.

Among 52 participating teams, 49 (94%) teams (comprising 573 players) were contacted. Thirty-six teams (73%) reported at least one ill player. Sixty-two employees were identified who had worked at the tournament, and 46 (74%) were interviewed. A total of 242 persons with acute gastroenteritis were identified and interviewed, including 154 (27%) of the 573 players, 12 (26%) of the 46 employees, 11 coaches, and 65 spectators (the total numbers of coaches and spectators attending could not be determined). Nineteen (8%) persons with AGE had sought medical care, including two children who were hospitalized. Three persons from three separate teams had experienced illness onset before the tournament, and one had vomited courtside in a crowded gymnasium on the first night of the tournament. The vomitus was cleaned up by tournament attendees, and janitorial staff members were notified 3 days later. Symptom onset occurred among 196 (81%) ill persons on days 2 and 3 after the vomiting episode. No common food or water sources were identified as potential vehicles for transmission.

Six stool specimens were collected from five players and one spectator; all tested positive for norovirus. Five were sent to CDC for sequencing, and results yielded the identical genogroup II type 7 (GII.7) strain, a relatively rare norovirus strain. These confirmed cases represented players or spectators from four different teams. The three persons who had arrived at the tournament with gastrointestinal symptoms were unable to provide stool specimens for norovirus testing. However, three of the six confirmed stool specimens came from participants who had played on the court where the vomiting episode occurred.

A chef in Windsor (that’s in Canada, across the river from Detroit, where they have a decent hockey team) is going to serve raw meat dishes lamb tartare and lamb Carpaccio this Canada Day weekend to protest local health types banning the raw beef dish kibbeh from a handful of Lebanese restaurants and steak tartare from another.

“Until an inspector tells me to stop, I’ll keep serving it. And if they tell me to stop, I will probably still do it,” said Rino Bortolin.

Lawyers, open your bank accounts.

Bortolin called the Windsor Essex County Health Unit unit “culturally insensitive” to "hard-working small businesses."

“Certain preparations have been accepted for years and pose no harm when done properly. Those have been on menus for decades,” Bortolin said. “These meats and dishes have been prepared and eaten this way for centuries.”

Bortolin said the health unit has overreacted to an incident in Ottawa.

In February, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency issued a media release warning customers to not consume finely ground beef sold at New Middleast Supermarket in Ottawa.

“The affected ground beef is a finely ground raw beef known to be used for Kebbeh,” the release said.

The release never mentioned a restaurant. In an email sent Wednesday, CBC News asked the CFIA why it made reference to a specific dish. The agency has not responded.

The owner of the New Middleast Supermarket told CBC News that he didn't sell the beef to restaurants and that the meat in question was consumed by a customer.

“If it’s the source material, investigate that source and fix that problem,” Bortolin said.

Chief medical officer Dr. Allen Heimann said beef must be cooked to an internal temperature of 71 C for 15 seconds before public consumption.

Bortolin contends the law does not prohibit him from serving raw meat, only that he must "be aware of susceptible segments of society," such as children and the sick.

Bortolin said he hasn’t yet heard the reason behind the health unit's sudden enforcement. He said he’s not aware of anyone in Windsor getting sick after eating kibbeh at a restaurant.

He said before ordering, customers should ask when a restaurant’s meat arrived and where it came from.

“I welcome people asking questions,” he said. “All my meat comes fresh from Essex County. We do that for a reason.”

I wouldn’t eat there.

People can’t drive in Brisbane but they have great seafood and produce.

Blue swimmers for lunch with Sorenne while mom is off doing French professoring stuff in, er, France.

The Sponge-Bob-Colbert leafy greens cone of silence has been partially peeled back after investigators in New Brunswick (that’s in Canada) determined an outbreak of E. coli O157 in April was linked to Romaine lettuce.

CBC News reports the Department of Health released results of a case control study on Friday that examined 55 people, including 18 individuals who were sick and 37 people who were not sick.

Dr. Eilish Cleary, the chief medical officer of health, said all of those in the study who were sick with E. coli appear to have consumed romaine lettuce.

"The lettuce was used in salads, as an ingredient in wraps and hamburgers and as a garnish. These results indicate a strong likelihood that contaminated lettuce was served at the restaurant,” Cleary said in a statement.

The Public Health Agency of Canada helped the province’s health department on the control study. The experts focused on the food items eaten by those who ate at Jungle Jim's in Miramichi between April 23 and 26, 2012.

The federal agency became aware that cases matching the E. coli strain involved in the Miramichi outbreak had also been identified in Quebec and California, according to the province’s statement.

Now that would be something to follow up on. So while the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement folks were wining and dining Canadian journalists last month (not so much journalists, more like hacks) , I wonder how many asked about the Romaine-related outbreaks? There was also the Schnucks salad bar outbreak that sickened 58 people in the U.S. Midwest last fall.

A table of leafy green related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/leafy-greens-related-outbreaks.

Taking smugness to a new level, which is a worthy achievement given the level of smugness already found in Oregon, restaurant owners and chefs have successfully delayed a new no-hands rule for food contact.

Michael Russell of OregonLive writes the rule could make dining out more expensive, create waste and, despite its good intentions, do little to protect public health and isn’t safer than the state's current rigorous handwashing practices.

Except no one has validated whether those handwashing practices are actually followed or just sound smugly superior.

"The idea that using rubber gloves is going to stop people from getting sick is ludicrous," said Andy Ricker, chef and owner of Pok Pok restaurants in Portland and New York. His New York locations already comply with that state's no bare-hand-contact rule.

"For it to be safe, every time you touch something, you'd have to take your gloves off, wash your hands, and put on new gloves." Ricker said.

At least a half-dozen recent studies have concluded the same: Counter intuitively, wearing gloves does little to prevent the spread of bacteria compared with effective hand washing.

But wearing gloves is not the same as a no-bare-hand contact rule. They’re called tongs (not thongs).

Wearing gloves has been found to reduce the number of times people wash their hands, while warm, moist conditions create a hothouse for bacteria to grow. A 2005 report from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center that analyzed grilled tortillas found more staph, coliform and other harmful bacteria on the samples prepared by workers wearing gloves.

Eric Pippert, a manager with the Oregon Health Authority's Foodborne Illness Prevention department, said the measure was created to prevent the spread of norovirus, the most common cause of food poisoning. It's often spread through improper hand washing by employees after they use the bathroom.

Norovirus spreads easily; a don’t work while sick rule would be more effective at reducing the spread of norovirus (ask Harvard or Heston).

In response to those who favor hand washing, Pippert points to a 2003 health authority survey in which restaurant inspectors found at least one hand-washing violation at nearly two-thirds of Oregon eateries.

"Anybody who tells you hand washing is so darned good, well, yeah, except when you're not doing it," he said.

But restaurant owners argue that handwashing has since been drilled into cooks across the state. And they contend the rule -- which will affect bakeries and barrooms, fine dining and food carts -- would make gloves mandatory for many tasks, creating new headaches and new costs in a notoriously low-margin business. And those added costs might end up passed along to customers.

When asked for his thoughts on the new rule, sushi chef Bruce Lee at Hillsboro's Syun Izakaya replied, "When's that happening again, in January?"

For Lee, wearing gloves presents a concern beyond potential health risks.
"If you wear the glove, you're not able to feel the rice tenderness, or softness," he said. "Even wasabi -- you can feel how much you need with your fingers. But if you wear the glove, you're never going to feel it.

"If I had a choice, I wouldn't wear it."

And I wouldn’t want anyone temping food with their fingers.

A federal plan to battle invasive lionfish by dishing them up on America’s dinner plates may have backfired with the news that the flamboyantly-finned creatures can harbor a potentially dangerous neurotoxin.

JoNel Aleccia of mswnbc writes two years ago, officials with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, launched a well-publicized campaign, complete with flashy pull-cards, a lionfish cookbook and a catchy slogan. As one newsletter put it, “If we can’t beat them, let’s eat them."

“Once stripped of its venomous spines, cleaned and filleted like any other fish, the lionfish becomes delectable seafood fare,” NOAA officials enthused.

But another government agency, the Food and Drug Administration, now frowns on the “Eat Lionfish” campaign after tests of nearly 200 lionfish show that more than a quarter exceed federal levels for a toxin that can cause ciguatera, a potentially dangerous fish food poisoning.

“We certainly don’t promote any campaign like that since we have found levels above our guidance,” said Alison Robertson, the FDA’s lead ciguatera researcher for the chemical hazards branch of the Gulf Coast Seafood laboratory. “It certainly wouldn’t be our recommendation at this time.”

Robertson said she and other FDA scientists decided to test the lionfish in the summer of 2010 after hearing about NOAA’s gustatory effort.

Of 194 fish tested, 42 percent showed detectable levels of ciguatoxin and 26 percent were above the FDA’s illness threshold of 0.1 parts per billion.

That’s enough to potentially sicken a diner with the illness that causes not only typical food poisoning symptoms – diarrhea, vomiting and fatigue – but also neurological problems such as painfully tingling hands and feet, a feeling of having loose teeth, and, oddest of all, a reversed sense of temperature.

“Whatever I touched, if it was hot, it would feel cold. If it was cold, it felt hot,” ciguatera victim Pat Schroeder of Beaumont, Texas, told msnbc.com three years ago. “I couldn’t walk on the tile floor. It felt like it was burning me.”

At least 50,000 cases of ciguatera poisoning are reported worldwide each year, but the real figure may be 100 times higher, experts say. There are dozens of confirmed reports of ciguatera poisoning in the U.S. each year with more than 300 logged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2005 and 2009, according to the agency’s database. There were 84 cases in 2007, for instance, including 29 people sickened at a single dinner party.

Kibbeh – a Lebanese dish made from raw hamburger – is off the menus in Windsor, Ontario (that’s in Canada).

Windsor-Essex County Health Unit inspectors are forcing Lebanese restaurants to pull product after a report of contaminated raw kibbeh in Ottawa late last year has health inspectors taking a tougher stand. Restaurant owners say the sudden crackdown is costing them sales and upsetting longtime customers.

"No warning, no heads up, nothing. They just told us you can't sell it anymore," said Mohamad Nizam, who's owned and operated Al-Sabeel restaurant at 1129 Wyandotte St. E., for seven years. "They didn't send us any letters."

Nizam and other restaurant owners expressed pride in their raw kibbeh, which they say is popular with customers of all backgrounds.

Many came specifically for his recipe, which he makes with fresh ground beef and a special recipe of seasonings, Nizam said. Raw kibbeh can also be made with fresh ground lamb and ingredients such as bulgur wheat.

Provincial regulations require ground meat cooked to an internal temperature of at least 71 C for at least 15 seconds.

Tudor said raw fish can be served for sushi because freezing is required at some point to eliminate parasites associated with fish.

Abbas and Tannous at El-Mayor say they've never experienced food safety issues with raw kibbeh.

"A lot of customers have Lebanese background and they have been raised on raw meat," Tannous said.

And a lot of people get sick from raw meat.