The Agriculture Department isn’t doing a good job keeping an eye on Nova Scotia’s (a province in Canada) slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, raising the risk of tainted meat hitting the market, says auditor general Jacques Lapointe. Lapointe detailed problems with the province’s inspection program in a report released Wednesday.

Historically, food safety has been voluntarily viewed as a non-competitive practice of the food industry. But today with FDA’s funding woes and FSMA mandates, partnering for food safety is not only a voluntary option, but is becoming, in some cases, a necessity.

In June 2009, 11 outbreaks of food poisoning occurred in France, involving 45 individuals who had consumed mussels harvested in Vilaine Bay (Northwestern France). Because the toxic dinoflagellate Dinophysis spp.

Ready Pac Foods, Inc. of Irwindale, CA is recalling a total of 5,379 cases of bagged salad products containing Romaine lettuce, as listed below, with the Use-by Date of November 18, 2011 because they may be contaminated with E. coli (E.coli O157:H7). E.coli O157:H7 is an organism that may cause diarrheal illness often with bloody stools.

Producers of sprouts should add more food safety steps throughout the production chain to lower the risk of the kind of contamination that triggered a widespread Escherichia colioutbreak in Europe earlier this year, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) said in a report released yesterday.

Abstract

Abstract Objective

On June 6, 2011, the Section of Epidemiology (SOE) of the Alaska Division of Public Health was notified of a case of paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) in southeast Alaska. In collaboration with local partners, SOE investigated and identified a total of eight confirmed and 13 probable PSP cases that occurred during May--June 2011.

In 2011, cantaloupes contaminated with the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes caused the deadliest foodborne disease outbreak in the United States in more than 90 years.