Currently browsing posts about: Food-safety

The CDC tracking of the papaya outbreak continues, with a score of

• Case Count: 173
• States: 21
• Deaths: 1
• Hospitalizations: 58
• Recall: Yes

All foodborne illness outbreaks are devastating for victims but fascinating for investigators, since each is different.

This investigation has traced the illness-causing Salmonella to one kind of papaya (Maridol, under Caribeña, Cavi, and Valery brands) to one Mexican farm (Carica de Campeche).

But four Salmonella strains have been found in papaya samples and in ill people:

• Kiambu
• Thompson
• Agona
• Gaminara

The shift from one to another is evident in the epi curve:

The moral:

• Don’t buy Maridol papayas.
• If you have one, throw it away (but be careful not to cross contaminate surfaces)
• If you don’t know where the papaya was grown, don’t eat it

If you are interested in the legal implications, check Bill Marler’s website.

First cantaloupe, now papayas.

The CDC has opened up a homepage on Salmonella infections associated with eating Yellow Maradol Papayas.

Here’s the count so far:

• 47 Cases
• 12 States
• 12 Hospitalizations
• 1 Deaths

Food Safety News has the story.  And provides the label you had best avoid.

As usual, by the time the CDC finds out about outbreaks, cases have slowed down (it takes time to find them).

This one is affecting people in states all over the country.

Papayas grow on trees.  Salmonella are animal bacteria.  Monkeys?  Arboreal sloths?

A more likely explanation is that the fruit came in contact with human waste or dirty hands sometime during collection, transport, or processing.

What to do?

Bacteria are on the rind.  They get on the fruit itself when you cut through it.  You can try scrubbing the outside before you peel the papaya.  The CDC recommends discarding it and cleaning your kitchen carefully.

Better preventive controls?  They are on the books (the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act).

Enforcement?  Not unless Congress appropriates the funds.

Why won’t it?  FDA appropriations go through agricultural appropriations, not health.  Do ag committees care about food safety?

I wish.

Addition:  Food Safety News reports that the distributor of the papayas has started recalling them, but not publicly.

From the USDA’s partnership with the Ad Council…

Scott Faber, Vice President of Government Affairs for the Environmental Working Group summarizes Trump’s Full-Scale War on Food.  Since taking office, he writes, Trump has:

• Proposed to cut food safety funding for the Food and Drug Administration by $117 million.
• Proposed to cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by $193 billion – a 25 percent cut – and cut international food aid by $2 billion.
• Delayed new labeling rules for menus and packaged foods that would give consumers more information about calories and added sugars, and so far failed to issue a draft rule to implement a new law on disclosing genetically modified ingredients in food.
• Weakened new rules designed to drive junk food out of U.S. schools.
• Proposed to eliminate several Department of Agriculture programs that helped farmers sell directly to local consumers.
• Proposed to eliminate funding for an entire division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that works to reduce obesity.
• Withdrawn new rules to protect drinking water supplies from polluters and proposed cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 31 percent.
• Proposed to suspended two of the largest farmland stewardship programs and mothball others.
• Postponed new rules designed to strengthen animal welfare standards on organic farms and proposed to eliminate funding for programs that help farmers switch to organic farming.
• Reversed a ban on a pesticide linked to brain damage in kids and proposed cutting EPA funding for pesticide review programs by 20 percent.
• Punted on new rules to protect farmworkers from pesticides, and proposed to eliminate a program to train migrant and seasonal farmworkers.
• Mothballed new voluntary sodium guidelines that would drive reformulation of foods.
• Called for so-called regulatory “reforms” that would block agencies like the FDA and USDA from adopting new rules designed to keep food safe, update food labels or provide students healthier meal options in schools.

This is an impressive list, calling for serious resistance.

How?  That’s the question….

Food Safety News, my go-to source for information about current and past episodes of foodborne illness, reports the price of insufficient corporate diligence: $36 million in recalls by Dole Foods.

Dole, a privately-held company is going public, which means it has to file lots of financial documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  For the past couple of years, these show:

2015: $10.8 million to recall bagged salads in which a sample tested positive for Salmonella.

2016: $25.5 million for a four-month shutdown of a salad processing plant found to be contaminated with Listeria, and manage a recall. Listeria at the plant was linked to four deaths and 33 cases of illness in the U.S. and Canada.  The company continued to ship salads from the facility after swab tests were positive for Listeria.

The SEC requires companies to list potential risks.  In its SEC filing, Dole said:

We are subject to the risk of product contamination and product liability claims…Even if a product liability claim is unsuccessful or it not fully pursued, the negative publicity surround any assertion that our products caused illnesses or injury could adversely affect our reputation with existing and potential customers and our corporate and brand image.  Moreover, claims and liabilities of this sort might not be covered by our insurance or by any rights of indemnity or contribution that we may have against others.

This is why diligent attention to preventive controls is essential for producing safe food.

Not using them kills people; it also is expensive.

Special Edition: Food Safety

Food safety is an issue every meat business takes considerable careover as the financial costs of a recall, not to mention the reputational risk, can be devastating. In this special newsletter, GlobalMeatNews takes a look at the latest recalls, changes to food safety regulation and other key developments across the supply chain.

• Food safety tips for storm-battered businesses: Donald Trump’s government has shared food safety tips after New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia declared states of emergency as the deadly storm Stella swept across the north-eastern US… Read
• Subway hits back at fake chicken allegation: Subway has strongly denied media claims that its chicken is roughly half soy, calling the analysis “baseless” and “factually incorrect”… Read
• Canada green-lights irradiation for ground beef: Irradiated ground beef looks set to hit the shelves of supermarket stores after the Canadian government approved its sale… Read
• New food safety rules for butchers: New rules simplifying food safety management in small retail businesses, including butcheries, have been proposed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). .. Read
• California food firm hit by 26t recall: US, California-based Ready Pac Foods Inc has recalled 26 tonnes (59,225 pounds) of chicken salad products that may be contaminated with listeria… Read
• Online forum explores packaging advances for meat safety: Suppliers seeking an edge in the fight to kill germs and boost shelf-life through packaging innovations can access a free online forum held on 23 March, featuring EU and US experts. .. Read

The congressional watchdog Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just published its latest plea for coordinating federal food safety programs: A National Strategy Is Needed to Address Fragmentation in Federal Oversight.

GAO persists in pointing out that 16 federal agencies administer 30 laws government food safety and quality, although USDA (meat and poultry) and FDA (everything else) have the greatest responsibility.

Despite some progress, GAO’s long-standing recommendation for a single, unified food safety agency continues to be ignored.

HHS’s and USDA’s efforts since 2014 are positive steps toward government-wide planning, but OMB has not addressed our recommendation for a government-wide plan for the federal food safety oversight system. Without an annually updated government-wide performance plan for food safety that includes results-oriented goals, performance measures, and a discussion of strategies and resources…Congress, program managers, and other decision makers are hampered in their ability to identify agencies and programs addressing similar missions and to set priorities, allocate resources, and restructure federal efforts, as needed, to achieve long-term goals. Also, without such a plan, federal food safety efforts are not clear and transparent to the public.  OMB staff told us that they were not aware of any current plans to develop a government-wide performance plan for food safety.

The footnotes list previous GAO reports aimed at rationalizing our food safety system, among them:

• GAO, High-Risk Series: An Update, GAO-15-290 (Washington, D.C.: Feb. 11, 2015), GAO-15-180.
• GAO, Federal Food Safety Oversight: Food Safety Working Group Is a Positive First Step but Government-wide Planning Is Needed to Address Fragmentation, GAO-11-289 (Washington, D.C.: Mar. 18, 2011)
• GAO, High-Risk Series: An Update, GAO-07-310 (Washington, D.C.: January 2007)
• GAO, Food Safety: U.S. Needs a Single Agency to Administer a Unified, Risk-Based Inspection System, T-RCED-99-256 (Washington, D.C.: Aug. 4, 1999).
• GAO, Food Safety: A Unified, Risk-Based System Needed to Enhance Food Safety, T-RCED-94-71 (Washington, D.C.: Nov. 4, 1993)
• GAO, Food Safety and Quality: Uniform, Risk-based Inspection System Needed to Ensure Safe Food Supply, RCED-92-152 (Washington, D.C.: June 26, 1992)
• GAO, Need to Reassess Food Inspection Roles of Federal Organizations, B-168966 (Washington, D.C.: June 30, 1970).

One of these years, maybe?

Ellen K. Silbergeld. : How Industrial Meat Production Endangers Workers, Animals, and Consumers.  Johns Hopkins Press, 2016.

Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences, epidemiology, and health policy at Hopkins, has long been a strong advocate for getting toxic substances out of our food supply.  Here, she takes on our system of industrial farm animal production in a plea for better treatment of everyone and everything involved in it.

Big issue #1: the use of antibiotics as growth promoters.  This not only induces bacteria to become resistant to those drugs, but also is unnecessary.

Big issue #2: the failure of HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point—the method for preventing food safety problems) to prevent harmful, antibiotic-resistant bacteria from reaching the public.

Overall, she says:

The inextricable relationship between industrial food animal production and the environment challenges us in two ways.  First, we are all at risk–not just those of us who consume the products of industrially raised animals–and second, decontaminating food products will not contain the public health problems of this industry.  It is time to think about industrial food animal production as an industry in terms of environmental pollution, and it is long overdue to recognize that its pollution footprint, like its production, is industrial in scale (p. 127).

As for the remedy, “agriculture is an industry, and as such it carries certain obligations.”  These include, among others:

• Industries must abide by laws that prevent monopolization, price fixing, and overconcentration.
• Industries must bear full liability for unsafe products.
• Industries must obey the labor laws of the country.

She has plenty more to say about government’s role in all this.

Our role is to insist that industry and government follow and apply laws.  We had best get busy.