The Marler Clark Network
Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 30, 2008

Top Ten Food Safety Challenges for 2009 - Bill Marler Style

As we're all getting ready to ring in the New Year, our thoughts usually turn to the resolutions for change we'd like to see in 2009.  And since this is a blog about food safety, what better way to do that than by highlighting Bill Marler's Top 10 excellent food safety challenges for us to meet head on in 2009.  Let's make this next year safer and less outbreak-ridden than the past one!

Now, on to the Top 10 list...

1. Globalization: More international recalls and outbreaks due to expanding globalalization of the food supply and the challenges of oversight/infrastructure in developing countries. International challenges probably deserve a list of their own, but in the mean time, this wide umbrella includes the possibility of bioterrorism and/or “economic/chemical terrorism” (intentional adulterations with a profit motive, like melamine).

2. Local Food: Outbreaks linked to local food and/or farmer's markets. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups and food co-ops need to demonstrate knowledge and practice of food safety, and be inspected. In addition to produce and meats/fish, prepared items are currently unsupervised.

3. Non-O157 STEC (Shiga Toxic producing E. coli) illnesses and outbreaks (both beef and produce): E. coli O157:H7 is listed as an adulterant, is tested for, and is still a terrible problem. E. coli strains that are non-O157 (but are equally as deadly) have not been evaluated or listed, and are not regularly tested for.

4. Animal to Human contamination: More contamination events involving the whole food chain (from animal feed to animals to humans). Whether it’s dioxin in Irish hogs or melamine in Chinese egg-laying hens, it’s clear that what goes into animals eventually goes into us. As the market for animals-as-food grows, so does the price to feed those animals and then the impetus to cut corners.

5. Having to do more with less: Public funding for food safety research, surveillance, and education is down, but the work load (and its importance) continues to grow.

6. 21st Century communication: In addition to improving communication between each other, food safety agencies need to improve communication with consumers. Outbreaks will move through the population with increasing speed, and agencies need to streamline their processes (and embrace social media like twitter and Facebook) in order to keep up.

7. Balancing food protection and environmental health: How to balance on-farm food safety practices with the protection of water quality, the prevention of soil erosion & dust, and the protection of wildlife and their habitats.

8. Zoonotic diseases: The rise of grain prices and starvation in other parts of the world will have many consequences, including the possibility that as people hunt wild animals for food, they may become exposed to new diseases, triggering a zoonotic virus jumping into humans. (A zoonotic virus is one that originates in animals and crosses to humans, like avian influenza.)

9. Consumers and food safety: How do consumers sort through the cacophony of information on food? What’s “safe”? What does “organic” mean anymore? How is it that “USDA inspected and passed” doesn’t guarantee pathogen-free meat? Who does the consumer believe/trust? Included in this category are the raw milk controversy, food irradiation, and even the new labeling laws like COOL (Country Of Origin Label). Will we get closer to farm to fork tracking of all fruits and vegetables this year?

10. Pet food ills: Pet food testing is increasing, so the level of contamination will become more apparent, and we should expect more recalls. Supervision of the pet food industry as a whole needs improvement, with clarity in ingredients and calorie counts.

Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 29, 2008

Tis The Season For Food Poisoning - Even Health Department's Are Not Immune

It turns out none of us are invulnerable from food poisoning illnesses, not even health department employees.  That's the hard lesson learned by the folks at the Lawrence County Health Department in Illinois following their holiday party this month.

Phyllis Wells, the head of the Lawrence County Health Department, was among the 42 people who ultimately got sick after partaking in a buffet gathering of 72 people on December 15.  She says the cause of the outbreak hasn't been pinpointed, but she suspects the culprit was a norovirus.

People can get it through contact with infected people, ingesting contaminated food or drink, or by touching contaminated items and then their mouths.

For now, Wells says the common denominator appears to be ham served in the salad bar.

Remember people (food service workers, restaurant patrons, everyone), WASH YOUR HANDS! These tips from the CDC are a good guide to follow:

Steps to proper handwashing:

  1. Hands should be washed using soap and warm, running water
  2. Hands should be rubbed vigorously during washing for at least 20 seconds with special attention paid to the backs of the hands, wrists, between the fingers and under the fingernails
  3. Hands should be rinse well while leaving the water running
  4. With the water running, hands should be dried with a single-use towel
  5. Turn off the water using a paper towel, covering washed hands to prevent re-contamination.

Hands should be washed after the following activities:

  • After touching bare human body parts other than clean hands and clean, exposed portions of arms
  • After using the toilet
  • After coughing, sneezing, using a handkerchief or disposable tissue, using tobacco, eating or drinking
  • After handling soiled equipment or utensils
  • After food preparation, as often as necessary to remove soil and contamination and to prevent cross-contamination when changing tasks
  • After switching between working with raw food and working with ready-to-eat food
  • After engaging in other activities that contaminate the hands.

 

Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 23, 2008

Melamine-Tainted Foods Still On US Shelves!

Winter has certainly come to the Northwest!  Here in Seattle we have over a foot of snow and the temperature has yet to crack freezing level in the past week and a half.  Wherever you are, now is the time of year to bundle up, take a walk, and sip on a nice cup of steaming hot cocoa.

But if you purchased that cocoa from Big Lots or Shopko under the brand name "G & J," put that cup down.   

Three "G & J" brand cocoa products packaged for Christmas sale at Big Lots and Shopko are being recalled after testing positive for melamine.  It seems this melamine problem will just not go away, as evidenced by the numerous recalls and stories from around the world, including contaminated baby formula in China that led to 294,000 children sickened, hundreds hospitalized, and at least six infants who lost their lives. 

As Phyllis Entis points out in her excellent three-part article, Getting Rid of Melamine, this problem is now not just China's or the US's.  More must be done to stop this type of flagrant disregard for food safety laws that puts all of us at risk.  How about starting with some of the suggestions made by Bill Marler in his open letter to the new Undersecretary for Food Safety at FSIS?

But I digress.  Getting back to the current recall, the products are:

  • Hot Cocoa Stuffer (bar code number 061361201444), sold in small green and blue packages along with a candy cane and marshmallows.
  • His and Hers Hot Cocoa Set (bar code number 489702201296), sold with two ceramic mugs in a brown box.
  • Cocoa (bar code number 061361201260), sold in two flavors -- French vanilla, sold in a small green bag, and double chocolate, sold in a small pink bag. Both have a whisk attached.

For more details, see the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection.

Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 18, 2008

Musical Tribute to Food Safety

Carl Winters and the other great folks at UC Davis's Food Science and Technology Department have put together an educational, and hilarious, musical tribute to food safety.  So head on over to their website and before you know it you'll be dancing to soon-to-be-classics like, We Are the Microbes or Who Left the Food Out!

 

Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 18, 2008

Musical Tribute to Food Safety

Carl Winters and the other great folks at UC Davis's Food Science and Technology Department have put together an educational, and hilarious, musical tribute to food safety.  So head on over to their website and before you know it you'll be dancing to soon-to-be-classics like, We Are the Microbes or Who Left the Food Out!

 

Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 16, 2008

Foodborne Bacteria Suicide

As an initial matter, I'm a lawyer, not a scientist.  This recent article from Science Daily.com is therefore a bit - OK, a lot - over my head, but the short version is researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have found a way to fool a bacteria’s evolutionary machinery into programming its own death.

Could this development have a place in foodborne bacteria reduction, leading to less human illnesses from the likes of E. coli, Campylobacter, or Salmonella?  Keep that funding coming and let's find out!

The basic idea is for an antimicrobial to target something in a bacteria that, in order to gain immunity, would require the bacteria to kill itself through a suicide mutation,” said Gerard Wong, a professor of materials science and engineering, of physics, and of bioengineering at the U. of I.

Wong is corresponding author of a paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is to be posted this week on the journal’s Web site.

The researchers show that a synthetic “hole punching” antimicrobial depends on the presence of phosphoethanolamine, a cone-shaped lipid found in high concentrations within Gram-negative bacterial membranes. Although PE lipids are commandeered to kill the bacteria, without the lipids the bacteria would die, also.

“It’s a Catch-22,” Wong said. “Some mutations bacteria can tolerate, and some mutations they cannot tolerate. In this case, the bacteria would have to go through a mutation that would kill it, in order to be immune to these antimicrobials.”

In their work, the researchers compared the survival of the bacterium Escherichia coli with that of a mutant strain of E. coli, which lacked PE lipids in its membrane. The fragile PE-deficient mutant strain out-survived the normal, healthy bacteria, when exposed to a “hole punching” synthetic antibiotic.

However, the opposite was true when both strains were exposed to tobramycin, a conventional metabolic antibiotic that targets the bacterial ribosomal machinery rather than the membrane.

The researchers first reported on compounds that functioned as molecular “hole punchers” last year in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Their latest work further elucidates the “hole punching” mechanism.

“The antimicrobial re-organizes PE lipids into holes in the membrane,” said Wong, who also is a researcher at the university’s Beckman Institute. “The perforated membranes leak, and the bacteria die.”

Finding new ways to treat emerging pathogens that are more and more resistant to the best antibiotics will be increasingly important in the future, Wong said. “Now that we more fully understand how our molecular ‘hole punchers’ work, we can look for similar ways to make antimicrobials that bacteria cannot evolve immunity to.”

With Wong, the paper’s co-authors include U. of I. graduate student and lead author Lihua Yang, materials science and engineering professor Dallas R. Trinkle, microbiology professor John E. Cronan Jr., and University of Massachusetts polymer science and engineering professor Gregory N. Tew, who earned a doctorate from Illinois.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Naval Research.

 

Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 16, 2008

Is There a MRSA and E. coli O157:H7 Connection?

Dr. Michael Millar, an infectious disease expert in the United Kingdom, certainly seems to think so.

According to a recent article published on Legal-Medical.com, Dr. Millar believes that by putting an increased focus on eradicating infections such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile (C. diff), other similarly dangerous bugs, like E. coli O157:H7, are being ignored.

He said: “It's not clear that overall things have got better. Rates of E. coli are going up and it almost compensates for MRSA, so all you've done is replaced one problem with another one.”

However the Department of Health said it had taken steps to tackle all infections.

Dr. Millar, a medical microbiologist at Barts and the London NHS Trust, said MRSA bloodstream infections account for only two percent of all healthcare-associated infections.

Narrow targets to reduce bloodstream MRSA rates push hospitals away from tackling other infections and even other types of MRSA infection. For example, bloodstream infection caused by antibiotic-resistant E. coli bacteria cause deaths in more than 20 percent of cases.

Dr. Millar told delegates at The Lancet Infectious Diseases conference on healthcare-associated infections, that targets should be set on the basis of local problems and measure patient outcomes rather than rates of one infection.

"There's no evidence that overall we have fewer hospital infections or fewer people are dying," he claimed.

Professor Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, said there were good reasons for introducing MRSA targets at the time but a broader approach was now needed.

"It's a fair point - it happened with the C. difficile outbreaks, where it was found the hospitals were paying a lot of attention to MRSA but not enough to C. difficile which was more serious.

"We need to be a bit more mature about how we look at the overall problem."
He added that he had no doubt other infections were rising because attention had been diverted away from them.

"Generally what we're seeing is the tip of the iceberg - we need to get better statistics so we can see what the trends are."

In a recent State of Healthcare report, the Healthcare Commission warned that trusts need to have measures in place to combat all healthcare-associated infections.

A Department of Health said spokesperson said C. difficile and MRSA bloodstream infections have potentially very severe consequences for patients and both significantly affect patient confidence in the NHS.

"We are clear that the NHS needs to take action to address any infections that are a challenge locally.

"We don't currently have plans to set targets for other infections as it would be impossible to set a target for each and every infection."

According to Health Protection Agency figures, E. coli is the most common bloodstream infection with 22,000 cases reported in 2007, although rates have remained stable in recent years.
 

Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 16, 2008

The Future Of Foodborne Pathogen Testing Is Now

I have seen the future of foodborne pathogen monitoring technology!  According to a new article published by the US Department of Agriculture's Quality and Safety Assessment Research Unit, Salmonella detection (with other possible pathogens to follow) may be possible at a level not previously seen in food pathogen testing systems.

By using nanotechnology,  microscopic biological sensors can detect Salmonella bacteria in laboratory testing.  The sensors could be adapted to detect other foodborne pathogens as well.

The sensor is part of an evolving science known as nanotechnology—the study and manipulation of materials on a molecular or even atomic level, measured in billionths of a meter, which is about 10 to100 times thinner than a human hair.

There are examples of biosensors in nature. Insects detect tiny amounts of sex pheromones in the environment and use them as a beacon to find mates. And fish use natural biosensors to detect barely perceptible vibrations in the surrounding water.

ARS engineer Bosoon Park at the Quality and Safety Assessment Research Unit in Athens, Ga., and cooperators at the University of Georgia used nanotechnology to develop the biosensor. The detection method may have great potential for food safety and security, according to Park.

The biosensors that Park and his university colleagues developed include fluorescent organic dye particles attached to Salmonella antibodies. The antibodies hook onto Salmonella bacteria and the dye lights up like a beacon, making the bacteria easier to see.

People who eat Salmonella-infected food products can get salmonellosis, a disease characterized by nausea, vomiting, severe diarrhea, and sometimes death.

For his research, Park recently received the prestigious first place Innovation Nano Research Award at the Sixth International Nanotech Symposium and Exhibition, in Ilsan, Korea.

Perhaps this technology can help reduce the alarming number of people who fall ill from Salmonella outbreaks each year .

Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 12, 2008

FDA Warning - Botulism in Ungutted, Salt-Cured Alewives (Gaspereaux) Fish

I'm not sure how many of you out there are avid consumers of ungutted, salt-cured Alewives fish (mmm, sounds delicious, doesn't it?), but for those of you who are you need to heed the FDA's just-announced consumer warning! 

Retailers and food service operators are being instructed not to offer for sale ungutted, salt-cured alewives (also called gaspereaux fish) from Michel & Charles LeBlanc Fisheries Ltd., CAP-PELÈ, New Brunswick, Canada, because the fish may contain the Clostridium botulinum (C. botulinum) toxin. Consumers should not consume the product.

C. botulinum toxin can cause botulism, a serious and sometimes life-threatening condition. The toxin cannot be removed by cooking or freezing.

The fish were imported into the United States and sent to these Florida distributors:

  • Quirch Foods Inc.
  • Den-Mar Exports LLC
  • Dolphin Fisheries Inc.
  • Labrador & Son Food Products Inc.

The fish were packed in 30-pound, white plastic pails with green plastic lids. The brand name "Michel & Charles LeBlanc Fisheries Ltd.," appears on the side of the pails, as does the phrase "Product of Canada." One hundred seventy-three (173) 30 lb. pails of fish were distributed. The fish may have been repacked or sold loose by retailers in Florida.

The FDA considers any ungutted fish over five inches in length that is salt-cured, dried, or smoked, such as the ungutted, salt-cured alewives/gaspereaux fish, to be adulterated because it could contain the C. botulinum toxin. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services discovered the ungutted alewives/gaspereaux fish from Michel & Charles LeBlanc Fisheries Ltd. being sold in stores and alerted the FDA. The FDA prohibits the sale of this adulterated product in the United States.

To date, there have been no reported illnesses associated with this product. However, consumers who have purchased ungutted, salt-cured alewives/gaspereaux fish in Florida should contact the place of purchase to determine if the fish they bought originated from Michel & Charles LeBlanc Fisheries Ltd. If the fish were from this company or if the source of the fish cannot be determined, consumers should immediately discard the fish and any foods made with these fish. 

Symptoms of botulism poisoning can begin from six hours to 10 days after eating food that contains the toxin. Symptoms may include double vision, blurred vision, drooping eyelids, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth and muscle weakness that affects first the shoulders and then moves progressively down the rest of the body. Botulism poisoning can also cause paralysis of the breathing muscles which can result in death unless assistance with breathing (mechanical ventilation) is provided.

Individuals who show these symptoms and who may have recently eaten alewives/gaspereaux fish should seek immediate medical attention.

For information about other botulism related issues, check out http://www.botulismblog.com/.

Posted by Food Poisoning Attorney on December 10, 2008

Food Safety Still Has A Long Way To Go

It looks like Congress is about to throw Detroit a bone by infusing some taxpayer money into the cash-starved Big Three.  But the area Congress should really be focusing its attention is on the US's preparedness (or lack thereof) for health emegencies.

Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) released a report yesterday that concludes the US's ability to protects itself from disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and bioterrorism is now at risk from budget cuts and the worsening economic crisis.

With regard to food safety specifically, the report noted that America’s food safety system has not been fundamentally modernized in more than 100 years.  Further, twenty states and the District of Columbia do not meet or exceed the national average rate for being able to identify the pathogens, like E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella, that are responsible for foodborne disease outbreaks in their respective states.

Conclusion?  SHOW FOOD SAFETY THE MONEY!

The full report is available here.