Project follows the race to make bagged salad safer
The latest investigation by California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting’s Deborah Schoch will make you think twice before ripping into a sack of spring mix, but her work about the myriad food safety challenges posed by bagged salads examines the industry’s struggle to develop technology powerful enough to overcome the existential threat posed by E. coli and friends.
The industry has made great strides since a 2006 outbreak linked to tainted spinach, she writes, but “It’s impossible to stop all pathogens from landing on lettuce and spinach leaves.” And once they’re on the leaves, it seems as if their spread is almost inevitable. They hide in gooey biofilms and resist powerful washes.
Thousands upon thousands of salad leaves are taken to a central plant, washed together, bagged and shipped. Even if only a few leaves are tainted, harmful pathogens can spread in the wash water — the modern salad version of the old adage that one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.
“I would think of it as swimming in a swimming pool in Las Vegas with a thousand people I didn’t know,” said William Marler, a prominent Seattle-based food safety attorney.
Plenty of public and industry money has been aimed at the problem, Schoch writes. “The Center for Produce Safety at UC Davis, founded in response to the spinach outbreak as an industry-public partnership, has pumped more than $9 million into 54 research projects at 18 universities.”
Even the best research can’t reduce the risk of contaminated greens by 100%, scientists said. At Earthbound, Daniels says the ultimate goal is to achieve what scientists call a “5 log reduction,” the equivalent of pasteurizing milk. In short, if an unwashed lettuce contained 100,000 pathogens, the perfect wash system would knock off five “0s” and reduce the pathogen count to 1.
An added bonus? Schoch’s column on whether she (and the experts she talked to) feel like it’s important, or even salutary, to wash their bagged greens.
Reporter finds the story behind food code violations
Filed under: Government, Health data, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public health, Public records
All the time that The Muskegon Chronicle’s Brian McVicar has been spending with his county health department’s inspection records has paid off with a slew of stories, with the most recent turning the spotlight on the thousands of food code violations area businesses have racked up in recent years.
Photo by bookgrl via FlickrFor this particular story, McVicar crunched the numbers on 22,000 violations, 37 percent of them critical, logged over a four-year period. Among the most salient, he writes, were “Raw chicken and crabmeat sitting out at room temperature, food kept past its expiration date, cockroaches, mice and fruit flies living in kitchens, employees not following proper hand washing procedures.”
In addition to the typical rogue restaurants, McVicar found that a wide range of local businesses were guilty of health code violations, including “Schools, hospitals, and food stands found in places such as Michigan’s Adventure Amusement Park.”
With his broad-based, data-oriented methodology, McVicar provides a model for other local reporters looking to move beyond the typical “cherrypick the cockroach horror stories” approach that is so often found in inspection-record stories.
Stories in the series:
- Food code violations rampant; food poisoning outbreaks rare
- Management is key to cleaning up food code violations
- Handwashing, temperature storage key to keeping foods safe
- Are some restaurants allowed to get too many health violations?
- Day in the life of a Muskegon County health inspector
- Food poisoning outbreaks rare, but serious
- Some states grade restaurants based on health inspections
- Food code violations: Public health risk or over-burdensome government regulation?
CBC analysis finds resistant bacteria in raw chicken
Filed under: Health data, Hot Health Headline, Public health
Reporters from the CBC’s “Marketplace” program visited supermarkets in Canada’s three largest cities, bought 100 samples of chicken, and sent them off to a lab for analysis. When the analysis came back, they weren’t particularly surprised to find that two-thirds of the samples were contaminated by bacteria – that’s the sort of thing you expect from raw chicken. What they didn’t expect was that every one of the bacteria strains present in those bits of raw chicken, purchased from major supermarkets and labeled with big-name brands, was resistant to at least one antibiotic. Some were resistant to as many as eight.
“This is the most worrisome study I’ve seen of its kind,” said Rick Smith, the head of Environmental Defence, a consumer advocacy group.
The culprits in this case of superbug proliferation will be all too familiar to regular Covering Health readers.
Doctors and scientists told Marketplace co-host Erica Johnson that chicken farmers are overusing antibiotics — routinely giving healthy flocks doses of amoxicillin, tetracycline, erythromycin and ceftiofur to prevent disease and to make the chickens grow bigger, faster.
The full CBC program is available for free online. The reporters have even shared a spreadsheet of their test results.
Food safety law boosts tracking technology sector
In The Washington Post, reporter Lyndsey Layton digs into the industry spawned by a requirement in last year’s food safety law that producers and processors be able to track food at every step of its journey from farm to supermarket. It applies to everything but meat, poultry and egg products.
Under the law, each business will need to know where the food came from and where it’s going, creating a chain of provenance that the FDA can use to more rapidly trace outbreaks of food-borne illness.
As the September deadline for the launch of the FDA’s first pilot projects looms, Layton writes, no single tracking technology yet predominates. After the pilots, the FDA will report to congress and issue specific rules by 2013.
According to Layton, some food industry segments (not farms or restaurants) have been required to track this data since 2005, “but according to a 2009 investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general, most food facilities surveyed did not meet those requirements and 25 percent didn’t even know about the law.”
Layton’s story includes a profile of HarvestMark, a company whose barcode sticker is already catching on in some places (Kroger foods has adopted it for store-brand produce, for example). HarvestMark not only allows end consumers to scan their food with a smartphone and figure out where it came from, it also allows them to deliver their feedback to the farmer who produced it.
GAO evaluates FDA’s overseas inspectors
Filed under: Europe, Government, Pharmaceuticals, Public health
A couple of new GAO reports are seeking to shed some light on the FDA’s overseas regulatory efforts. The first is part overview, part progress report (52-page PDF). It’ll answer your basic questions.
An FDA chemist tests food for antigens of Salmonella. (Photo: Black Star/Michael Falco for FDA)
In 2008 and 2009, the FDA sent 42 staffers overseas to establish foreign offices. The staff are on two-year overseas rotations, though it’s been difficult to find qualified workers for certain locations, especially since some of them had to take a pay cut. There’s a map of all 11 offices on the 12th page of the PDF.
According to the GAO, what do FDA overseas offices do?
- Build relationships with foreign regulators and stakeholders, and with other U.S. agencies that are overseas
- Gather information about regulated products
- Inspect overseas facilities which are exporting to the U.S. (China and India only)
- Train foreign stakeholders to better understand FDA regulations and systems
The second report is focused specifically upon inspections of overseas drug manufacturers producing for the U.S. market. The FDA has prioritized a list of such facilities that it would like its inspectors to visit, and the overseas agents managed to check off 11 percent of that list last year. At that rate, it will take about nine years for them to cover everything. For domestic facilities, that turnover rate is about 2.5 years.
Conflicts abound for private food inspectors
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Government, Hot Health Headline, Public health
The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun has gathered, in one story, a laundry list of all the shortcomings, loopholes and conflicts of interest plaguing an American food inspection system so flawed that foodborne disease outbreaks are routinely caused by facilities with “superior” safety ratings (See Wright County Egg and the Peanut Corporation of America).
Here, I’ve cherry-picked Sun’s basic points. They echo much of what we’ve heard from previous food-safety investigations, despite the fact that each story always seems to end with the FDA pledging to reform the system. Her first observation is also the most fundamental, and will be familiar to anyone following the role of independent credit rating agencies in the financial crisis.
“… auditors are typically paid by the companies they are inspecting, creating a conflict of interest for inspectors who might fear they will lose business if they don’t give high ratings.”
“Food companies often choose the cheapest auditors to minimize the added expense of inspections, which range from about $1,000 to more than $25,000.”
“… foodmakers can prepare for audits because they often know when inspectors will show up.”
“… auditors have a range of experience and qualifications, from recent college graduates to retired food industry veterans. They sometimes walk through a plant, ticking off a checklist to produce a score, Samadpour said. Basic inspections do not typically include microbial sampling for bacteria.”
“The FDA has the authority but not the resources to routinely inspect the estimated 150,000 food-processing plants in the United States or the 250,000 facilities abroad that supply U.S. consumers.”
Investigating, localizing salmonella outbreak
Filed under: Health data, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
As some of you may have noticed, there’s an egg recall going on. It all began when the CDC’s PulseNet monitoring program noticed a fourfold jump in the number of salmonella cases being reported, which spurred investigations around the country. This jump is evident in the graph below. Don’t be fooled by the dropoff at the end, it has more to do with the reporting process than with an actual decrease in the number of salmonella cases (which clearly isn’t happening).
Image courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Health officials then traced it all back to a man outlets love to describe as a sort of rogue Iowa egg magnate and his Wright Country Eggs (satellite view?).
As we stand now, the tainted eggs could have been distributed through any number of channels, but constitute a tiny fraction of the national egg supply.
For reporters digging into this national recall story, or looking to localize it to their coverage area, AHCJ has a strong archive of foodborne illness resources.
Start with a classic, the AHCJ article “Fatal Food: A study of illness outbreaks ,” in which Thomas Hargrove details SHNS’ massive investigation into the nation’s food safety monitoring system. Not only is Hargrove’s how-to instructive, his actual findings are useful examinations of state and local food safety systems around the country.
For your own investigation, look at Mining NLM databases: PubMed, Medline and more and the rich set of resources in the sidebar to Hargrove’s story.
If you’re looking for solid numbers and the most up-to-date national context, see Covering Health’s recent post on the CDC’s lates foodborne illness data, as well as our examination of 2009 foodborne illness rates.
Other relevant Covering Health posts include:
Schneider: FDA lacks resources to keep food safe
CDC assembles rogues gallery of food bugs
Private food auditors didn’t stop outbreaks
Lax oversight, complex supply chains aid outbreaks
Stadium concessions rack up health violations
ESPN’s Paula Lavigne examined 2009 health department inspections from the 107 stadiums that host MLB, NBA, NHL and NFL games in the United States and Canada. The resulting report may keep you from indulging in your favorite ballpark food.
At 30 of the venues (28 percent), more than half of the concession stands or restaurants had been cited for at least one “critical” or “major” health violation. Such violations pose a risk for foodborne illnesses that can make someone sick, or, in extreme cases, become fatal.
Photo by Katie Spence via Flickr
An interactive map lets you see the venues based on the number of violations there; rolling your mouse over the location tells you the percentage of vendors found in violation and gives some information about the kinds of violations that were found.
The same information, compiled by Lavigne and Producer Lindsay Rovegno, is also available in a text format broken down by state.
Many of the excerpts cite instances in which food was not being kept at appropriate temperatures and a few are related to pests, but there are a few more unusual examples:
- At the Jobing.com Arena, where the Phoenix Coyotes play, “inspectors spotted an employee scooping ice with his bare hands instead of using scoops.”
- At Dodger Stadium, there was mold growing inside an ice machine.
- At Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium and at the Pepsi Center in Denver, inspectors found flies in bottles of liquor.
- At Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions, inspectors found an employee’s half-eaten hamburger in a warming unit.
Another interesting note: Food inspectors aren’t always visiting unannounced nor are they always visiting when concessions are open. In Chicago, inspections are done when the stadiums are empty and no workers are preparing or serving food. At Cincinnati’s Paul Brown Stadium, inspectors must “submit a list of employees’ names and make an appointment a few days in advance.”
Reporters who have a major sports venue in their community might want to see how it stacks up against others, what kinds of violations have been found and do some further reporting.
Resources for covering food safety
Tip Sheets
- Lifting the shroud: Using multiple-cause-of-death data
- FDA Reform: The Time Has Come (Nancy Donley presentation)
- Why Is It So Difficult to Prevent Foodborne Illnesses? (Michael Doyle presentation)
- Reporting on the intersection of health and the environment
- Fatal Food: A study of illness outbreaks
Websites
- Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy
- Outbreak Alert! Database
- Center for Food Safety and Security Systems
- FoodRisk.org
Related
- Recent stories and studies on foodborne illnesses
- Video study finds risky food-safety behavior more common than thought
- Airlines delay testing of onboard water
- A selection of stories about a 2008 salmonella outbreak
- Private companies, not the FDA, increasingly perform food safety inspections
Raw, warm vegetables breed illness in salsa, guac
Filed under: Government, Hot Health Headline, Public health, Studies
New research implicates guacamole or salsa in 3.9 percent of restaurant-related outbreaks of foodborne illness between 1998 and 2008, more than double the rates of previous measurement periods. Both sauces often combine raw ingredients – tomatoes, peppers and cilantro – that have each been blamed for past outbreaks, the CDC release said.
Photo by anitasarkeesian via FlickrImproper storage and temperature were blamed for 30 percent of the outbreaks, and another 20 percent were caused by worker-related contamination. The outbreaks are common enough that the government even gives them their own acronym (SGA!), an honor that’s admittedly not particularly rare in the world of federal bureaucracy.
CDC began conducting surveillance for foodborne disease outbreaks began in 1973, yet no salsa- or guacamole-associated (SGA) outbreaks were reported before 1984. Restaurants and delis were the settings for 84 percent of the 136 SGA outbreaks. SGA outbreaks accounted for 1.5 percent of all food establishment outbreaks from 1984 to 1997. This figure more than doubled to 3.9 percent during the ten-year period from 1998 to 2008.
According to the release, the primary weapon against such outbreaks is simply the awareness that vegetables are a threat.
“Possible reasons salsa and guacamole can pose a risk for foodborne illness is that they may not be refrigerated appropriately and are often made in large batches so even a small amount of contamination can affect many customers,” (Magdalena Kendall, Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education researcher) says. “Awareness that salsa and guacamole can transmit foodborne illness, particularly in restaurants, is key to preventing future outbreaks.”
Airplane food caterers cited for health violations
After finding critical health violations at airport restaurants last year, USA Today reporters are at it again. This time, Gary Stoller has reviewed FDA documents that show violations by the catering companies that prepare the food served on the planes themselves.
Photo by Mr. Mystery via Flickr
According to Stoller, “the inspections were at U.S. facilities of two of the world’s biggest airline caterers, LSG Sky Chefs and Gate Gourmet, and another large caterer, Flying Food Group.” Between them, they provide 100 million meals to U.S. air travelers each year and run 91 separate kitchens.
The FDA reports say many facilities store food at improper temperatures, use unclean equipment and employ workers who practice poor hygiene. At some, there were cockroaches, flies, mice and other signs of inadequate pest control.
“In spite of best efforts by the FDA and industry, the situation with in-flight catered foods is disturbing, getting worse and now poses a real risk of illness and injury to tens of thousands of airline passengers on a daily basis,” says Roy Costa, a consultant and public health sanitarian.
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