Monthly Archives: November 2017

RASFF-shigatoxin-producing Escherichia coli (stx1 + /25g) in frozen boneless beef from Brazil in the Netherlands

RASFF-shigatoxin-producing Escherichia coli (stx2+ /25g) in frozen boneless beef from Brazil in the Netherlands

RASFF-shigatoxin-producing Escherichia coli (O145, stx1+, stx2+ /25g) in frozen beef from Uruguay in Spain

RASFF-shigatoxin-producing Escherichia coli (O145; stx2+ /25g) in chilled beef from Brazil in Spain

Food Poisoning Bulletin

Many holiday meals, especially those served to large groups, can be risky because of a bacteria called Clostridium perfringens. This bacteria causes almost 1 million cases of food poisoning every year in the United States. And these illnesses are preventable. Foodsafety.gov has information on how to prevent these outbreaks.

CFIA

Recall details

Ottawa, November 24, 2017 – The food recall warning issued on November 17, 2017 has been updated to include additional product information. This additional information was identified during the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s (CFIA) food safety investigation.

International House of Caviar Ltd. is recalling AKI brand Chum Salmon Caviar from the marketplace because it may permit the growth of Clostridium botulinum. Consumers should not consume the recalled product described below.

FSA 

Image CDC

Today the top nine retailers have published their results on campylobacter contamination in UK produced fresh whole chickens (covering July to September 2017) in line with a FSA protocol agreed with them.  The FSA welcomes this publication which follows our announcement on 21 September 2017 explaining changes to the survey in light of the progress made by major retailers and producers in taking action to reduce campylobacter levels in their chickens.

For all results released by the top nine retailers today, the percentage of chickens containing more than 1000 colony forming units per gram (cfu/g) lie in the range 0 to 9%. This is broadly consistent with results released by the FSA on October 18 2017, from our own retail survey findings. The FSA results, covering April to July 2017, showed all nine retailers to lie in the range 0 to 10.2%, with a weighted mean of 4.7%. The equivalent figure for the top nine retailers in the year August 2016 to July 2017 (Year 3 of the retail survey) was 5.6%, while the figure for the overall UK market (including smaller retailers and butchers) was 6.5%. This was down from 19.4% in the first full year of the FSA retail survey (February 2014 to February 2015).

Heather Hancock, Chairman of the Food Standards Agency, said: ‘I am pleased to see the major retailers publish these important figures about their progress in tackling campylobacter in chicken.

‘This is a very positive step towards transparency and openness in the food sector, and one which reinforces public confidence in food. We welcome the ongoing reduction in contamination levels that these results indicate, and the resulting benefits to public health that retailers and processors have helped deliver over the last few years.

‘We are grateful to the British Retail Consortium and the retailers for working together to coordinate the publication of their results.

‘The FSA will continue to monitor the retailer results so that we can be assured that the significant progress made so far by this part of the food sector is maintained. Our resources will now be focused on smaller processors and outlets, to drive down contamination levels across the rest of the industry.’

Food Standards – ANZ 

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The Daily Star

Around 62 percent of water available to households of the Rohingya camps in Cox’s bazar is contaminated with the possibility of having high levels of E.coli, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Unicef spokesperson Christophe Boulierac came up with this data on Tuesday at the regular press briefing in Geneva, Unicef reported.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) is working with authorities in Bangladesh to urgently investigate “high levels of E.coli contamination” in water drawn from wells inside the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.

“We are also concerned over an increase in cases of acute watery diarrhoea (AWD), which have included several deaths,” he added.

Between 25 August and November 11 this year, a total of 36,096 AWD cases were reported, including 10 related deaths — 42 percent or 15,206 of which were children under the age of five.

Science News 

Eggs, long condemned for making raw cookie dough a forbidden pleasure, can stop taking all the blame. There’s another reason to resist the sweet uncooked temptation: flour.

The seemingly innocuous pantry staple can harbor strains of E. coli bacteria that make people sick. And, while not a particularly common source of foodborne illness, flour has been implicated in two E. coli outbreaks in the United States and Canada in the last two years.

Pinning down tainted flour as the source of the U.S. outbreak, which sickened 63 people between December 2015 and September 2016, was trickier than the average food poisoning investigation, researchers recount November 22 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

RASFF-shigatoxin-producing Escherichia coli (stx1+; O103; O145 /25g) in frozen dog food from the United Kingdom in Finland

Journal of Food Protection 

Customer demand for convenient food products has led to an increased production of prepackaged and ready-to-eat food products. Most of these products rely mainly on surface disinfection and other traditional approaches to ensure shelf life and safety. Novel processing techniques, such as cold plasma, are currently being investigated to enhance the safety and shelf life of prepacked foods. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of cold plasma corona discharge on the inactivation of Salmonella on prepackaged, tomato-and-lettuce mixed salads. Two different inoculation methods were evaluated to address cross-contamination of Salmonella from cherry tomatoes to lettuce and vice versa. In separate studies, a sample of either cherry tomatoes (55 g) or romaine lettuce (10 g) was inoculated with a Salmonella cocktail (6.93 ± 0.99 log CFU/mL), placed into a commercial polyethylene terephthalate plastic container, and thoroughly mixed together with its noninoculated counterpart. Mixed salads were allowed to dry in a biosafety cabinet for 1 h. Samples were treated with 35 kV cold plasma corona discharge inside plastic containers for 3 min. Samples were stomached and serially diluted in buffered peptone water and then were plated onto aerobic plate count Petrifilm and incubated for 18 h at 37°C. When lettuce was the inoculated counterpart, log kill of Salmonella was significantly greater on tomatoes (0.75 log CFU/g) compared with lettuce (0.34 log CFU/g) (P = 0.0001). Salmonella was reduced on mixed salad only when lettuce was the inoculated counterpart (0.29 log CFU/g) (P = 0.002). Cold plasma can kill Salmonella in a prepackaged mixed salad, with efficacy dependent on the nature of contamination, direction of transfer, and the surface topography of the contaminated commodity.

Food Poisoning Bulletin 

An outbreak of Salmonella food poisoning associated with Miller’s Guild restaurant in Seattle, Washington is being investigated by the King County Public Health Department. Six people from four separate parties got sick after eating there on dates that range from August 15, 2017 to November 3, 2017.