Officials with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health report seeing an increase in listeriosis cases in December, prompting a warning for high-risk groups.
According to an official notice Friday (computer translated), six cases were reported this month when the country typically sees 1-2 cases a month.
Four of the six patients reported in December are from Hedmark and Oppland.
Health officials are working to identify if their is a common food source linked to the increase in cases.
Since the last update on November 8, 2018, 52 ill people from 26 states and the District of Columbia have been added to this investigation. As of December 18, 2018, 216 people infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella Reading have been reported from 38 states and the District of Columbia. A list of the states and the number of cases in each can be found on the Map of Reported Cases page.
Illnesses started on dates from November 20, 2017, to December 6, 2018. Ill people range in age from less than 1 year to 99, with a median age of 40. Fifty-five percent of ill people are female. Of 175 people with information available, 84 (48%) have been hospitalized. One death has been reported from California.
SummaryPublic Health investigated an outbreak of salmonellosis (caused by Salmonella bacteria) associated with Burien Fresh Smoothies in Burien. The exact food or drink item that caused the illnesses has not been identified.
Since August 15, 2018, eleven people from six separate meal parties reported becoming ill after consuming food and beverage from Burien Fresh Smoothies from August 6–8, 2018. Two of the ill people were hospitalized and have since recovered. There is no indication that any employees of the restaurant have had any symptoms consistent with salmonellosis.
Eight of the eleven people who got sick tested positive for Salmonella Braenderup with the same genetic fingerprint, suggesting that they have a common source of infection.
Food samples collected from the establishment tested negative for salmonella. We were not able to confirm which food or beverage caused these illnesses.
Dr Zak’s Barn Farmed Liquid Egg White sounds like 19th century hucksterism or medicine man.
According to Tony Gussin of the North Devon Gazette, nine people in the UK including one in North Devon are thought to have caught the disease after consuming Dr Zak’s Barn Farmed Liquid Egg White bottles.
The FDA, along with CDC, state and local agencies, is investigating a multistate outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 illnesses linked to romaine lettuce grown in California this fall. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) are also coordinating with U.S. agencies as they investigate a similar outbreak in Canada.
On December 13, 2018, Adam Bros. Farming, Inc., in Santa Barbara County, recalled products that may have come into contact with water from the water reservoir where the outbreak strain was found. The firm recalled red leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce and cauliflower harvested on November 27 through 30, 2018. According to the firm, cauliflower was distributed to wholesalers in the U.S. Mexico, and Canada.
The Adam Bros. recall has prompted a sub-recall by Spokane Produce Inc. of Spokane, WA. The firm recalled sandwiches and other products under the Northwest Cuisine Creations and Fresh&Local labels.
Consumers should not eat recalled products and should throw them away. Consumers also should not eat romaine from Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Barbara counties in California.
Based on discussions with producers and distributors, romaine lettuce entering the market will now be voluntarily labeled with a harvest location and a harvest date or labeled as being hydroponically- or greenhouse-grown. Romaine lettuce with the new labeling is available in stores. Consumers should look for signs in stores where labels are not an option. If signs or labels do not have this information, you should not eat or use it.
If it does have this information, we advise avoiding romaine from Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Barbara counties in California. Romaine from outside those regions need not be avoided. Additional counties may be added or subtracted as FDA traceback investigation continues.
For example, romaine lettuce harvested from areas that include, but are not limited to, the following do not appear to be related to the current outbreak:
Additionally, there is no evidence hydroponically- and greenhouse-grown romaine is related to the current outbreak, and there is, also, no recommendation to avoid romaine from these sources.
Restaurants and retailers should not serve or sell romaine from Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Barbara counties in California. Romaine from outside those regions need not be avoided. See the list above of examples of growing areas not related to the current outbreak. Retailers and restaurants should discard any recalled product.
Retailers should ensure that there is labeling with the harvest date and location on each bag of romaine, or that there is signage when labels are not an option.
Suppliers, distributors and others in the supply chain should not ship or sell romaine from Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Barbara counties in California. Romaine from outside those regions need not be. Distributors and suppliers should discard any recalled product.
FDA recommends that labels are placed on romaine lettuce entering the market to help consumers, restaurants and retailers determine that the romaine is from unaffected growing regions outside of Monterey, San Benito, or Santa Barbara counties in California.
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New Delhi (CNN)Food shared among participants in a religious ceremony is believed to have caused at least 11 deaths and put more than 90 worshipers in hospital, police in the southern Indian state of Karnataka said Saturday.
SINGAPORE: The Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) is working with importers to recall implicated frozen raw pork products from the Netherlands, after a salmonella outbreak.
The move comes after the European Commission’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed issued an alert of a foodborne outbreak of the salmonella goldcoast bacteria, said AVA on Friday (Dec 14). This outbreak is suspected to be linked to the consumption of pork products from one slaughterhouse in the Netherlands.
The authority confirmed that about 1,200 tonnes of frozen pork from the affected slaughterhouse was imported into Singapore.
The recall is ongoing, it added.
NTUC FairPrice, Singapore’s largest supermarket chain, said on Saturday that although it carries frozen pork from the Netherlands, it has not been told to recall its pork products.
“We understand the affected batches of product come from a specific slaughterhouse,” a spokesperson for the supermarket said in response to queries from Channel NewsAsia.
Listeria monocytogenes is a major cause of severe foodborne illness in the United States. But recent research at NC State indicates that not all strains of the bacteria are equally virulent.
team led by Sophia Kathariou, professor of food science and microbiology, found that certain Listeria strain groups, or clones, acquired unique genetic determinants associated with hypervirulence – unusually high propensity to cause disease – and one of these clones has been responsible for three listeriosis outbreaks since 2014, all traced to fresh produce.
“We looked in depth into especially problematic groups of Listeria, and we wanted to know if we could identify strains that are more prone to be found in human disease than others,” Kathariou says. “We examined Listeria from various sources such as food and food processing environments, human disease, other animals and the natural environment such as soil and water.”
The study will provide baseline data critical for the development of targeted strategies to reduce food safety threats associated with Listeria-contaminated produce and other ready-to-eat foods.
Kathariou describes Listeria as “really problematic” because after ingestion through contaminated food it quickly leaves the gut and enters the bloodstream, becoming an invasive organism.
In people who are at risk (pregnant women, the elderly and immunosuppressed patients) Listeria can spread to the placenta in the case of pregnancy, causing abortions and stillbirths, or to the central nervous system, causing meningitis. That’s a big part of the reason why she and her team have been working to further understand the ecology and virulence of Listeria and eventually help eliminate it from food processing environments.
Most Cracker Jack boxes come with a surprise inside. At Coors Field in Denver, the molasses-flavored popcorn and peanut snacks came with a live mouse.
A health department inspector found the mouse in a commercial-size bag of Cracker Jack at Coors Field in September 2016, along with five live cockroaches in a trap in a storage room. Two weeks earlier, inspectors had found copious amounts of mouse droppings on a kitchen floor, in food-prep trays, inside a bin of rice and amid bags of cookies that had been chewed. Dead mice were found, and another live one had been found.
Inspectors on both visits cited the Coors Field food locations with high-level health violations — just a few of thousands of such violations found at North America’s 111 NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL venues in 2016 and 2017, according to an Outside the Lines analysis of more than 16,000 routine food-safety inspection reports from local health departments. At about 28 percent of the venues, half or more of their food service outlets incurred one or more high-level violations, the type of unsanitary conditions or omissions that can pose a risk for a foodborne illness.
The violations run the gamut: chicken, shrimp and sushi festering at dangerous temperatures that can breed bacteria; employees wiping their faces with their hands and then handling food for customers; cooks sweating over food; beef blood dripping on a shelf; moldy or expired food; dirty utensils or contaminated equipment; and the presence of live cockroaches and mice. Less serious but still icky: dirty floors, fruit flies, pesky pigeons and, in one venue, beer leaking from a ceiling.
You know the symptoms well enough. The clammy chill that washes over your body, the clenching in your stomach and then, finally, the dash to the bathroom, possibly accompanied by a split-second decision about which part of your body to aim at the toilet first.
But what’s happening inside your body when you have food poisoning?
Research published today has given us a slightly clearer idea, at least for one type of bacteria.
A team from the Australian National University looked at the way the body responds to the bacteria Bacillus cereus, which can cause food poisoning and sometimes lead to serious infections elsewhere in the body, including sepsis, pneumonia and meningitis.
They found a toxin secreted by the bacteria binds directly to cells in the human body and punches holes in the cells to kill them, triggering an immune response.
Food Poisoning Journal 
FoodWorld 