The Food Safety And Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013
The purpose of this consultation is to seek comments on the current draft of the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013, due to come into force in December 2013, noting that for the first time that the provisions for enforcement of food safety and food hygiene have been consolidated in England
FSA – CONSULTATION SUMMARY PAGE
Posted in Food Hygiene, Food Safety, Food Standards Agency, Research
The FSA has recently outlined a refreshed strategy to reduce the number of people getting ill from campylobacter. The strategy will be discussed by the FSA Board at its meeting in Aberdeen on Wednesday, 11 September.
Campylobacter is the most common cause of food poisoning in the UK. It is considered to be responsible for about 460,000 cases of food poisoning, 22,000 hospitalisations and 110 deaths each year and a significant proportion of these cases come from poultry. An FSA survey of chicken on sale in the UK (2007/8) indicated that 65% of chicken on sale in shops was contaminated with campylobacter.
Reducing cases of campylobacter is the FSA’s top food safety priority but monitoring carried out by the FSA shows there is no evidence of change in the proportion of the most highly contaminated chickens since 2008.
A new app out of Ireland is set to make the task of maintaining adequate food hygiene and safety standards easier than ever.
Developed by environmental health graduates and colleagues Emer Murphy and Michael O’Rourke, ‘Safe Food Healthy Business’ features both written information and tutorials that business owners can leverage to guarantee the health and safety of their customers.
“We developed the app due to the increased number of food businesses closing because of poor food hygiene standards in Ireland,” said Murphy.
The idea for the app was conceived in August 2012, and it was launched in February after six months of information and software development.
The app offers:
A veterinarian and farm consultant doubts the recent Fonterra botulism scare was caused by a dirty pipe, and says he is sitting on material that will embarrass the dairy giant further.
Matamata veterinarian and farm performance consultant Frank Rowson says Fonterra should be tracing the source of the Clostridium botulinum bacterium back to farms or their own water supply.
He doubts Clostridium botulinum was caused by an old pipe at Fonterra’s Hautapu plant and said it had to get in there in the first place.
The Fonterra botulism contamination scare has claimed its first scalp – that of Gary Romano, the dairy industry veteran left to publicly front the crisis in New Zealand.
Romano has resigned as managing director of NZ Milk Products, the dairy company’s manufacturing operations division, effective immediately.
His departure from New Zealand’s biggest company was announced this evening in a four-paragraph statement which said chief executive Theo Spierings had accepted his resignation. Spierings will temporarily assume Romano’s day-to-day duties.
An interesting new video of fungal cells has been made.
M. Roper, A. Simonin, P. C. Hickey, A. Leeder, N. L. Glass. Nuclear dynamics in a fungal chimera. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1220842110
The objective of this study was to identify ingredients that inhibit Listeria monocytogenes in natural, organic, or clean-label ready-to-eat meat and poultry products. Fourteen ingredients were screened in uncured (no-nitrate-or-nitrite-added), traditional-cured (156 ppm of purified sodium nitrite), cultured (alternative cured, natural nitrate source, and Staphylococcus carnosus), or preconverted (alternative cured, natural nitrite source) turkey slurries. Slurries were cooked, cooled, inoculated to yield 3 log CFU/ml L. monocytogenes, stored at 4°C, and tested weekly for 4 weeks. Three antimicrobial ingredients, 1.5 % vinegar-lemon-cherry powder blend, 2.5 % buffered vinegar, and 3.0 % cultured sugar-vinegar blend, were incorporated into alternative-cured ham and uncured roast beef and deli-style turkey breast. Controls included all three meat products without antimicrobial ingredients and a traditional-cured ham with 2.8 % sodium lactate-diacetate. Cooked, sliced products were inoculated with 3 log CFU/g L. monocytogenes, vacuum packed, and stored at 4 or 7°C, for up to 12 weeks. For control products without antimicrobial agents stored at 4°C, a 2-log L. monocytogenes increase was observed at 2 weeks for ham and turkey and at 4 weeks for roast beef. Growth (>1-log increase) in the sodium lactate-diacetate was delayed until week 6. Compared with the control, the addition of either vinegar-lemon-cherry powder blend or buffered vinegar delayed L. monocytogenes growth for an additional 2 weeks, while the addition of cultured sugar-vinegar blend delayed growth for an additional 4 weeks for both ham and turkey. The greatest L. monocytogenes delay was observed in roast beef containing any of the three antimicrobial ingredients, with no growth detected through 12 weeks at 4°C for all the treatments. As expected, L. monocytogenes grew substantially faster in products stored at 7°C than at 4°C. These data suggest that antimicrobial ingredients from a natural source can enhance the safety of ready-to-eat meat and poultry products, but their efficacy is improved in products containing nitrite and with lower moisture and pH.
The aim of this study was to obtain data from refrigerated ready-to-eat seafood products at retail in Spain (young eels, crabstick and smoked salmon), regarding prevalence and levels of Listeria monocytogenes, storage temperatures and the impact of transport conditions (type of bag) on the temperature of the product. The one-year surveillance period was carried out according to the EC Regulation No. 2073/2005, taking 5 units/batch and analyzing 250 samples following ISO 11290-1/A1 and ISO 11290-2/A methodologies. Low prevalence of L. monocytogenes was observed in surimi products, while 4.8% of smoked salmon samples were positive for Listeria with low levels (<10 cfu/g) and uneven pathogen distribution. A single company was responsible for 80% of the positive lots. All purchased products showed values higher than 4 °C at retail and an average increase of 2.5 °C or up to 6.2 °C was recorded when isothermal or plastic shopping bags were used for transport, respectively. To avoid noncompliance of the Food Safety Objective for L. monocytogenes in seafood RTE products more efforts from all stakeholders are needed, with special attention so as to improve control and maintenance of refrigerators at retail and to enhance consumer education regarding food safety practices.
Dear Interested Party 30 July 2013
Norovirus in shellfish – an update on status of EU negotiations
Following my letter dated 08 May 2013 I would like to provide you with an update on the EU discussion on norovirus controls in shellfish.
The EU Commission gathered views from Member States at a Working Group meeting on 27th June 2013. Following detailed and constructive discussions, during which many different views were expressed, it was agreed that no limits should be set at this stage due to the limitations of the current methodology and the gaps in current knowledge about norovirus. However, it was agreed that there is a need to address food safety risks associated with norovirus in raw shellfish and the Commission, together with Member States, will continue to explore risk management options, identifying areas where harmonised practices could be introduced. There was also support for a harmonised EU baseline study, as recommended by EFSA, to help fill gaps in the data that have been identified.
The FSA is continuing to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of alternative approaches which could be applied, such as buffer zones and alert systems to facilitate active management of harvesting. I would welcome any evidence based information and/or suggestions in the coming months to inform these considerations.
Botulism is a rare, life-threatening paralytic illness caused by neurotoxins produced by an anaerobic, gram-positive, spore-forming bacterium, Clostridium botulinum. Unlike Clostridium perfringens, which requires the ingestion of large numbers of viable cells to cause symptoms, the symptoms of botulism are caused by the ingestion of highly toxic, soluble exotoxins produced by C. botulinum while growing in foods.
Posted in Bacteria, Clostridium botulinum, Food Hygiene, Food Inspections, Food Micro Blog, Food Microbiology, Food Safety, Food Safety Alert, Food Testing, Hygiene, Microbiology, Pathogen, Recall, Research
Tagged bacterium clostridium botulinum, clostridium perfringens, exotoxins, symptoms of botulism, viable cells
Gastro-intestinal and foodborne infections: general outbreaks of infectious intestinal disease reported to HPS in the first quarter of 2013.
While adequate, statistically designed sampling plans should be used whenever feasible, inference about the presence of pathogens in food occasionally has to be made based on smaller numbers of samples. To help the interpretation of such results, we reviewed the impact of small sample sizes on pathogen detection and prevalence estimation. In particular, we evaluated four situations commonly encountered in practice. The first two examples evaluate the combined impact of sample size and pathogen prevalence (i.e., fraction of contaminated food items in a given lot) on pathogen detection and prevalence estimation. The latter two examples extend the previous example to consider the impact of pathogen concentration and imperfect test sensitivity. The provided examples highlight the difficulties of making inference based on small numbers of samples, and emphasize the importance of using appropriate statistical sampling designs whenever possible.
FoodWorld 