Food safety
revere | June 15, 2007Spring harvest is over so it is almost Tomato Safety Initiative time. Seems like just yesterday it was Leafy Greens Safety Initiative. I was younger then. My salad days. But now it's Tomato Initiative:
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will begin a Tomato Safety Initiative in the Summer of 2007. The Initiative is a collaborative effort between FDA and the state health and agriculture departments in Virginia and Florida, in cooperation with several universities and members of the produce industry.
FDA developed the Tomato Safety Initiative in response to recurring Salmonella outbreaks…
revere | June 14, 2007A newspaper in Taiwan newspaper is telling its readers the Chinese government reports 13% of its chili powder based products failed Chinese safety tests:
The products came from 38 companies in 12 provinces and municipalities, including Beijing and Shanghai, the report said without detailing if any of the chilli was exported.
"The products produced by small firms have lots of safety problems, while those from large- and middle-sized ones have all passed the safety tests," it quoted the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine as saying.
Many of the tested…
revere | May 15, 2007News on the benzene-in-softdrinks front (for background see here, here, here, here, here and the Environmental Working Group site). The dominoes are starting to fall and the first was a big one, Coca Cola:
Consumer lawyers and The Coca-Cola Company announced today a legal settlement involving Fanta Pineapple and Vault Zero products.
"We are very pleased to join with The Coca-Cola Company in announcing this settlement," said Boston attorney Andrew Rainer and Florida attorney and Northeastern University Law and Policy Professor Tim Howard, who represented the consumers.
Although the FDA and…
revere | May 12, 2007The problem of melamine in the food chain continues to be discussed, so we thought we'd do a follow-up of our earlier post. The mechanism whereby melamine, or melamine plus some other factor, or something else entirely is the cause of pet deaths remains unclear. The latest theory is that a co-precipitate of melamine and cyanuric acid might be the cause of the apparent renal failure in cats and dogs who ate pet food contaminated with melamine and like compounds. Here's what I have been able to make out at this point.
To recap, melamine is a nitrogen-rich chemical added surreptitiously to…
terrasig | May 9, 2007Via the Knight Science Journalism Tracker at MIT, I was directed to one of the best-written articles on melamine contamination of pet food and animal feed.
David Brown at the Washington Post is the guilty party whose article appeared Monday. Brown does a terrific job of explaining how the modestly toxic substance, melamine, can cause renal failure when combined with cyanuric acid. Not widely reported in the press is the fact that cyanuric acid, another nitrogen-rich compound, has also been found to contaminate some wheat gluten and wheat flour from China.
For example, here is the most…
revere | May 1, 2007Lots of us knew melamine as a heat resistant plastic polymer found in kitchen items, like plastic plates. Despite its reputation for heat resistance it would melt in an oven, although it doesn't catch fire. It is used in a lot of other places: floor tiles, white boards, fabrics, filters, even the cleaning product called Magic Eraser. Now we know it is also used by crooked Chinese food manufacturers to make it appear their products have more protein than they really do. This works because melamine is loaded with nitrogen, also a key atom in the building blocks of proteins, amino acids.
Here…
revere | April 6, 2007The US only requires meatpackers to test a small fraction of their cows for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), otherwise known as Mad Cow Disease. Literally. They cannot test a larger fraction. Does that sound stupid? It sounded stupid to a federal judge, too:
The federal government must allow meatpackers to test their animals for mad cow disease, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
Kansas meatpacker Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all its cattle for the disease, a move that larger companies feared. If Creekstone is allowed to advertise its meat as tested and safe, that could…
revere | March 15, 2007The problem of H5N1 contaminated food keeps coming up (see here and here). First it was, don't worry, stomach acid will kill it. Then it was, don't worry, you can't be infected through the intestinal tract. Then it was, don't worry, proper cooking kills the virus. The last of these is correct but isn't a reason not to worry. Somebody has to "properly cook" the food, so during preparation and food handling there is a risk of contact with possibly infectious material. Then there is "ready-to-eat" foods (like from the deli) which aren't cooked. Then there is contamination of animal foods that…
revere | March 13, 2007Food safety again. Peanut butter, spinach, lettuce, cantaloupes, sprouts. That's just produce. There's the meat problem, too, from E. coli O157 and Salmonella to Mad Cow. Food production now involves long chains, often mixing ingredients from many sources and countries. Regulation of the food supply, now beyond the control of the individual consumer, needs to catch up. It's not likely to make much progress this way:
The government has new rules for preventing food poisoning in fresh-cut produce, but companies don't have to follow them.
[snip]
In the new, voluntary rules, announced Monday by…
revere | March 12, 2007If anything should signal the dire shape of the US food safety problem it's FDA's announcement last week that it is extending the warning over Salmonella contaminated Peter Pan peanut butter to products bought as far back as October 2004. FDA warnings about Peter Pan peanut butter have been steadily pushed back from May 2006 to December 2005 and now to October 2004.
ConAgra makes Peter Pan peanut butter products at a single plant in Sylveter, Georgia. It is also marketed by Wal-Mart as Great Value Peanut Butter with lot number 2111. The product recall for the Peter Pan and Wal-Mart Great…
revere | March 6, 2007While finishing drafting a series of posts on how Tamiflu resistant virus might spread as a result of intense use for influenza control, Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway posted this to remind us that drug resistant organisms spread for reasons much less useful than trying to stop people from dying. Like treating cows so they can be killed later and we can eat them and make money for agribusiness:
The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that…
revere | March 1, 2007The new public health site, The Pump Handle (TPH), continues to produce top notch posts. The latest is by David Michaels, Professor and Associate Chairman in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (and former Assistant Secretary for Heath at the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration). It's about the dietary supplement industry, or as I prefer to call it, the quackery in a capsule biz. One of their favorite products is the anti-oxidant cancer preventative scam. There is quite a body of…
revere | February 27, 2007A follow up (of sorts) to yesterday's post on the "new" strategy for preventing foodborne illness at the US Department of Agriculture. This one's about the new policy at the Food and Drug Administration:
The federal agency that's been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.
The cuts by the Food and Drug Administration come despite a barrage of high-profile food recalls.
"We have a food safety crisis on the horizon," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food…
revere | February 26, 2007I must really be losing it, because I just can't seem to understand the latest announcements from the the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), a regulatory division of the US Department of Agriculture. I've read it a bunch of times and I still don't understand it. I'm not saying it's bad (whatever it is). I just wonder what it is. Enough about my confusion. Let's see if you are confused, too.
The set-up is pretty easy. We've had a spate of food safety problems, the latest being a multistate outbreak of Salmonella traced to commercial peanut butter (Peter Pan and generic brands sold in high…
revere | February 10, 2007There is no bird flu in the UK. The biosecurity is too good for that to happen. OK. There is bird flu in the UK but it is well confined. It must have gotten there from wild birds. Biosecurity is too good for anything else. OK. It might have gotten to the UK on a truck from Hungary where there is bird flu in poultry. But it's well confined. OK. It's not well confined, but just affects turkeys in one small shed on one farm. OK. It somehow got out of that shed and infected birds in three other sheds on that farm. But it's confined to that farm. OK. It's possible it got loose into wild animals.…
revere | February 5, 2007The big news is that the UK has its first large outbreak of H5N1 in commercial poultry, a turkey farm in Suffolk. Retailers there are already moving to reassure the public. Although this is the UK's largest turkey farm, large chains have been quick to say they do not sell its birds. The Talking Points have been ready for some time. You have nothing to fear but fear itself. It is perfectly safe to eat an infected bird if you cook it properly.
The US poultry industry is also ready, although they have assured us they are safe because they have excellent biosecurity. Just like the UK farms…
revere | January 25, 2007Stories like this really interest me, so a special thanks to Jody Lanard who sent it along. It's about those gloves they wear while making you a sandwich at the deli or a fast food joint. You know the ones. The disposable plastic kind. Disposable so you can change them often and throw them away. The kind that prevent the hands of the person behind the counter making direct contact with the food. Those gloves.
From the Journal of Food Protection Volume 68, Number 1 p. 187-190, a paper by Lynch et al.:
A study was conducted to determine whether the levels of selected microorganisms differed on…
revere | December 12, 2006The sanitary revolution of the 19th century began with providing clean water and food to urban residents. Piped water supplies brought an essential, health giving commondity to city dwellers starting around the beginning of the 19th century (i.e., the 1800s) and the result was an improvement in overall health and longevity. But the same mechanism that brought a healthy substance efficiently to large numbers of people could also be the means to distribute poison to the community and the periodic outbreaks of waterborne diseases was the result. A water supply is a long lever and small changes…
terrasig | December 11, 2006Among the many duties charged to the US FDA is the safety of veterinary feed. Therefore, equestrian enthusiasts should take note of the following warning from the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine on natural contamination of certain corn products with a toxin produced by an endophytic fungus of the Fusarium genus:
FDA Warns Horse Owners About Fumonisins in Horse Feed
Each year, a number of horses die from eating corn or corn byproducts containing fumonisins. Fumonisins are a group of toxins produced by an endophytic mold found within the corn kernel. Typically, fumonisins are produced…
revere | November 27, 2006It's been a while since we visited the FDA's benzene-in-soft-drinks failure (see here, here, here and here). No time like the present.
Serious questions remain over how America?s food safety watchdog handled the presence of benzene residues in soft drinks, a senior ex-official has said, after tests showed some drinks still contained the chemical 15 years after the industry agreed to cut it.
The source told BeverageDaily.com it was "embarrassing" the Food and Drug Administration had failed to eradicate benzene residues from all drinks.
His comments come as newly released meeting memos show at…