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this is a discussion post so it doesnt need to be too longAfter reading the article posted this week, please post your thoughts. How could Jack-in-the-Box have prevented this tragedy? Several parents and other adults ate the exact same burgers – why did only children die and/or suffer severe consequences?
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Mother’s mission: Making food safe
Roni Austin with one of the poster boards she displays when she urges highschool students to get involved in community affairs.
( / U-T)
By JOHN WILKENS
AUG. 21, 2011
6 AM
FOOD SAFETY FACTS
The number of E. coli 0157 cases — the pathogen that killed Lauren Beth Rudolph —
has dropped 44 percent in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, according to FoodNet, which
tracks foodborne diseases.
Other infections have decreased, too: Shigella, down 57 percent; Yersinia, 52 percent;
Listeria, 38 percent; and Campylobacter, 27 percent.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention credits better food-handling,
inspections and outbreak for the downturn, along with increased consumer awareness.
But cases of Salmonella, the most common foodborne disease, have gone up 3
percent. Vibrio, a rare infection caused by eating contaminated seafood or getting
seawater in an open wound, went up 115 percent.
In all, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 48 million
Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases
every year.
Every year, some 3,000 people die in this country from bad food. Salmonella in
peanut butter. E. coli in strawberries. Many of the victims are children, and their
parents, unmoored by grief, reach for an anchor.
Sometimes they call Roni Austin.
Almost 20 years ago, a few days before Christmas, Austin’s 6-year-old daughter,
Lauren, went to a Jack In the Box in Carlsbad and ate a hamburger. She got sick, was
rushed to a hospital and never came home.
Lauren was the first to die in a multi-state E. coli outbreak that claimed the lives of
three other children and sickened 700 people. She was buried in a bejeweled dress her
parents had bought her for Christmas — her father’s Purple Heart pinned to the dress,
her mother’s wedding gown underneath her in the casket.
Like many people, Austin had never heard of E. coli before. At first bewildered, and
then angry, Austin soon became the face of food-safety reform in California and
beyond.
She cofounded a nonprofit advocacy group, Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), and
pushed successfully for legislation requiring E. coli to be a reportable illness, so
outbreaks could be traced and stopped sooner. She sued Jack in the Box, winning a
confidential settlement.
Nervous initially to be in the spotlight, she learned not to fear politicians or powerful
lobbyists for the beef and fast-food industries. “What are they going to do, kill my
daughter?” she said. “Already done that.”
She was in the Oval Office when President Clinton signed the most sweeping changes
to federal food-inspection law in 90 years. She was in Sacramento when a state
measure named after her daughter passed, mandating minimum cooking temperatures
in restaurants.
“I’ve seen a lot of people who are hit with tragedies, accidents or injustices, and they
have all kinds of ways of dealing with it,” said writer Jeff Benedict, whose new book,
“Poisoned,” chronicles the E. coli outbreak and its aftermath.
“A lot of people just get bitter and the rest of their lives are kind of ruined by being on
the wrong end of something bad that happened. Then there are people like Roni who
try to make something good come of it.”
Austin, 64, is not sure she had much choice. “When Lauren got sick, I promised her
she would be OK and she wasn’t,” she said.
Sitting in her Encinitas home office on a recent afternoon, she picked up a framed
picture. Drawn by Lauren, it shows a girl being hugged by a grown-up. “Wen I am
cozy I am in my moms arms,” the caption reads.
“If you found this a few days after your daughter died, wouldn’t you have to do
something?” Austin asked. “Wouldn’t you?”
Fix-it attitude
Twenty years is a long time to be a pallbearer. “You can only handle so much
sorrow,” Austin said.
Every time she thinks she’s handed off the baton to others, though, something brings
her back. A phone call from a parent who has lost a child to a food-borne illness. A
news story about another outbreak. An event at La Costa Heights Elementary School,
where redheaded Lauren was in first grade and where a memorial garden was planted
in her honor.
“What happens to Roni is the same thing that happens to me,” said Nancy Donley, the
president of STOP and a Chicago real estate agent who also lost her son to E. coli.
“You can’t not pay attention. It compels her to speak up and get involved again.”
FOOD SAFETY TIPS
While you can’t control how food is handled on the farm or in a restaurant, there are a
few simple precautions to reduce the risk of foodborne diseases:
• CLEAN: Wash produce by rinsing fresh fruits and vegetables in running tap water to
remove visible dirt and grime. Remove and discard the outermost leaves of a head of
lettuce or cabbage. Wash your hands with soap and water before preparing food and
again after handling raw meat.
• SEPARATE: Avoid cross-contaminating foods by washing hands, utensils, and
cutting boards after they have been in contact with raw meat or poultry and before
they touch another food. Put cooked meat on a clean platter, rather back on one that
held the raw meat.
• COOK: meat, poultry, and eggs thoroughly. Use a thermometer to measure the
internal temperature of meat to be sure that it is cooked sufficiently to kill bacteria:
145°F for whole meats, 160°F for ground meats, and 165°F for all poultry. Eggs
should be cooked until the yolk is firm.
• CHILL: Bacteria can grow quickly at room temperature, so refrigerate leftover foods
if they are not going to be eaten within 4 hours.
SOURCE: cdc.gov/foodsafety
Each January, Austin talks to seniors at Rancho Buena Vista High School in Vista.
She brings poster boards filled with newspaper clippings and government
proclamations. She talks about her daughter, but the message is broader. Get involved,
she tells the students. Vote. “You are the solution to your problems.”
She inherited that attitude from her father, she said. When she was growing up in the
San Francisco Bay area, he always told her it wasn’t OK to complain about something
unless she was willing to work at fixing it.
Fixing food safety meant putting her career as an interior designer on hold and flying
10 times to Washington DC to testify. It meant going to Sacramento to speak a halfdozen times.
She’s not fond of the legislative process. So many meetings. So many fingers in the
pie, trying to get theirs. So many people back East “who think everybody out here in
California just fell off the surfboard.”
Asked what she’s proudest of in making her way through all that, she quipped, “That I
didn’t kill anyone.”
Then she said this: “That I didn’t give up. I made Lauren a promise that I couldn’t
keep, so the next best thing was trying to put standards and practices in place that
would prevent another family from having to go through what we went through.”
Her already-troubled marriage to Lauren’s father, Dick Rudolph, fell apart after their
daughter died. (She’s been remarried for 12 years to Donn Austin, a computer
specialist with a local hotel company.) Her son, Michael, who was 11 when his sister
died, “found out way too early about how hard the world can be,” she added.
Michael, now 30, is a musician and piano teacher who works in a barbecue restaurant.
He said he grew up being careful about what he eats, and he mostly steers clear of fast
food.
He’s proud of what his mom has done in the aftermath of tragedy. “It ends up helping
a lot of people,” he said.
Painful reminders
In a way, talking about Lauren all the time — introducing her to new people — helps
keep her daughter alive. But the details are wrenching.
Benedict’s book opens with a chapter about Lauren. It recounts how Austin went into
her daughter’s bedroom on Christmas Eve, when Lauren was in the hospital, and
found this note to Santa: “I don’t feel so good. Please make me better for Christmas.”
It recounts how the parents had to decide whether to keep Lauren on life-support, and
then once they decided, how Austin painted her daughter’s toenails with pink polish
one last time.
And it recounts how, having been told initially that Lauren had died
from flu complications, they learned the truth in a newspaper story.
“Doing the kind of work Roni has done is healing,” Donley said, “but you’re also
picking open the scabs.”
Austin’s pain is never far below the surface. She still chokes up when she talks about
Lauren. She cried when she saw that Benedict had dedicated his book to her and her
daughter.
What she tries to do is remember happier times, like the day Lauren was born, Feb.
18. On the 18th of every month, she has flowers put on her daughter’s grave.
In the face of death, a celebration of life.
Lecture: Food Safety
The globalization of the food chain has led to food being able to be transported great
distances via airplanes with refrigeration. Of course, this has been positive news in
terms of being able to feed people in rural areas and, also, in terms of being able to
preserve food for much longer periods of time. However, one huge negative has been
the effect on food safety. It is much harder now to prevent foodborne illness since food
is travelling great distances from where it was originally produced. For example, when
you go to Ralph’s and buy your groceries, are you aware that some of the food you are
buying came from other countries or from meat processing plants thousands of miles
away?
One term that is important to visualize how food travels through our society is the “Farm
to Table” concept. In the year 1800, imagine how you would cook steak for your family.
You would get on your horse and ride a short distance to your local butcher who would
sell you beef from a cow that was slaughtered that day (no refrigeration). So the “Farm
to Table” chain was very short. Today, however, it is likely that the steak you buy at the
market came from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. And, you more than likely
will not cook it that day. Instead, you will probably refrigerate it and eat it
days/weeks/months later. So, today the “Farm to Table” chain is much longer and more
complicated. So, thinking of food safety, was the steak you purchased at Ralph’s
properly refrigerated for the entire time it was in the food chain? What was the
temperature of the meat on the airplane? How about the railroad car and/or semi
(truck)? What about the temperature of your refrigerator? You can see how much more
difficult it is today to control for all the variables that can cause foodborne illness.
How serious of a problem is foodborne illness in the United States?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 1 in 6 Americans
get a foodborne illness every year! They also estimate 128,000 people are hospitalized
and 3,000 die every year. Clearly foodborne illness is a serious problem in the United
States in the year 2016.
What are the top 5 pathogens causing Foodborne Illness?
1. Norovirus (58%)
2. Salmonella (11%)
3. Clostridium perfringens (10%)
4. Campylobacter (9%)
5. Staphylococcus aureus (3%)
What are the top 5 pathogens causing hospitalizations?
1. Salmonella
2. Norovirus
3. Campylobacter
4. Toxoplasma gondii
5. E. coli 0157:H7
What are the top 5 pathogens causing deaths from foodborne illness?
1. Salmonella
2. Toxoplasma gondii
3. Listeria monocytogenes
4. Norovirus
5. Campylobacter
Looking at the data above, it is interesting to note that even though 58% of all foodborne
illnesses (in the U.S.) are caused by Norovirus (over 26 million people), many more
people die from other pathogens? Why? Well, as we discussed earlier, the terms
“pathogenicity” and “virulence” come into play. Norovirus is not as virulent as some of
the other pathogens.
What is a “Potentially Hazardous Food” (PHF)?
1. Food that requires time or temperature control to limit pathogenic microorganism growth or toxin formation.
2. Not a PHF if the water activity is less than 0.85 (Aw < 0.85)
3. Not a PHF if the pH is less than 4.6 (pH < 4.6)
4. Not a PHF if exempted by microbial challenge studies
So, what exactly is “water activity”? It is a measure of the moisture content of the food.
For example, when you buy rice at the store it is NOT a potentially hazardous food and
it is unrefrigerated, sitting on a shelf, right? Now, when you take the rice home and
cook it - suddenly it is a potentially hazardous food and you can get sick if you don’t
refrigerate it or keep it hot before eating, right? What has changed? The ONLY THING
that changed was the water activity! Simply put, bacteria need a certain amount of
water and nutrients to be able to grow; without the right amount of water content they
can’t survive and you will not get sick (e.g., dry rice you buy at the store).
What about pH? The same thing: bacteria can’t survive and/or reproduce if the food is
too acidic (pH below 4.6). So, now you know why some cheeses are not refrigerated
when you buy them at the store…..like the Kraft “Cheese and Crackers on a red stick”.
Why is this cheese unrefrigerated? Well, Kraft has manipulated either the pH or water
activity (or both) to prohibit the growth of microorganisms. The MREs (Meal Ready to
Eat) that the military gives its soldiers are also manipulated to make the food
nonpotentially hazardous.
What are some examples of Potentially Hazardous Foods?
1. Cooked Rice
2. Cut Melons
3. Beef
4. Poultry
5. Milk
What is the difference between a Foodborne Illness infection and intoxication?
An infection is usually the result of a pathogen replicating inside the human body to
large enough numbers to cause you to get sick. An intoxication is caused by eating
food that has toxins either on it or inside of it. For example, Staphylococcus aureus
bacteria are capable of causing both an infection and an intoxication. This bacteria is
extremely common in the nasal passages of people; about 25% of the population has
this bacteria living inside their nasal passages. So, let’s say one of these people
sneezes on some cooked, white rice that is not held at the proper temperature (below
41 or above 140 degrees). What will happen? The bacteria will grow very rapidly
because of the improper temperature and after a few hours their numbers will be large
enough to cause someone to get an infection. The person will start feeling symptoms
usually after 1 to 3 days.
Now, let’s take another example: let’s say you and your roommate are studying for a
Final Exam and order a pizza from Pizza Hut. You both enjoy 4 slices of pizza and
leave the rest out on the table while you study. When you both go to bed at 2am you
forget to put it in the fridge. The next morning you wake up and see the pizza and think
of this class and decide to be “safe” and put a piece of pizza in the microwave for
several minutes to kill all the possible bacteria on it (assume your roommate has
Staphylococcus bacteria in her nasal cavity and sneezed on the pizza the night before
when you went to the restroom). You watch the pizza’s cheese bubble in the microwave
so you are sure the pizza is now safe to have for breakfast before your Final Exam. You
eat the pizza and get sick two hours later! What happened? The Staphylococcus
bacteria produced a toxin overnight and once the toxin is produced no amount of
cooking/reheating will inactivate the toxin.
What are some examples of Foodborne Illness Infections?
1. Salmonella
2. Campylobacter
3. Listeria monocytogenes
4. Hepatitis A
5. Brucellosis “Undulant fever”
What are some examples of Foodborne Illness Intoxications?
1. Staphylococcus aureus
2. Clostridium botulinum (botulism)
3. Clostridium perfringens
What are some examples of Foodborne Illnesses caused by poisonous plants or
animals?
1. Snake Root
2. Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning
3. Ciguatera (fish feeding in red tides)
Here are some real world examples of these types of illnesses:
Campylobacter example:
May, 2013 raw milk outbreak in Pennsylvania
- Dairy was found to be in compliance with all rules
- 6 confirmed cases, 2 probable
- 4 were children
Same dairy had a large outbreak in 2012: 148 cases
Listeria example
August, 2011: Jensen Farms in Colorado
- Cantaloupe growing farm
- Killed 33 and sickened at least 147 in 28 states
- Both brothers were arrested by Federal Authorities
Cause:
- Probably a contaminated truck that was used to transport cattle
Hepatitis A example
Townsend Farms in Oregon
- 162 people affected, 71 hospitalized
- 1-84 years of age
- Pomegranate seeds imported from Turkey
Brucellosis example
North Carolina
- 18 confirmed cases
- All patients were exposed to the kill floor
- NIOSH went in and tested all 156 workers and 30 were +
Staphylococcus aureus example
Staph found in Chicago bakery
- 70 confirmed cases from one event alone in Wisconsin
- Recall affected 22 states
- Failure to clean and sanitize food prep surfaces
- Even after company was given a chance to clean and sanitize surfaces,
samples revealed S. aureus still present
Clostridium botulinum examples
Backyard BBQ in Oregon
- Improper home canning
- People ingested the toxins produced by the bacteria
- Symptoms developed in less than 24 hours
- Blurred vision, droopy eyelids, slurred speech, muscle weakness, etc.
Arizona prison
- Homemade Hooch/Pruno (alcohol)
- 8 people hospitalized
- Fermented baked potatoes
Clostridium perfringens example
Louisiana State Mental Hospital
- 42 residents, 12 staff members sickened with abdominal cramps, vomiting and
diarrhea
- Within 24 hours 3 people had died
- 3 patients were taking psych meds that made their bodies less able to fight off
the disease
- Chicken was cooked 24 hours prior to serving and improperly cooled
Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning examples
- Recent muscle harvesting closure along Pacific Ocean along California/Oregon
border
- Domoic Acid is a naturally occurring toxin produced by phytoplankton or algae.
- Not destroyed by cooking
- 3 recent cases in Alaska
- Tingling in mouth, tongue and lips within hours of eating contaminated shellfish
- One patient intubated – muscle paralysis can occur
Ciguatera example
- Bioaccumulation in food chain: the ciguatoxin is naturally produced by algae
and works its way up the food chain. Larger, predatory fish are usually implicated in
these outbreaks.
- Recent outbreak in Queens, New York – Barracuda fish sold at a fish market.
- One entire family experienced tingling, numbness, nausea, vomiting and
dizziness.
- All visited the emergency room within a few hours after eating the contaminated
fish.
O.K., now that we have learned about different types of Foodborne Illness. How do we
prevent these types of illnesses?
1. Temperature Danger Zone: 41-140
-We always want to keep potentially hazardous foods (PHFs) below 41 or above
140 degrees F. to prevent the rapid growth of bacteria.
2. Proper cooking:
- 145 degrees for 15 sec: eggs, fish
- 155 degrees for 15 sec ground meat, ratites, injected meats
- 165 degrees for 15 sec: poultry, ground poultry
3. Rapid Cooling:
- Break down food into shallow, metal pans (increase surface area:volume)
- Adding ice as an ingredient
- Using ice paddles to stir soups/etc.
- Repeated stirring, until center and sides same temp.
4. Proper Thawing
- In refrigerator
- Under cold running water
5. Cross Contamination
- store ready to eat foods (i.e., salads) above raw meats in refrigerator.
When I was a Health Inspector in Long Beach I can’t tell you how many times I did a
restaurant inspection and saw raw meats dripping blood down onto salads and other
ready to eat foods! This is how some vegetarians get E coli infections (they never quite
understand how they got it).
- properly sanitize cutting boards in between raw and ready to eat foods.
- properly wash hands when cooking so your hands don’t cross contaminate. For
example, if you touch a raw hamburger patty don’t touch the bun/lettuce/etc. until after
you wash your hands with SOAP and vigorous scrubbing!
- don’t put your cooked steak back into the pan where the marinade juices are
7. Handwashing
- About 100 degrees
- Vigorously scrubbing of hands and arms for 15 seconds
- Particular attention to areas under the nails
When should you wash your hands? A) after using the restroom and any time they
come in contact with food/equipment that can contaminate them.
8. Sanitization
- 100 ppm of chlorine for 30 seconds: at home you can make this concentration
of chlorine by adding 1 cap (of a gallon container) and mixing it with 1 gallon of water.
So, you can do this in your kitchen sink and dip your cutting boards/knives/etc. for 30
seconds.
- 171 degrees for 30 seconds (a dishwasher)
- 200 ppm Quat Ammonia for 1 minute (most restaurants use this)
9. Food From An Approved Source
- In order to prevent foodborne illness you have to make sure your food is
purchased from an approved source (a licensed facility – not from the trunk of a car – in
Long Beach I personally witnessed some restaurants buying chickens from someone’s
trunk!)
10. Miscellaneous
- Eliminate vermin (i.e., cockroaches/rats/mice/etc.)
- Food employees that are sick or have diarrhea should be sent home
immediately.
- Food employees should take an 8-hour food safety course and retain the
certification annually.
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