Food Safety NewsDan Flynn is a Denver-based writer and editor with more than ten years of food safety experience. As a public affairs professional, he worked with government and regulatory agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. His career as a journalist included working for newspapers throughout the West, from the Black Hills to Seattle. His on-scene reporting on the collapse of the Idaho’s Teton Dam and the suicide bombing at Washington State University’s Perham Hall was carried by newspapers around the world and was recognized both times regionally by the Associated Press for Best Reporting on a Deadline. Most of the disasters he attends these days involve food illnesses.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) will close district offices in Lawrence, KS; Beltsville, MD; Minneapolis, MN, Albany, NY; and Madison, WS.The budgets cuts and consolidations, leaving 10 district offices open for business, are the FSIS contributions to planned USDA budget cuts totaling about $150 million, or about .1 percent of the giant farm and...
Tomorrow in San Diego, California cantaloupe growers will meet with scientific advisers and regulators to chart a recovery course for an industry cut down by a deadly Listeria outbreak last year that did not originate in their state.Organized by the Center for Produce Safety -- housed at the University of California Davis -- and the Produce Marketing Association, the by-invitation-only...
More E. coli testing may be just days away, or it could be well past March 5 before we know how all this is going to come out.Since the USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety, Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, announced on Sept. 13 that six more strains of pathogenic Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli would be banned from ground beef, the process...
Let this be the last word on the Iowa caucuses.Believe me, no one is happier to have this quadrennial event over. For years, we've seen presidential candidates from both parties go to Iowa and make like pigs, rolling around in the mud or doing any other trick to endear themselves with the Hawkeye caucuses. Were it not for those Iowa voters...
The 12th annual matanza, an event that's been called a pig roast with side dishes, is back on in Belen, New Mexico.The event, expected to attract 15,000 and raise scholarship money for mostly Hispanic students, was cancelled after a run-in with USDA that was blamed on "miscommunication and misinterpretation." Getting one of New Mexico's top regional cultural events back on track...
Some state changes in food safety-related laws are taking effect this week, and more are likely in the near future.State and territorial legislative bodies, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures (NCSL), last year passed an estimated 40,000 new laws, which mostly took effective on Jan. 1.Only a small percentage of those directly involved food safety---a surprise after the...
Hannah Overton, 34, is serving life without the possibility of parole at the Murray Unit, a maximum-security women's prison near Waco, Texas.Her crime: capital murder for salt poisoning by omission or failure to act.The often-crusading Texas Monthly magazine picks up in its January issue on whether life imprisonment of Hannah Overton for the death of her four-year old foster child,...
This week I was planning on writing about the emerging food safety issues that we will likely be dealing with in 2012.Then I looked at what I wrote last year and decided my ability to forecast what's going to be important is not one of my strong suits. In the (going on) three years we've been doing this, the one...
The epidemic of E. coli O104:H4 centered in Northern Germany was 2011's most important food safety story. The top story of the year involved a rare serotype of dangerous bacteria that in May and June killed at least 50 and sickened more than 4,000, including 852 who developed kidney-damaging hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS).In terms of HUS, it was the largest...
Ground beef sold to Americans is going to undergo more E. coli testing in 2012, and the historic decision to require it was 2011's 4th more important food safety story.For the first time since 1994, when the E. coli strain O157; H7 was banned from meat, six more serotypes of the pathogen were declared as adulterants by Dr. Elisabeth Hagen,...
Four outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella -- the most ever in a single year --- were 2011's 3rd most important food safety story.Since April, Salmonella Hadar, Salmonella Heidelberg and Salmonella Typhimurium infections have left a trail of victims who cannot be successfully treated with common antibiotics.The sudden frequency of these antibiotic-resistant Salmonella outbreaks in 2011 is sounding alarm bells on several...
America's most deadly incidence of foodborne illness in a century was 2011's second-most important food safety story -- the outbreak of listeriosis linked to whole cantaloupes from Jensen Farms, CO, that spread over 28 states, infecting 146 mostly elderly Americans.In its final report on the outbreak, issued Dec. 8, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said 30 had died...
A short-lived federal court case, Del Monte Fresh Produce versus the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was 2011's 5th most important food safety story.The case was notable for several reasons. Del Monte tried to get a federal judge to question the science of epidemiology and set a standard in which only the "smoking gun" of a positive genetic test...
Although the government has a new priority of reducing Salmonella Enteritidis (SE), inspectors are still finding unsanitary conditions at big egg farms, which made egg regulations 2011's 6th most important food safety story.A year after nearly 2,000 SE infections were linked to Iowa eggs and a half billion table eggs were recalled, some of the country's biggest egg producers still...
Food fright, a phenomenon mostly experienced by parents, is 2011's 8th most important food safety story. Parents in 2011 have had to wade through scary stories about the purported dangers their children face if they drink apple juice, eat rice, use a Sippy cup, or pick non-organic fruits and vegetables.It's difficult to determine the actual level of risk.Arsenic was a...
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