Editor’s note: This column and profiles of the 16 food safety champions (four not pictured above) was originally published by Quality Assurance magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. To read profiles of the individual food safety professionals referenced in the column, please click here.
When revolutionary epidemiologist William Keene started working for the Oregon Public Health Division in 1990, he also started collecting packaging from recalled products, restaurant menus, and other elements from his outbreak investigations and displaying them in his office. “These exhibits commemorate why we do these investigations and the kind of
Continue Reading Oregon Outbreak Museum Memorializes What We’ve Learned About Foodborne Illness
Epidemiologist Bill Keene was posthumously awarded the 2014 NSF Food Safety Leadership Lifetime Achievement Award on Thursday at the Food Safety Summit in Baltimore, MD. Keene was a senior epidemiologist for the Oregon Public Health Division (OPHD) whose work involved breakthroughs on investigations into major foodborne illness outbreaks, including the
Continue Reading NSF Food Safety Leadership Awards Presented at Food Safety Summit
When Dr. Bill Keene gave a presentation on the dangers of raw milk at a past meeting of the American Veterinary Medical Association, even the raw milk advocates on the opposing side of the panel couldn’t help but laugh and revel in the Oregon senior state epidemiologist’s dry humor. “When
Continue Reading Keene Remembered for Commitment to Public Health, Unconventional Style
A complaint lodged by Del Monte Fresh Produce against an Oregon Public Health epidemiologist has been dismissed by the state’s Government Ethics Commission.
The Oregonian’s Lynne Terry reported Monday that the commission considers allegations of misuse of public office for personal gain, so the produce company’s criticism of senior epidemiologist
Continue Reading Oregon Dismisses Complaint Against Epidemiologist
OK, so it ain’t the Louvre, and it ain’t the Smithsonian. The National Outbreak Museum has no galleries, no gift store, no guides.
And it most certainly has no restaurant.
In fact, the Outbreak Museum, on the 7th floor of a state office building in Portland, Oregon, may be the
Continue Reading Recall Relics at the 'National Outbreak Museum'
Early in December, a nurse in Roseburg, Oregon, contacted the state Public Health Division to report that two women, both in their 60s, had been sickened by toxic E. coli O157:H7. That report immediately got the attention of Dr. William Keene, Oregon’s senior epidemiologist.
Keene and others launched an intensive
