Secretary of Agriculture Emphasizes Safety of U.S. Pork
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack issued a statement today emphasizing that U.S. pork products are safe and that there is no evidence that U.S. swine have been infected with the swine flu virus.
Calling trade restrictions on pork or pork products unnecessary, Vilsack said any such restrictions would be inconsistent with World Organization for Animal Health guidelines. “[I]t is not necessary to introduce specific measures for international trade in swine or their products, nor are consumers of pork products at risk of infection,” Vilsack said. The complete statement is available here.
A report in The New York Times notes that pork producers are questioning whether it is appropriate to call the virus “swine flu” given that there is no evidence of swine infection. The report states that officials in Thailand, one of the world’s largest meat exporters, have started calling the virus “Mexican flu.” An Israeli deputy health minister reportedly said Israel would follow suit to keep Jews from having to say the word “swine.”
Pork Producers Feel Effects of Swine Flu
Pork producers are feeling the effects of the swine flu as the number of reported cases of the virus increases. Stock prices for Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork processor, and Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, fell 12 percent and 9 percent today, respectively. The Wall Street Journal reports that the prices of hogs, corn, and soybeans also dropped today. About 16 percent of U.S. pork exports have been shipped to Mexico over the past year – a country where so far 149 people have died from the swine flu.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health officials have emphasized that swine flu viruses are not transmitted by food and people cannot contract the virus by eating pork or pork products. That fact alone does not seem to be enough to quell consumers’ fears. MarketWatch earlier today quoted a pork industry analyst as saying the industry wants to avoid a slip of exports and prices akin to the 2003 avian flu outbreak in Asia. Analyst Heather Jones said she believes the pork industry “needs to undertake an aggressive and widespread informational marketing campaign.”
Meanwhile, the Associated Press is reporting that Seattle-based Starbucks Corp. announced today that it is closing 10 of its Mexico City cafes in response to the swine flu outbreak and pursuant to instructions from the Mexican government.
Michigan Company Announces Frozen Pasta Recall
A Michigan maker of frozen pasta products has issued a recall for products that were distributed to seven states. Canton, Mich.-based Mucci Food Products is recalling an undetermined amount of frozen meat and poultry pasta products because the food was prepared without federal inspection.
The products were produced from May 1, 2008 to April 24, 2009 and distributed to California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. The recalled products bear the establishment number “19177” or “P-19177” inside the USDA mark of inspection and the dates “1218” to “1149” located at the bottom of the product box.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has complete details of the products subject to the recall, including images of the product labels. The USDA has not received any reports of illness as a result of consumption of the products.
FDA and CDC Warn of Salmonella in Raw Sprouts
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are recommending against eating raw alfalfa sprouts because of potential salmonella contamination.
According to the FDA, the salmonella contamination appears to be in seeds for alfalfa sprouts. As of yesterday, 31 cases of illness with Salmonella Saintpaul have been reported to the CDC. The reported cases are in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia. The FDA cautions that the number of infected people may rise because some illnesses have not yet been confirmed with laboratory testing.
The FDA believes this outbreak may be linked to an outbreak from earlier this year. Its initial investigation traces the contaminated raw alfalfa sprouts to multiple sprout growers in multiple states. Additional details are available here.
NY Senator to Propose Director of Food Safety Oversight
Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) is expected to introduce legislation today to strengthen U.S. food safety. Newsday.com is reporting that Sen. Schumer’s bill will call for a director of food safety oversight who would be a senior-level director at the Department of Commerce. The proposed director would focus exclusively on food safety.
Kellogg Co. Agrees to Settle False Advertising Claims
Cereal maker Kellogg Company has entered into a consent agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that certain Kellogg advertisements contain false or misleading statements.
At issue in the FTC’s complaint are statements from Kellogg’s advertising that eating a bowl of Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal for breakfast is clinically shown to improve kids’ attentiveness by nearly 20 percent. The complaint also challenges a separate advertising claim that eating Frosted Mini-Wheats for breakfast was clinically shown to improve children’s attentiveness by nearly 20 percent when compared to children who ate no breakfast. The complaint alleges that both of the challenged claims are false and violate the Federal Trade Commission Act.
The proposed settlement would, among other things, bar Kellogg from making comparable claims about Frosted Mini-Wheats unless the claims are true and not misleading. The consent agreement will be subject to public comment through May 19, 2009. The FTC will then decide whether to make the agreement final.
Ivar's Turkey Soup Recall
Ivar Haglund was a Seattle legend. In these parts, he was known only by his first name, the way you can refer to "Michael" when you're discussing basketball and people know you mean Michael Jordan. His food is at Sea-Tac Airport, Safeco Field and Qwest Field. From 1964 until it was discontinued for this year, he sponsored one of the largest fireworks displays in Seattle on the Fourth of July, which was called Fourth of Jul-Ivar's. Every city, I imagine, has someone like Ivar, but he was ours.
Ivar's is known for seafood. The original restaurant was called Acres of Clams, right on the waterfront. His landmark Salmon House is on Lake Union next to Dale Chihuly's house and studio; you can sometimes see Chihuly with his trademark patch walking past Ivar's.
I had no idea Ivar's made turkey soup until it was recalled.
You couldn't buy Ivar's turkey soup, more particularly "turkey-flavored egg noodle soup with turkey meat", even before it was recalled. It is only sold to institutions. I imagine it is a way of increasing revenue from by-products that might otherwise have to be thrown out or recycled.
So what was wrong with the soup?
Absolutely nothing. Bring it by and I'll happily consume it (though not expecting it to be a high-end product, given the market).
Why then the recall? Because the packaging didn't indicate that it contained milk and milk is a known allergen.
Ordinarily, I might note also that vegans don't ingest milk products either, so the mislabeling might cause an issue with them. And of course Jewish dietary laws prohibit the mixing of milk with poultry. So in both cases, there might have been mislabeling issues unrelated to milk's status as an allergen. However, vegans don't eat turkey anyway, and observant Jews only eat turkey that has been properly ritually slaughtered, as would be evidenced by a rabbi's stamp on the package, which I somehow doubt Ivar's had. Incidentally, the rabbinical kosher stamp here in Seattle incorporates a Space Needle into the K.
Update: Supreme Court Declines Review of Methylmercury Case With Potential Preemption Implications
An update to a case we’ve been following: the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit involving state-law claims over methylmercury content in canned tuna.
The Supreme Court’s order in Tri-Union Seafoods, LLC v. Fellner leaves in place the Third Circuit’s ruling that allowed the plaintiff to sue the maker of Chicken of the Sea products over methylmercury poisoning she allegedly suffered after consuming canned tuna almost exclusively for five years.
In its petition for a writ of certiorari, Tri-Union Seafoods argued that the Supreme Court should review the case to determine, among other things, whether regulatory actions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act preempt state-law claims based on a failure to warn of the risks of methylmercury in tuna products. The Supreme Court declined to review the case without comment.
Update on the Rojak Case
The rojak-related outbreak in Singapore happened only on April 3, but the Singapore health officials have already issued their official report.
The report links the illnesses to Vibrio parahaemolyticus, which in turn got into the rojak by having raw cuttlefish on an upper shelf of a refrigerator, which dripped into the gravy on the lower shelf of the refrigerator. Needless to say, this is a poor food handling practice. The stall remains closed and prosecution is likely.
The question that has not been answered is why the deaths occurred. According to the FDA, cases linked to vibrio are usually "mild or moderate" and only in rare cases even require hospitalization. Here, there were not only significant numbers of hospitalizations, but two deaths and an apparent miscarriage. The Singapore officials await the coroner's report on the deaths to find out why Ordinarily, vibrio causes death (about 7 a year in the US) only when there are other medical conditions present.
Nebraska Governor's Conference on E. Coli
The third annual Nebraska Governor’s Conference on Food Safety Issues related to E. coli is May 5-7 in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Together with Bill Marler, I have been invited to speak to agricultural stakeholders about legal issues and ramifications of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli outbreaks. In the past, the emphasis for this conference has ranged from basic science to applied science, and this year's conference will emphasize issues ranging from animal and plant management strategies to regulatory issues. Given the inevitable changes that will be coming in food safety regulation under the Obama administration, this should be a lively conference.
FDA Seeks Input on Intentional Adulteration of Products
The Food and Drug Administration has announced an effort to explore the intentional adulteration of products to increase a producer’s bottom line. So-called “economically motivated adulteration,” or EMA, is the topic of an FDA-sponsored public meeting to be held on May 1 in College Park, Maryland.
The meeting follows last year’s concerns about products tainted with melamine and other incidents of concern to public health. For purposes of the meeting, the FDA proposes to define EMA as “the fraudulent, intentional substitution or addition of a substance in a product for the purpose of increasing the apparent value of the product or reducing the cost of its production, i.e., for economic gain.” The FDA hopes to raise awareness about EMA and receive input regarding how industry and regulators can predict, prevent, and address EMA.
Full details regarding the meeting can be found in the Federal Register.
Food-Borne Illness: Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full?
The Centers for Disease Control has issued a study of the incidence of food-borne illness in ten states. The study, by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, known as "FoodNet", in general concludes that food-borne illness has not significantly either increased or decreased in the United States since 2004, after substantial gains in food safety from 1996 to 2004.
The Associated Press article on this, by Mike Stobbe, is entitled, "CDC: US food poisoning cases held steady in 2008." This is an appropriately neutral headline. What is interesting is how different media outlets have dealt with the story
Reuters, in an article by Julie Steenhuysen, uses the headline, "U.S. making little progress on food safety." She emphasizes in the lede the use in the study of the word "plateaued." Lyndsey Layton's Washington Post article is headed, "CDC Study Finds Some Food-Borne Illnesses Rising in U.S." The article's lede actually says that the rate has "remained stagnant", and nowhere in the article is any mention made of any specific diseases whose rates have risen (the article instead clumps together some where rates have either risen or remained constant, without distinguishing which are which). The UPI headline is "Little Progress in U.S. food safety", similar to the New York Times's "U.S. Food Safety No Longer Improving, Data Show".
On the rosier side, the Wall Street Journal's Jacob Goldstein blogged with the headline, "Reality Check on Foodborne Illness Rate." Goldstein takes the position that the lack of an increase given the wide publicity to certain outbreaks is an indication that things are doing well. It is not clear, however, whether Goldstein understood, as the Washington Post article reported,
The data did not include the ongoing national outbreak of salmonella illness linked to peanut products that began in late 2008 but peaked in the early months of 2009, with nearly 700 people sickened and nine killed.
So what does the report actually say?
Continue Reading...
The High Cost of Loving Rojak
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Rojak is an important Singaporean dish. To the Indonesian rudjek, basically a salad, is added (for the Indian version most popular in Singapore) yu tiao, sort of a doughnut; ju her, a cuttlefish salad; taupok, which are tofu puffs; or pei tan, which are preserved duck eggs. What is usually not added is something--still unidentified--that has sickened over a hundred Singaporeans, may have caused a spontaneous miscarriage by a 38-year old pregnant woman and killed at least two people. Unfortunately, this is exactly what has happened at Sheik Allaudin Mohideen's stall at the Geyland Serai temporary market in Singapore.
When we think of Singapore, we think of clean. We also think of an amazing health care system, which costs one-third the per capita cost of U.S. healthcare.
So when food poisoning occurs in Singapore, you get a Singaporean response. Emergency rooms in three Singapore hospitals began filling overnight Friday with people vomiting who had all eaten food from the stall. Mr. Allaudin, whose stand has been in business for over 20 years, arrived at his stand at 8am Saturday morning to find health officials who shut the stand down. The remaining stands were inspected and found clean and allowed to open.
One possible cause: Vibrio parahaemolyticus. Its presence has been confirmed in two cases, but it has not been positively identified as the cause of the illnesses and deaths.
There is one lesson to be learned already, and it comes, unfortunately, from the sad story of the woman who miscarried, who was excited to be carrying a child by her new, second husband. She had had a yearning for rojak, and her husband had brought her some on Friday from her favorite stand. According to a report in Channel NewsAsia, "She noticed the Rojak smelled unusual [but] carried on eating it."
I suspect she won't do that again. And I imagine she wishes she had followed the basic advice not to eat food that smells off.
(The image is provided by the Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/)
A Bad Week for Grapefruit
The Lancet reported last week that a "constellation of potential risk factors" had almost cost a woman in Olympia, Washington her leg. Dr. Lucinda Grande reported that the woman had started a "grapefruit diet", while taking birth control pills and having a previously undiagnosed genetic condition, while remaining immobile in her car for an extended period. The result of this "perfect storm" of bad facts was a blood clot that eventually turned her left leg purple. Not just an ordinary blood clot, according to the BBC:
When doctors examined her, an ultrasound scan confirmed the woman had a large blood clot within the veins of her left leg, which stretched from her hip down to her calf and she was deemed to be at risk of losing her leg because of gangrene.
The culprit, according to the Lancet article, is apparently the grapefruit. The woman had not previously eaten much grapefruit, but had eaten about a half pound a day for three days. Whatever the weight-loss advantages of the grapefruit diet, one of the effects of eating a lot of grapefruit is that is changes the effects of certain drugs. In this case, it may have stopped a key enzyme from breaking down the estrogen from her birth control pills. Combined with her genetic predisposition, the clot may have resulted.
It has been reported previously that grapefruit or grapefruit juice has an effect on other drugs. It apparently enhances the effects of some, like certain antihistamines, and diminshes the effects of others, like Viagra. The Mayo Clinic has a specific list: Other studies have indicated no effect despite indications from others, such as with caffeine. The evidence in many cases is inconsequential and subject to interpretation.
I happen to love grapefruit and have drunk grapefruit juice for breakfast for years. I don't drink caffeine with breakfast, but I do take over-the-counter antihistamines. My doctor has told me not to worry about any side effects. She did warn that if I took statins, we might have to rethink this. Grapefruit is a good source of Vitamin C.
Grapefruit growers should not have to worry about liability from the natural effects of grapefruit or the interactions between it and drugs. This is quite similar to the naturally occurring mercury in tuna; courts are not eager to find liability for someone growing or selling an unadulterated, legal product in a safe manner.
In other news, a horse named The Pamplemousse was scratched from the Santa Anita Derby over the weekend. He won't be competing in the Kentucky Derby, either. What does "Pamplemousse" mean in French? Grapefruit.
California Lawmakers Announce Proposed Food-Safety Reforms in Wake of Pistachio Recalls
As pistachio recalls continue to be announced in the wake of salmonella-tainted pistachios from Setton Farms, two California lawmakers this week announced legislation that is expected to strengthen food-safety standards in that state.
The bill to be introduced in the California State Assembly by Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Assemblyman Mike Feuer is expected to require detailed safety plans from food processors, periodic testing of food at California food processing facilities, and requirements for food processors to report to state authorities any positive tests for a dangerous contaminant within 24 hours.
A video of Assemblyman Mike Feuer’s announcement is available below. Meanwhile, the FDA continues to update its list of recalled products.
More on Pistachios and Setton Farms
As I predicted yesterday, the pistachio recall is affecting more products. The FDA has a nice list.
Meanwhile, the Setton Farms website, as of 1:30 pm PDT today, still has no information on the recall.
