Showing posts with label HACCP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HACCP. Show all posts
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Don't put Cleaning Chemicals in Food Containers!
It's happened again! According to Doug Powell's Barfblog Daily, a woman was poisoned and nearly died after drinking iced tea containing cleaning chemicals at a suburban Salt Lake City restaurant.
Apparently, a worker at the restaurant put cleaning lye (probably sodium hydroxide) into a sugar bag. A second worker put the material into an iced tea dispenser. The restaurant chain claims that this is the first time in 73 years that this has happened.
Indeed, if the restaurant chain is using any kind of food safety programme, this should never have happened, and as Doug says, "It has never happened before" is no defence. One of the basic principles of Good Catering Practice and HACCP is not to put non-food materials into food containers, and to store cleaning chemicals away from food.
There are many incidences of accidental poisoning occurring because of mis-identification of chemicals. All could have been avoided by using proper containers and labelling them clearly with the contents.
Of course, this principle doesn't just apply to restaurants - it is just as important at home. Ayesha tells me that the kitchen is her preserve, and she knows what is in the glass jars in the pantry. On some occasions when I have had to fend for myself, deciding on the identity of the white powders in the identical unlabelled glass jars has taxed my scientific abilities! Icing sugar and cornflower are subtly different, and custard powder is slightly yellow with a vanilla odour. Salt and castor sugar look the same but taste different. These are trivial examples, but in the high pressure of a restaurant kitchen, unlabelled materials, or worse, mislabelled materials are unlikely to be identified and will find their way into foods, sometimes with serious consequences.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Colonel Mustard, in the Dining Room, with the Sprouts
The last couple of weeks have been like the old game of Cluedo, with everyone running round accusing various participant of foul play and trying to find the culprit. It would be amusing if it were not so deadly serious.
It now appears that the outbreak of Escherichia coli O104:H4 in Germany, which has now reached 16 countries, was probably caused by fresh vegetable sprouts grown in a farm in Uelzen, near Hamburg. Unfortunately, cucumbers from Spain, lettuces and tomatoes also had the finger pointed almost indiscriminately at them. That caused huge financial losses for the suppliers and had knock-on effects on vegetable sales throughout Europe. In some ways, I can sympathise with the authorities and the media. This is one of the largest and most serious outbreaks of food poisoning ever and finding the source as quickly as possibly was imperative.
At the time of writing, there have been 3517 cases of EHEC infection, resulting in an unprecedented 839 cases of Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome and 39 deaths. The rate of new case reporting has slowed, but it is likely that more people will become ill before this is all over.
This shows just how difficult it is to pinpoint the source of an outbreak of food poisoning in our highly integrated and widespread food supply chain. The sprout farm purchased seeds for sprouting from both European and Asian countries. The seeds were sprouted, using what seems to be standard and well designed conditions, and the 18 different sprout mixtures were sent to many different points in Germany.
The German authorities have been accused of being in disarray and having no proper response prepared. There may be some truth in this - if the responsibility for food safety is spread across many local authorities and agencies, setting up a coordinated and timely response is fraught with difficulty. But it is generally recognised that epidemiological investigations may have a success rate as low as 33% in tracking down the source of infections and the chance of success falls as time goes on.
At times like this, we often hear calls for increased testing of products before they are released onto the market. Good try, but no cigar! For a number of reasons, microbiological testing to assure safety of food is just not possible. Testing is expensive and time consuming. In some cases, the testing period exceeds the shelf life of the product. A simple statistical calculation shows that when contamination levels are low, the number of samples that must be tested to get even a 95% chance of detection is prohibitively large and even then, 5% of contaminated samples will be accepted as safe. Testing for E. coli O157:H7 would not have picked up the German strain and even proposed widened testing for "The Big Six" Entero-Haemorrhagic E. coli strains would have missed this one.
Regulators must be strong in the coming months. Microbiological testing gives only a retrospective view and a poor one at that. Imposing increased mandatory testing will not assure the safety of foods.
The only way we can ensure the safety of our food supply is to introduce controlled lethal steps in processing, such as heating or irradiation, or to put in place rigorous control of every potentially hazardous ingredient, process step, processing facility and distribution chain. This is particularly important with high risk products such as sprouts. What every food producer and distributor needs is a Hazard Analysis based Food Safety Programme of Risk Management.
It now appears that the outbreak of Escherichia coli O104:H4 in Germany, which has now reached 16 countries, was probably caused by fresh vegetable sprouts grown in a farm in Uelzen, near Hamburg. Unfortunately, cucumbers from Spain, lettuces and tomatoes also had the finger pointed almost indiscriminately at them. That caused huge financial losses for the suppliers and had knock-on effects on vegetable sales throughout Europe. In some ways, I can sympathise with the authorities and the media. This is one of the largest and most serious outbreaks of food poisoning ever and finding the source as quickly as possibly was imperative.
At the time of writing, there have been 3517 cases of EHEC infection, resulting in an unprecedented 839 cases of Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome and 39 deaths. The rate of new case reporting has slowed, but it is likely that more people will become ill before this is all over.
This shows just how difficult it is to pinpoint the source of an outbreak of food poisoning in our highly integrated and widespread food supply chain. The sprout farm purchased seeds for sprouting from both European and Asian countries. The seeds were sprouted, using what seems to be standard and well designed conditions, and the 18 different sprout mixtures were sent to many different points in Germany.
The German authorities have been accused of being in disarray and having no proper response prepared. There may be some truth in this - if the responsibility for food safety is spread across many local authorities and agencies, setting up a coordinated and timely response is fraught with difficulty. But it is generally recognised that epidemiological investigations may have a success rate as low as 33% in tracking down the source of infections and the chance of success falls as time goes on.
At times like this, we often hear calls for increased testing of products before they are released onto the market. Good try, but no cigar! For a number of reasons, microbiological testing to assure safety of food is just not possible. Testing is expensive and time consuming. In some cases, the testing period exceeds the shelf life of the product. A simple statistical calculation shows that when contamination levels are low, the number of samples that must be tested to get even a 95% chance of detection is prohibitively large and even then, 5% of contaminated samples will be accepted as safe. Testing for E. coli O157:H7 would not have picked up the German strain and even proposed widened testing for "The Big Six" Entero-Haemorrhagic E. coli strains would have missed this one.
Regulators must be strong in the coming months. Microbiological testing gives only a retrospective view and a poor one at that. Imposing increased mandatory testing will not assure the safety of foods.
The only way we can ensure the safety of our food supply is to introduce controlled lethal steps in processing, such as heating or irradiation, or to put in place rigorous control of every potentially hazardous ingredient, process step, processing facility and distribution chain. This is particularly important with high risk products such as sprouts. What every food producer and distributor needs is a Hazard Analysis based Food Safety Programme of Risk Management.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make her drink
Another saying from my childhood, translated from the original Yorkshire dialect into English!
What triggered this? Well, HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) has been around since 1959, when NASA attempted to ensure that food fed to astronauts would not make them ill, or cause injury. The possibility of early astronauts, trapped in orbit and vomiting into their helmets, could not be contemplated. Originally developed as a microbiological safety programme by the US Natick laboratory and later by The Pillsbury Company, the Modes of Failure programme eventually covered all aspects of astronaut food, not just microbiological hazards. By 1971, the HACCP system was published and documented in the USA and by 1985, the National Academy of Science recommended the use of the system. Incidentally, I began teaching HACCP to food technology undergraduates in New Zealand in 1978.
Recently, Roy Costa posted an article on Food Safety and Environmental Health Blog:
in which he pointed out that retailers demand food safety management systems from suppliers. The end of the supply chain - institutions and food service organisations - are also required to have HACCP-based food safety plans in place, but schools seem to have dropped beneath the regulatory radar: few have implemented the requirements and they are not being pursued by the local health departments. Costa suggests that this is because the schools and health departments are both part of the counties, which claim that this is an unfunded Federal Government mandate.
Politics aside, this problem of lack of implementation of HACCP-based food safety plans is not restricted to schools and food service outlets.
Some years ago, I wrote an HACCP-based food safety programme for a local food manufacturer. This is not something I will do again; as a consultant, I was an outsider and though I had a close familiarity with the factory, I don't think that the production manager wanted to do more than "tick the box" that they had a programme.
About a year after I wrote the programme, one of my students got a job at the factory. "What do you think of the HACCP programme?" I asked. "What programme?" he replied, "I never saw it". The next time I visited the factory, I mentioned this to the manager. He said "Oh, I'm sure it's around somewhere, probably on the shelf in my office".
So, after that roundabout story, we come back to the title of this posting. The factory complied with the regulations - it had an HACCP-based food safety programme, so any auditor could be shown the document. But just having a nicely bound document on the shelf is only the beginning. The plan must actually be implemented in the factory and reviewed on a regular basis. This manager wasn't even sure where it was, his staff didn't know of its existence and there is no doubt in my mind that he never reviewed it.
What triggered this? Well, HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) has been around since 1959, when NASA attempted to ensure that food fed to astronauts would not make them ill, or cause injury. The possibility of early astronauts, trapped in orbit and vomiting into their helmets, could not be contemplated. Originally developed as a microbiological safety programme by the US Natick laboratory and later by The Pillsbury Company, the Modes of Failure programme eventually covered all aspects of astronaut food, not just microbiological hazards. By 1971, the HACCP system was published and documented in the USA and by 1985, the National Academy of Science recommended the use of the system. Incidentally, I began teaching HACCP to food technology undergraduates in New Zealand in 1978.
Recently, Roy Costa posted an article on Food Safety and Environmental Health Blog:
in which he pointed out that retailers demand food safety management systems from suppliers. The end of the supply chain - institutions and food service organisations - are also required to have HACCP-based food safety plans in place, but schools seem to have dropped beneath the regulatory radar: few have implemented the requirements and they are not being pursued by the local health departments. Costa suggests that this is because the schools and health departments are both part of the counties, which claim that this is an unfunded Federal Government mandate.
Politics aside, this problem of lack of implementation of HACCP-based food safety plans is not restricted to schools and food service outlets.
Some years ago, I wrote an HACCP-based food safety programme for a local food manufacturer. This is not something I will do again; as a consultant, I was an outsider and though I had a close familiarity with the factory, I don't think that the production manager wanted to do more than "tick the box" that they had a programme.
About a year after I wrote the programme, one of my students got a job at the factory. "What do you think of the HACCP programme?" I asked. "What programme?" he replied, "I never saw it". The next time I visited the factory, I mentioned this to the manager. He said "Oh, I'm sure it's around somewhere, probably on the shelf in my office".
So, after that roundabout story, we come back to the title of this posting. The factory complied with the regulations - it had an HACCP-based food safety programme, so any auditor could be shown the document. But just having a nicely bound document on the shelf is only the beginning. The plan must actually be implemented in the factory and reviewed on a regular basis. This manager wasn't even sure where it was, his staff didn't know of its existence and there is no doubt in my mind that he never reviewed it.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
To test, or not to test – that is the question (with apologies to Shakespeare).
I had intended to write my next blog article on the latest information on Campylobacter in New Zealand. However, in view of the continuing Salmonella-in-eggs problem in the USA and yet another recall in New York State of ground beef owing to the detection of Salmonella, I decided to write about product testing and the alternatives.
It had been suggested that the feed was the source of Salmonella that infected the Wright County Egg Co. Reporting in the Wall Street Journal last week, Alicia Mundy and Bill Tomson wrote that the Food and Drug Administration had failed to detect Salmonella at the premises of the suppliers of the feed:
Officials warned that the investigation was continuing, but from my point of view, the fact that Salmonella was detected in the Wright County Egg Co. farm(s) on 426 occasions from 2008 to present is a pointer to the farms at least having some responsibility.
Testing of products, be they eggs, steaks or lettuces, can potentially detect Salmonella and other pathogenic bacteria, such as Escherichia coli O157:H7, allowing us to reject the lot. Unfortunately, testing doesn’t guarantee that we will detect Salmonella. In all sampling plans that I am aware of, detection of Salmonella in the sample is cause for rejection. Under the ICMSF 2-class attribute sampling plan nomenclature, ‘n’ is the number of samples to be taken from a lot, ‘c’ is the number of failures permitted and ‘m’ is the threshold above which the sample fails. Thus for Salmonella testing, c = 0 and m = 0. What number of samples should we take?
Statistics show us that when the frequency of contamination in the lot is 1 in 1000, setting c = 0 we would need to examine 2995 samples to achieve 95% confidence in detecting the defective sample; that is, we would still have a 5% chance of accepting a contaminated lot.
Put another way, extensive testing is prohibitively expensive, and many sampling plans call for only 5 samples to be taken from a lot. Even with 40% of the lot being defective, we would still accept the lot about 8% of the time.
So, testing seems a bit unreliable. Is there a better way? Well, yes there is. It’s called HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) and it came out of the space programme, developed initially as the Modes of Failure Programme by the Natick laboratory and then by The Pilsbury Corporation. Without going into detail on this occasion, it involves looking at the ingredients, the process and the processing facilities and looking for every way the food might become unsafe. These aspects are eliminated where possible and those hazards that cannot be eliminated are controlled by keeping tight control over Critical Control Points, such as cooking operations.
The hazard analysis can then be used to develop a Food Safety Programme for the factory. The factory runs the process according to this programme and monitors the CCPs and keeps accurate records of the entire process. There is then no need for end product testing – if the process is under control, safe food will be produced. Regulatory monitoring becomes a matter of checking the records and auditing the programme on a regular basis. This is a really good system and in a perfect world, it would work perfectly.
The problem with this approach is that the regulators need to have enough staff to do the inspections and the companies running the factory have to obey the rules, keep accurate records and come clean the minute something goes wrong. Companies must want to produce safe food, rather than just make money.
It is very sad that in many of the recent food poisoning outbreaks, it has eventually been shown that companies falsified records, while supposedly independent inspections were at best inadequate and at worst negligent and corrupt.
In this environment, the regulators need more staff, better legislation and more powers to shut down unsafe operations. I have watched in horror as one outbreak after another has resulted in severe injury to some consumers, massive food recalls and in some cases permanent shutdown of factories and wondered, “Where will it all end? Will there be any food manufacturers left in business? Will testing requirements become so onerous that food becomes ridiculously expensive?”
I don’t think there is an easy solution, but until the cowboys have all gone, I see no alternative to better legislation, more truly independent inspection, more frequent testing of product and full traceability of raw materials and finished products.
I don’t think there is an easy solution, but until the cowboys have all gone, I see no alternative to better legislation, more truly independent inspection, more frequent testing of product and full traceability of raw materials and finished products.
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