WHAT DO TURTLES, PEANUT BUTTER AND MANGOES HAVE IN COMMON? (ANSWER - SALMONELLA)

Today's trivia question: what do small turles, mangoes, cantaloupes, peanut butter, tuna, ground beef, dry dog food, live chickens, hedgehogs and raw scraped ground tuna have in common?

The answer- they have all been linked to outbreaks caused by different Salmonella bacteria just in the last 3 months in the United States. No, we can't only blame our food supply. It can also be our pets. And in fact, touching your pet turtle or hedgehog or chicken may prove to be just as dangerous as eating that bad cantaloupe or ground beef!

In case you don't believe me, here are the facts, summarized from information provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - CDC. Remember that these are not the final figures for many of these outbreaks as they are still ongoing:

•Peanut Butter – 35 Salmonella-caused illnesses in 19 States, 8 hospitalizations, 0 deaths

•Hedgehogs – 14 Salmonella-caused illnesses in 6 states, 3 hospitalizations, 0 deaths.

•Mangoes – 121 Salmonella-caused illnesses in 15 states, 25 hospitalizations, 0 deaths.

•Cantaloupes – 261 Salmonella-caused illnesses in 24 states, 94 hospitalizations, 3 deaths

•Ground Beef - 46 Salmonella-caused illnesses in 9 states, 12 hospitalizations, 0 deaths

•Live Poultry - 3 outbreaks in the past 3 months, involving 5 different kinds of Salmonella – total of 276 illnesses in 11, 22 and 26 states, with a total of 58 hospitalizations and 3 deaths.

•Dry Dog Food - 49 Salmonella-caused illnesses in 20 states, with 10 hospitalizations, 0 deaths (caused by people touching the dog food - not eating it!).

•Raw Scraped Ground Tuna Product - 425 Salmonella-caused illnesses, in 28 states, 55 hospitalizations, 0 deaths.

•Small Turtles - 3 different Salmonella bacteria causing 196 illnesses in 31 states, 36 hospitalizations, 0 deaths.

To your good health,
TSF

IS BIRD FLU A FOOD SAFETY CONCERN?

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for which I have worked, has just put out a new alert on "bird flu" - correct name "Avian Influenza" . Remember how scared we were of it years ago? And then, we forgot all about it. Now apparently it is on the rise again, especially in Asia.

When I was writing The Safe Food Handbook, I debated whether to include bird flu in the discussion of risks in meat and poultry. In the end I did - because I became convinced that there could indeed be a resurgence of it and the virus could mutate. But the final section on it is very abbreviated because it is not currently considered a food risk in North America.

True, the most common way you can catch this potentially deadly kind of flu (which has about a 60% mortality rate) is not through eating undercooked chicken or other poultry or eggs. Rather, it is through handling diseased birds (including wild ones) or touching their saliva or droppings. And, even through breathing in contaminated dust. Many of the children who have caught it did so when cleaning out poultry cages - a chore I well remember having to do as a child.

But can you ever get it from food? I became very involved in researching this issue, spending weeks on it, reviewing all the global case studies and research I could find. Yes, there have been a limited number of cases recorded where people did catch it from undercooked poultry or dishes made with poultry blood. However, many more have caught it from preparing the raw poultry.

So, how worried should you be if you don't work on a poultry farm - just eat poultry? In general, I would say "not much" especially if you don't live in countries where it is presently most prevalent - Egypt, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Cambodia or Vietnam. But with bird migration and the globalization of our food supply, this could change. Occasional cases have indeed occurred elsewhere.

To my knowledge, there has been just one small - and quickly caught - outbreak of this H5N1 virus in the US - on an Idaho pheasant farm (in September 2008).

To your good health,
TSF

THOSE OTHER BACTERIA IN YOUR MEAT AND POULTRY

On the whole, the meat-eating public in America seems to have taken the recent bad news rather well - that there is likely to be dangerous Staph bacteria in about half of the meat or poultry they buy. Although, I did notice more buyers at the fish than the meat counter today at my favorite store. Maybe just my imagination. (By the way, I bought fish for dinner - wild, not farmed and it was delicious).

But everyone seems to be forgetting all the other studies of bacteria in U.S. meat and poultry and acting as though this was the first time disease-causing bacteria - or, Staph, had been found. Such other research has usually concluded that the large majority of U.S. meat carries at least some disease-causing bacteria. And naturally, the industry has always questioned the findings - just as the American Meat Institute did this month.

For instance, take the study by Consumer Reports of bacteria in chicken in late 2006. The methodology used seems to be very similar to the most recently reported one: taking samples of raw poultry sold in stores. Except this study was larger and covered 23 states. It concluded that 83 percent of the 525 chickens it tested were infected with Salmonella enteritidis, Campylobacter jejeuni, Listeria monocytogenes - or, Staphylococcus aureus (the recent headliner) bacteria.

In other words, bacteria in your meat or poultry is nothing new. Some of these bacteria - or their toxins - are much more resistant to freezing and heat than others. To my mind, what was most frightening about the recent study's findings is not the percentage of meat found to contain Staph, but that such a high percentage of the Staph - which can produce toxins that aren't affected by cooking - are resistant to many antibiotics.

TSF