Posts from the "Latest News" category
AU: Food Poisoning Quiz
ABC Health & Wellbeing: Recent events highlight that we can all be vulnerable to food poisoning so test your knowledge of the causes of food poisoning and how you can prevent getting sick in the first place.
Click here to access the ABC Health & Wellbeing 7 Question Quiz.
US: New Food Safety Protocols Published for Reusable Grocery Containers
Reusable plastic containers used to transport fruits and vegetables have proliferated across the grocery industry in recent years despite recent warnings from university research studies suggesting the containers may harbor and spread harmful pathogens over time.
Responding to critics, the Reusable Packaging Association (RPA) has issued comprehensive, science-based protocols for the use of grocery containers for produce, while at the same time maintaining that no documented food safety issues have arisen related to their use.
The guidelines cover the best practices for washing and handling reusable plastic containers (RPCs), as well as outlines for regular microbiological testing. For growers, key food safety practices should include wrapping pallets of RPCs, transporting RPCs in covered trailers, and storing RPCs under cover, the RPA said. The association also asks retailers to handle and load RPC pallets like any other packaged commodity.
Click here to read the full article from Food safety News.
AU: Chinese fraudsters rebrand citrus with Australian labels
The skyrocketing demand and reputation of Australian citrus in the Chinese market is giving fraudsters more incentives to fake Aussie fruit. Citrus Australia said Chinese counterfeiters had been rebranding Chinese fruit with Australian labels to collect higher prices and sales.
It posed a major food safety threat, but citrus growers said this was not a new scandal, and there was not much they could do. The rise was driven largely by the "sweet, safe and healthy" profile of Aussie citrus, but that was being stolen to raise the value of Chinese fruit. Some of the fruit was even dipped in dye to enhance its colour.
Click here to read the full article from ABC Rural.
AU: Going nuts: Why are Australians allergic to everything?
Two generations ago, EpiPens were unheard of and taking peanut butter to school didn’t provoke hostile debate between parents. Now around one in 50 Australian children has a peanut allergy. A 2013 study by a team of researchers led by Katie Allen found that one in 10 children aged 12 months living in Melbourne had a food allergy – the highest incidence of food allergy ever reported in the world. Hospital admissions in Australia for severe allergic reactions for anaphylaxis due to food allergy in children aged four and under have jumped five-fold in the past 10 years.
We live in an age of food panic – carb panic, sugar panic and, more recently, berries-from-China panic – so it’s easy to think that with food allergy the enemy is food, especially foods such as cow’s milk, peanuts, tree nuts, seafood, sesame, soy, fish and wheat that are most likely to trigger allergy. But the problem isn’t food…
Click here to read the full article at Good Food.
NZ: New Zealand Food Safety Science and Research Centre Newsletter No. 2
New Zealand Food Safety Science and Research Centre: With the help of the industry participants, we have completed the first round of sector workshops. These were aimed at understanding food safety research needs from an industry perspective. Five workshops were held (meat and dairy in Wellington, horticulture and processing and manufacturing in Auckland and seafood in Nelson), attended by over 60 representatives from industry as well as MPI, MBIE and research partners.
In addition to the sector workshops we have been continuing to engage with other key stakeholders in trans-Tasman organisations, including Food Standards Australia New Zealand (http://www.foodstandards.govt.nz) and the Fresh Produce Safety Centre Australia and New Zealand (https://fpsc-anz.com/), to make sure our work is aligned with their activities.
Click here to read the full newsletter from Prof Nigel French, NZFSSRC Interim Director.
AU: Price, fat and appearance … are more important than country of origin, production methods or other labelling claims
Shoppers may claim they are interested in how food is produced and its effect on the planet, but in the end it is looks and cost that matter most. Research from the University of Adelaide shows there are two standards to the way people shop.
The first is called their "public values", which is where they talk about things like being hormone free, carbon neutral, low food miles and ethically farmed.
The second are their "private values" – how much does something cost? Does it look good? How much fat is in it? Will my children be safe eating it?
Dr Wendy Umberger, from the University of Adelaide, told the ABARES Outlook Conference in Canberra that fewer than one in 20 shoppers back up their public values at the checkout.
Click here to read the full article from ABC News.
EU: Journal Dedicates Issue to Climate Change and Food Safety
Food Research International has published a special issue dedicated to the impacts of climate change on food safety.
The collection of research examined issues such as pesticide use, parasite transmission, mycotoxin production on tomatoes, paralytic shellfish poisoning, Vibrio parahaemolyticus, and the relationship between flooding and leafy greens contamination.
Click here to read the article in Food Safety News.
Abstracts of the various papers are available here.
AU: Suspected salmonella outbreak: 250 food poisoning cases linked to principals’ conference in Brisbane
ABC News: A total of 250 people are now sick after a suspected salmonella outbreak at a school principals’ conference in Brisbane last week, Queensland Health says.
About 1,200 delegates gathered for the conference on February 26 and 27 at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre (BCEC).
Chief health officer Dr Jeannette Young said 250 have now reported gastro-intestinal symptoms, up from 175 on Tuesday.
So far 24 have been hospitalised.
Queensland Heath said the conference had a varied menu, and authorities were trying to work out precisely what people ate.
The usual causes for salmonella infections are poorly cooked meat, poultry and eggs.
BCEC suspended its supply of fresh eggs and poultry products until the results of the Queensland Health investigation were known.
Click here to read the full story at the ABC news website
US: Genome Trakr Is A Food Safety And Traceability Game Changer
Food safety may have entered a new era with this new, exciting advancement guaranteed to elevate the safety of food and lead to bigger and better discoveries and technology.
The Genome Trakr data base will make it possible to trace a foodborne pathogen back to its source more quickly and with more accuracy than the methods currently in place. Welch predicts this pathogen detection network will “transform” food safety.
Its goal is to isolate individual pathogens collected from environmental and food samples, and then compare them to pathogens collected from ill patients. This database will not only more quickly and accurately provide an assessment for the size and location of a foodborne outbreak —the process can potentially identify the single ingredient in a particular recipe that is causing the illnesses. This makes it possible to move more expediently to remove the contaminated food from commerce, meaning fewer illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Click here to read the full article on Food Online.
AU: Onions imported from US suspected of bringing deadly strain of superbug to Australia
Jane Hansen / The Daily Telgraph writes: The highly virulent strain of Clostridium difficile (C-diff), a spore-forming bacterium which causes severe diarrhoea and is resistant to many antibiotics, swept through Europe and the US before arriving in Australia in 2009.
Thomas Riley, a professor of microbiology at the University of Western Australia, said Australian hospitals experienced a dramatic increase in the C-diff strain known as 244 towards the end of 2011.
The bug, which is now the number one cause of hospital-related diarrhoea, poses the biggest risk in hospital settings where high antibiotic use allows it to flourish in compromised patients.
Currently 150 plus patients a month are infected in NSW hospitals.
Click here to read the full story from News Corp.