Food Safety Training and Current Food Poisoning Statistics

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Official statistics help us keep an eye on the state of food safety in our country. Recently, Food Safety News published a summary of a CDC report detailing the most common causes of food borne-illness. There are a few interesting findings in this report, but when breaking down this summary, we noticed two causes of illness that can be prevented or controlled with proper food safety training.

Using Food-Illness Statistics for Food Safety Training

In the statistics released from this five year study, over 100,000 confirmed cases of food poisoning were recorded. Out of these cases, 5,699 were hospitalized and food-borne illness was responsible for 145 deaths. If we break down these cases to root causes, we can begin to see patterns that we can use for effective food safety training to target common pathogens.

Chicken was the cause of 12-percent of these cases, causing us to believe that many of these situations were the result of under-cooked poultry. It is vitally important to train your staff how to handle chicken properly. There are numerous cross-contamination risks involved in processing raw chicken. Process raw chicken away from areas where ready-to-eat product is being prepared and always store raw poultry on the bottom shelf. Finally, making sure to verify that your chicken has been cooked to 165-degrees is vitally important. We recommend that you use a thermocouple thermometer when verifying the temperature of chicken. These thermometers are highly accurate and ideal for measuring thin chicken breasts and smaller pieces of meat.

The study also shows that the Norovirus was responsible for over 27,000 cases of food-borne illness. Training can go a long way towards preventing Norovirus poisonings. Teach your staff to stay home when they are sick, wash their hands properly and frequently and to avoid bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat foods. Enforcing these three easy-to-do food handling procedures greatly reduces the risk of spreading the Norovirus.

While this study points out quite a few other causes of outbreaks, proper training reduces the risk of poisoning via improperly prepared chicken or the Norovirus. Are there any other ways you use statistics to target food safety training in your facility?

MN Food Safety and National Regulatory Agency Consolidation

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At Safe Food Training, we usually avoid commenting on the political landscape unless it directly relates to MN food safety and certified food managers. However, as part of the current administration’s effort to consolidate select federal agencies, a proposal has been put forth to form a single federal food safety agency under the umbrella of the USDA.

MN Food Safety and National Regulatory Agency Consolidation

How Proposed Federal Agency Reorganization Might Affect MN Food Safety

As things currently stand, two agencies, the Food and Drug Administration and a branch of the USDA known as the Food Safety and Inspection Service, have different levels of regulatory power when it comes to food safety in our country. Since there are two agencies, we have to ask what is the difference between the two?

After some research, we’ve discovered that one of the major differences between the two agencies involves what types of products they inspect. For example, the USDA and the FSIS may be responsible for the inspection of poultry, meats and eggs while fruits and vegetables fall under FDA jurisdiction. Meats and canned products containing meat receive quite a bit of scrutiny during inspections by the USDA, but many times large quantities of non-meat canned products, such as applesauce or tomato soup, go uninspected before shipped to consumers. Some seafood and fish products belong under the jurisdiction of one agency or the other. Catfish, for example, is regulated by the USDA while other fresh-water fish are inspected by the FDA.

The line becomes more and more blurred as we delve into pre-made products. The FDA is in charge of closed-faced meat sandwiches, while FSIS regulates open-faced meat sandwiches. This means that one agency regulates frozen pizzas and the other mass-produced pre-packaged breakfast sandwiches. These varied regulations make us wonder if any products slip through this confusing inspection process and pose potential health risks to consumers.

The consolidation of federal food safety agencies is not a partisan issue, or even a new one. The Obama administration put forth a similar proposal during their tenure in the White House.

There may be pros and cons of creating one agency that encompasses all of national food safety regulations and inspection. As a certified food manager with a professional interest in MN food safety, do you feel that a single regulatory agency will help keep the raw ingredients you use safer, or do you think multiple, clearly defined agencies are necessary for extended oversight of national food safety.

The MN ServSafe Certified Food Manager and Contaminated Product

The MN ServSafe Certified Food Manager and Contaminated Product

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As a MN ServSafe certified food manager, you take care to ensure the food you serve is safe for your customers, but there may be occasions when certain things beyond your control could potentially endanger your customers. Your shipment of fresh spinach may look clean or your case of micro greens may be labeled ready to serve, but microscopic particles of E.coli and fertilizer from the soil may be hiding on the surface. Ground beef shows no signs if it has been handled by an infected production worker during packaging, and farm fresh eggs do not come with a warning flag that their surface has come into contact with salmonella. This week, we’d like to offer a few tips to help you keep items commonly contaminated during production safe for your guests.

The MN ServSafe Certified Food Manager and Contaminated Product

Image credit: Altus Air Force Base

MN ServSafe Certified Food Manager and Product Unknowingly Contaminated During Production

There are many cases where contaminated product is only discovered after an outbreak of food-borne illness has begun. A lot of outbreaks trace back to a certain ingredient’s origin rather than the food service provider who prepared the final product. So if the initial contamination comes from outside of your facility, is there anything a MN ServSafe certified food manager can do to prevent a guest from consuming contaminated product?

Even if a raw product contains undetectable pathogens, there are steps you can take to keep it safe, even if the contamination has not come to light. Here are a few pointers for commonly infected items:

  • Wash all fresh produce, even if the label reads “ready to eat”
  • Keep an eye on refrigerated storage temperatures to ensure product is always out of the danger zone
  • Always cook product to the appropriate cooking temperatures
  • Avoid loose storage of eggs

While a fresh vegetable product may be labeled as “ready to eat,” we have seen incidents where these pre-washed products have caused food-borne illnesses. A few seconds of prevention will always be worth the effort.

We’ve also seen facilities that unpack whole eggs and store them loose in the same bin. While this may not be a health violation, it does increase the risk that salmonella on the shells or from broken egg can be passed from one egg to another and multiply. With recent outbreaks of salmonella from shell eggs, we feel that taking steps to prevent eggs from coming into contact with each other could help prevent the spread of illness in the event your eggs have arrived unknowingly contaminated.

Do you take extra precautions with ingredients that are commonly recalled, or do you take extra precautions with every ingredient you bring in?

Changes to the Minnesota Food Code

Proposed Changes to the Minnesota Food Code and the Certified Food Manager

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For the first time since 1998, the Minnesota Department of Health is proposing changes to the state’s food code. While some of these changes to the Minnesota food Code are merely an altering of the terminology used throughout, there are a few proposed changes that certified food managers need to pay attention to.

Changes to the Minnesota Food Code

 

Proposed Changes to the Minnesota Food Code

The Department of Health published a list of 20 proposed major changes to the Minnesota food code. Right off the bat, they explain that there will be many changes concerning the language of the actual text. For example, two of the biggest changes include altering the title of Certified Food Manager to Certified Food Production Manager and changing “potentially hazardous foods” to “time/temperature control for safety foods.” They are also removing “critical” and “non-critical” categories with different levels of priorities for food-safety risks.

This list of 20 items includes some procedures that change the way certified food managers handle day-to-day operations. We will go into more depth on specific items in future articles once these changes come closer to implementation, but some of the highlights that stand out to us include:

  • The addition and clarification of rules for serving a “highly-susceptible” population such as children and the elderly
  • Hot-holding temperatures lower to 135 degrees and the time certain foods can held under 70 degrees increases to 6 hours
  • Changes will establish a non-continuous cooking procedure (with approval) for raw foods that have been cooking for under 60 minutes
  • Fingernail brushes will no longer be required at employee hand-washing stations
  • Several hygiene procedures are addressed, such as creating vomit cleanup protocols, requiring handwashing procedure signage and restrictions concerning working with wounds

These are just a few changes that stood out to us, and we are currently awaiting word from the Department of Health to clarify many of the other changes in the code. We will be sure to cover anything we learn as soon as the information becomes available.

After reading the brief synopsis from the Department of Health, do you see any issues you’d like us to delve deeper into in the future?