Tag Archives: food safety

Final June 14, 2023

June 14, 2023

How safe is the food we eat?

Join us for today’s webinar at 12 p.m. ET: Why our food supply still isn’t safe from contamination as Bara Vaida talks to Bill Marler, food safety lawyer and publisher of Food Safety News, about keeping the food supply safe, what the federal government should be doing about it and story ideas for reporters.

Bill Marler has represented clients in some of the most high-profile food-borne illness cases in the United States. In 2009, he founded Food Safety News to keep the spotlight on food, health and safety reporting, as traditional news organizations were reducing and eliminating food safety coverage. Marler’s work has been profiled in the book Poisoned and in the Netflix documentary of the same name.

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More stories from AHCJ

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Upcoming Events

June 14: AHCJ Webinar: Why our food supply still isn’t safe, 12 p.m. ET

Health hazards from tainted meat, produce and other foods are an ongoing national problem, underscored by last year’s unprecedented infant formula recall. Bill Marler, food safety lawyer and publisher of Food Safety News, will look at why it’s so hard to keep the food supply safe, what the federal government should be doing about it and story ideas for national and local reporters — just in time for summer — that will keep the focus on ensuring the safety of the food we eat.

July 14: AHCJ Webinar: How journalists can put ChatGPT to good use, 1 p.m. ET

The artificial intelligence program ChatGPT has made headlines for its ability to create prose (and headlines), but how does it work? How are journalists using it? And what are the potential problems and ethical pitfalls? In this webinar, Alex Mahadevan, director of the Poynter Institute’s MediaWise digital media literacy program, will take ChatGPT for a spin, discuss what he’s learned about the new technology and answer your questions.

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Experts say new tools, tougher government oversight can reduce foodborne illnesses #ahcj13

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Placing food safety above profits, and using new regulatory power and testing techniques could help protect consumers from foodborne illnesses, three experts in food safety said today.

The experts – an executive at America’s largest organic food producer, a food safety attorney and a federal food and safety regulator – discussed the challenges of protecting consumers from illnesses such as E. coli, salmonella and listeria on a panel called, “Why is food still making us sick in the 21st century?” during Health Journalism 2013 in Boston. Continue reading →

Lacey McLaughlin is a features writer at The Daytona (Fla.) Beach News-Journal. She is attending Health Journalism 2013 on an AHCJ-Healthier Beat Fellowship, which is supported by the Leona M. & Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.

Project follows the race to make bagged salad safer

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The latest investigation by California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting’s Deborah Schoch will make you think twice before ripping into a sack of spring mix, but her work about the myriad food safety challenges posed by bagged salads examines the industry’s struggle to develop technology powerful enough to overcome the existential threat posed by E. coli and friends.

The industry has made great strides since a 2006 outbreak linked to tainted spinach, she writes, but “It’s impossible to stop all pathogens from landing on lettuce and spinach leaves.” And once they’re on the leaves, it seems as if their spread is almost inevitable. They hide in gooey biofilms and resist powerful washes.

Thousands upon thousands of salad leaves are taken to a central plant, washed together, bagged and shipped. Even if only a few leaves are tainted, harmful pathogens can spread in the wash water — the modern salad version of the old adage that one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.

“I would think of it as swimming in a swimming pool in Las Vegas with a thousand people I didn’t know,” said William Marler, a prominent Seattle-based food safety attorney.

Plenty of public and industry money has been aimed at the problem, Schoch writes. “The Center for Produce Safety at UC Davis, founded in response to the spinach outbreak as an industry-public partnership, has pumped more than $9 million into 54 research projects at 18 universities.”

Even the best research can’t reduce the risk of contaminated greens by 100%, scientists said. At Earthbound, Daniels says the ultimate goal is to achieve what scientists call a “5 log reduction,” the equivalent of pasteurizing milk. In short, if an unwashed lettuce contained 100,000 pathogens, the perfect wash system would knock off five “0s” and reduce the pathogen count to 1.

An added bonus? Schoch’s column on whether she (and the experts she talked to) feel like it’s important, or even salutary, to wash their bagged greens.

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Reporter finds the story behind food code violations

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All the time that The Muskegon Chronicle‘s Brian McVicar has been spending with his county health department’s inspection records has paid off with a slew of stories, with the most recent turning the spotlight on the thousands of food code violations area businesses have racked up in recent years.

ozPhoto by bookgrl via Flickr

For this particular story, McVicar crunched the numbers on 22,000 violations, 37 percent of them critical, logged over a four-year period. Among the most salient, he writes, were “Raw chicken and crabmeat sitting out at room temperature, food kept past its expiration date, cockroaches, mice and fruit flies living in kitchens, employees not following proper hand washing procedures.”

In addition to the typical rogue restaurants, McVicar found that a wide range of local businesses were guilty of health code violations, including “Schools, hospitals, and food stands found in places such as Michigan’s Adventure Amusement Park.”

With his broad-based, data-oriented methodology, McVicar provides a model for other local reporters looking to move beyond the typical “cherrypick the cockroach horror stories” approach that is so often found in inspection-record stories.

Stories in the series:

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.

CBC analysis finds resistant bacteria in raw chicken

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Reporters from the CBC’s “Marketplace” program visited supermarkets in Canada’s three largest cities, bought 100 samples of chicken, and sent them off to a lab for analysis. When the analysis came back, they weren’t particularly surprised to find that two-thirds of the samples were contaminated by bacteria – that’s the sort of thing you expect from raw chicken. What they didn’t expect was that every one of the bacteria strains present in those bits of raw chicken, purchased from major supermarkets and labeled with big-name brands, was resistant to at least one antibiotic. Some were resistant to as many as eight.

“This is the most worrisome study I’ve seen of its kind,” said Rick Smith, the head of Environmental Defence, a consumer advocacy group.

The culprits in this case of superbug proliferation will be all too familiar to regular Covering Health readers.

Doctors and scientists told Marketplace co-host Erica Johnson that chicken farmers are overusing antibiotics — routinely giving healthy flocks doses of amoxicillin, tetracycline, erythromycin and ceftiofur to prevent disease and to make the chickens grow bigger, faster.

The full CBC program is available for free online. The reporters have even shared a spreadsheet of their test results.

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.