Sainsbury's is recalling all of its own-brand watercress due to an E.coli outbreak that has made 18 people ill. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) said the supermarket giant was also recalling salads containing watercress. It said the move was a precautionary measure due to a possible association with an outbreak of E.coli VTEC O157.
BBC News today reported that the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) has launched a strategy aimed at reducing the number of illnesses from Britain's most common cause of food poisoning — campylobacter.
This fall, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be convening a series of Food Defense Workshops around the country. The goal of these full-day workshops is to provide members of the food industry with an understanding of food defense, the tools and resources available, and to walk participants through a series of exercises on how to create a food defense plan for their facilities.
The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) will hold a press conference tomorrow, Sept. 11, to introduce its new Global Food Traceability Center (GFTC). The conference, which is slated from 1–2 p.m. Eastern Time, will be webcast live for those who cannot attend.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is reviewing 89 complaints from consumers who say they fell ill after eating the recalled Chobani Greek yogurt, the Journal Sentinel learned Monday. However, a food safety expert said the mold that caused the yogurt to spoil before its expiration date does not cause foodborne illnesses. That means either Chobani hasn't yet identified or publicized everything that caused the yogurt to spoil, or consumers must have eaten something else to cause them to vomit or have diarrhea, said Randy Worobo, a professor of food science at Cornell University.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) today published Revision 7 of FSIS Directive 8080.1, Recall of Meat and Poultry Products. This new version of the directive cancels and replaces Revision 6, which was published Oct. 26, 2010.
As if you needed another reason to cringe at the number of coal-fired power plants operating on our fragile Earth, a new study published in Nature Geoscience links power plants in China and India to the ever-increasing mercury levels of fish in the Pacific Ocean. According to the Los Angeles Times, scientists from the University of Michigan and University of Hawaii traced the chemical “fingerprint” of mercury found in nine species of fish present in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the largest ecosystem on the planet (also home of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch). They concluded that the mercury contamination originated from coal-fired power plant emissions in Asia.
Last month, the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA) Board approved changes to its rigorous food safety standards, or metrics, with respect to animal intrusion and composting practices, according to an Aug. 28 blog post by LGMA board chairman Ryan Talley. These actions represent a significant step forward in the evolution of food safety standards for leafy greens and will provide an improved system to assess and reduce potential risk in leafy greens fields while reducing the impact of food safety metrics on the environment.
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