Update: More Than 100 Illnesses Reported After Food Safety Summit

The Baltimore City Health Department and the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have received more than 100 reports of illness after the Food Safety Summit held April 8-10 at the Baltimore Convention Center.

According to an update sent out Tuesday morning to the approximately 1,300 FSS attendees, most of the illnesses reported relate to “self-limited diarrhea.”

A state health official noted that they have heard from about 400 people and that no associated hospitalizations or deaths have been reported.

“We are working on evaluating possible exposures and doing testing at the Maryland state public health laboratory to attempt to identify an agent. At the conclusion of the investigation, a summary report will be available,” Tuesday’s update stated.

Those who attended the FSS and have not yet responded to an online survey are being asked to do so now. More information may be obtained by contacting the Division of Outbreak Investigation at (410) 767-6700 or by email at DHMH.Outbreaks@maryland.gov.

Sara Luell, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, sent out a statement Thursday afternoon noting that initial reports of illness had come in from four attendees at the FSS:

“Although we are in the initial stages of the investigation, there are currently no reported hospitalizations or deaths related to these illnesses. There are also currently no reports of illnesses associated with other conferences at the Baltimore Convention Center. The investigation is ongoing.”

According to Michael Schwartzberg, public information officer for the Baltimore City Health Department, four calls came in on April 15 and 16 from people “complaining of feeling sick with diarrhea, upset stomach and other related symptoms about 12 hours after eating a meal at the Baltimore Convention Center on April 9.”

The city dispatched two environmental health sanitarians to the convention center on April 16, Schwartzberg stated, who did an “extensive investigation” at Centerplate, the center’s in-house caterer.

“With the exception of one issue, everything was in compliance with codes and regulations. Centerplate was issued a violation for condensation dripping from one of the 2 ice machines in the kitchen, and this issue was immediately corrected,” Schwartzberg wrote in an email. He added that no violations were noted at the most recent regularly scheduled inspection there on Feb. 27.

This year’s 16th-annual FSS drew more than 1,500 attendees from across the spectrum of the food industry, including growers, processors, retailers, distributors, food-service operators, regulators and academia.

China says one-fifth of its farmland is polluted with toxic metals

FACED with growing public anger about a poisonous environment, China's government released a study that shows nearly one-fifth of the country's farmland is contaminated with toxic metals, a stunning indictment of unfettered industrialization under the Communist Party's authoritarian rule.

The report, previously deemed so sensitive it was classified as a state secret, names the heavy metals cadmium, nickel and arsenic as the top contaminants.

It adds to widespread doubts about the safety of China's farm produce and confirms suspicions about the dire state of its soil following more than two decades of explosive industrial growth, the overuse of farm chemicals and minimal environmental protection.

It also points to health risks that, in the case of heavy metals, can take decades to emerge after the first exposure. Already, health advocates have identified several “cancer villages” in China near factories suspected of polluting the environment where they say cancer rates are above the national average.

The soil survey was conducted from 2005 until last year, and showed contamination in 16.1 per cent of China's soil overall and 19.4 per cent of its arable land, according to a summary released late on Thursday by China's Environmental Protection Ministry and its Land and Resources Ministry.

“The overall condition of the Chinese soil allows no optimism,” the report said. Some regions suffer serious soil pollution, worrying farm land quality and “prominent problems” with deserted industrial and mining land, it said. Contamination ranged from “slight,” which indicated up to twice the safe level, to “severe.”

The report's release shows China's authoritarian government responding to growing public anger at pollution with more openness, but only on its own terms and pace. Early last year, Beijing-based lawyer Dong Zhengwei had demanded that the government release the soil findings, but was initially rebuffed by the environment ministry, which cited rules barring release of “state secrets.”

That led to criticism from the Chinese public, and even from some arms of the state media. The Communist Party-run People's Daily declared that, “Covering this up only makes people think: We're being lied to.” The ministry later acknowledged the information should be shared, said Dong, who attributed this week's release of the report to public pressure.

Without a release of the information, “the public anger would get stronger, and soil contamination would deteriorate, while news of cancer villages and poisonous rice would continue to spring up,” Dong, an antitrust lawyer, said in an interview on Friday.

Because some of the samples in the survey, which is the first of its kind in China, date back nearly a decade, the results would likely be much worse if tests were taken today, Dong said.

He said the government should conduct soil surveys and release the results on an annual basis and respond with immediate remediation measures.

China's leaders have said they are determined to tackle the country's pollution problem, though the threat to soil has so far been overshadowed by public alarm at smog and water contamination. However, recent scandals of tainted rice and crops have begun to shift attention to soil.

A key concern among scientists is cadmium, a carcinogenic metal that can cause kidney damage and other health problems and is absorbed by rice, the country's staple grain.

Last May, authorities launched an investigation into rice mills in southern China after tests found almost half of the supplies sold in Guangzhou, a major city, were contaminated with cadmium.

In early 2013, the newspaper Nanfang Daily reported that tens of thousands of tons of cadmium-tainted rice had been sold to noodle makers in southern China since 2009. It said government inspectors declared it fit only for production of non-food goods such as industrial alcohol but a trader sold most of the rice to food processors anyway.

The worst pollution detailed in this week's report centres around the country's most industrialised regions, the Yangtse and Pearl River deltas in southern China, as well heavily industrial portions of the northeast.

The summary of findings gave no detailed breakdown of contamination by region. It said most of the contaminated soil had levels of pollutants ranging from just above the allowable limit to double the limit, while for 1.1 per cent of the country's soil the contaminants were at five times the safety limit or more.

Lu Yizhong, a soil contamination expert at China Agricultural University, said soil surveys must become more frequent, with detailed results published regularly. More legislation is needed to control the problem, he said.

Warning that food safety was emerging as a “thorny issue” for China, Lu said the effects of the gradual accumulation of toxic metals in the bodies of people who eat contaminated produce can take years to unfold. “Sometime it can take 10 to 30 years to develop serious disease.”

China must step up efforts to monitor and regulate soil contamination “otherwise the speed of new contamination will surely outpace efforts to rein it back,” he said.

AP

Track-and-Trace Technology in the Food Supply Chain

Globalization has created a fragmented, complex and vulnerable food supply chain. While globalization is an essential part of the international food trade, it has also exposed food suppliers and distributors to a higher risk of contamination, bioterrorism, counterfeit and poor quality. Not only do these risks pose a threat to public health and safety, but it also compromises environmental sustainability, erodes public trust, and cripples a company’s business and productivity.

With so much at stake, regulators have worked tirelessly to improve safety measures and compliance in the United States. Food manufacturers and distributors have also implemented new processes and technologies to help circumvent these risks in the supply chain. Food traceability technology is one approach to bridging this gap between safety and compliance, and is becoming a critical part of safeguarding the food supply chain.

Food safety is a global concern, yet the U.S. continues to lag far behind its peer countries with regard to its safety practices. Frost & Sullivan estimates that a total of 76 million food-related illness cases occurred in 2013, with the U.S. spending $40 billion dollars on treatment rather than prevention. Considering the wholesale food industry has an extensive value chain, the costs to treat and further prevent these food-related illnesses are astounding.

Traceability technology effectively reduces the number of contaminations in the food industry’s value chain by monitoring all the events in the supply chain, and catching where a contamination or quality control problem has occurred. Of course, not all traceability solutions are created equal. An effective track-and-trace technology must be robust enough to capture large amounts of data gathered from countless events. It must also be capable of processing all this data in real-time speed. If it breaks down, the interruption can be felt through the entire supply chain, from production to distribution, all the way down to delivery.

Food distributors and manufacturers know that the margin for human error is high in the supply chain, which is why companies cannot afford to neglect traceability technology. Take a look at the statistics around product recalls: In 2013, companies spent approximately $25 billion on recalls. Overall, there was a 52 percent increase in food recalls between the third and fourth quarters in 2013, according to one index report.

As a result, there has been an increase in focus on regulations surrounding the food supply chain. Most recently, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which passed in 2011. This renewed focus starts with heightened regulation at farming levels and culminates with increased safety standards for consumers. The law stems from a heightened risk in the food supply chain. The U.S. imports over 15 percent of the products in its food supply. The increasingly heterogonous food marketplace presents new hazards previously unknown. Given the risks associated with this potentially hazardous industry, FSMA gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) more power to enforce compliance through inspections and the ability to stop food manufacturers from operating unsafe production lines.

FSMA has a three-pronged approach to food safety as outlined by its three pillars of success:

• Prevention—mandated preventive controls for food production facilities, in addition to updated food safety standards that guarantees farm to fork safety.
• Inspection, compliance and response—new mandatory inspection protocols with increased frequency, prevention-based mandatory food recalls on uninfected produce and the ability to cease operations of unsafe food production facilities.
• Imports—new requirements for foreign suppliers to verify food safety through the use of certified third parties.

While applauding the efforts made by Capitol Hill and the FDA to improve regulatory standards, there is still more to be done. It’s imperative that private sectors reduce the cost of product recalls and focus on improving food safety globally. The administration of track-and-trace technologies throughout the food supply chain increases communication and safety throughout a product’s pipeline, and advances food safety around the world.

Traceability software is a key component to reducing food recalls and the costs associated with them. Take, for example, a recent E. coli outbreak in Germany, cited by BCC Research Food Traceability Technologies Market. The outbreak cost European Union farmers $611,000,000 per week, claiming 47 lives and affecting nearly 3,800 people worldwide who ingested the contaminated produce. German authorities falsely accused Spanish farms for the outbreak, which resulted in a loss of nearly $200 million per week for Spanish exporters. Due to the lack of traceability software, the highly publicized outbreak experienced delays in finding the source of the contamination and preventing additional loss of life.

Track-and-trace technology plays a critical role in the event of product recalls. As an enterprise resource planning (ERP) add-on, it has a unique advantage since ERP systems function as a single point of data across the enterprise. When connected to a company’s ERP, traceability software is ideally positioned for recording and maintaining data related to track and trace. Therefore, the technology is often a one-stop solution to facilitate backward and forward traceability within an enterprise.

In the case of food manufacturers who produce finished products, process software solutions that can detail lot tracking information (backward and forward) are able to point to the exact lots that contained the contaminated ingredients, including data on when the product was received, supplier details and the lot numbers of the finished goods produced with the contaminated ingredient. With the help of forward traceability features, manufacturers can also pinpoint the customers who received the contaminated lot of finished goods.

In the event of a product recall, traceability software repositories can pull up the relevant lot numbers, and information about the corresponding customers or recipients of the finished goods. Only the contaminated lots have to be recalled, which translates into significant cost savings for manufacturers who would have otherwise had to issue a blanket recall on all lots produced during a given time period.

The effect of globalization is both a blessing and a curse for businesses. The food ecosystem, in particular, is dependent on imports and exports, global safety standards, and compliance to maintain food safety throughout the supply chain. Track-and-trace technology is a significant part of this supply chain, helping farmers, distributors, grocers and everyone in between provide the highest quality foods to customers around the world. Time after time, we’ve seen the negative impact food recalls have on businesses, health and consumer lives. It is time then for the food industry to implement traceability technology to prevent the spread of contaminated products and safeguard customers worldwide.

.

Bird Flu Found on California Farm Spurs Export Bans

The disease known as bird flu has been found on a quail farm in California, prompting countries including Russia to ban poultry shipments from the state.

Low-pathogenic avian influenza was detected in a quail flock at a farm in Stanislaus County, California, on April 18, said Steve Lyle, spokesman for the state’s Department of Food & Agriculture. The case was confirmed by the federal agriculture agency, and the farm has been quarantined, he said.

“Veterinarians are humanely euthanizing birds at the farm as called for in established protocols, which also include epidemiological investigations, further testing of any at-risk flocks, and communication with other poultry farms to ensure that the disease is contained,” Lyle said today in an e-mail.

Russia and Taiwan banned imports of chicken from California. Cuba restricted imports of fresh or frozen poultry from birds raised or processed in Stanislaus County, and Japan has banned California eggs laid and poultry slaughtered on or after March 24, USDA reports show. The state exported $13 million of chicken in 2012, government data show.

Some countries have agreements with the U.S. that require poultry exports to be “suspended for a period when there are such detections,” Ed Curlett, a spokesman at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service, said in an e-mail.

Little Effect

The ban will have little effect on the U.S. market for poultry meat because California isn’t a big exporter, Tom Elam, the president of food-industry consultant FarmEcon LLC in Carmel, Indiana, said in a telephone interview.

Some “minor” demand disruptions may occur if consumer concerns are raised, Elam said. There is a “huge impact” for the infected flock’s growers, he said.

The USDA has said U.S. poultry farms in 2014 will earn $203,500 on average, the highest in data since 1996. Demand is rising as consumers seek cheaper alternatives to red meat. Whole chickens at U.S. supermarkets sold at half the per-pound cost of beef or pork last month.

“If it’s handled properly, there should be no significant impact on California or the rest of the country,” said Elam, who has studied the poultry markets for 30 years “This is, however, a highly contagious disease among poultry and can potentially cause disruption,” and a spread of the virus would be “catastrophic,” he said.

The virus strain is H5, according to an online notification to the World Organisation for Animal Health. The affected farm contains about 95,000 Japanese quail. The premises has an additional 21,000 Peking ducks for egg production.

California, the top U.S. agricultural producer, had $720 million in chicken sales in 2012 and almost $400 million for eggs, according to Lyle of the state agency.

“The odds are low that it will cause problems beyond these farms,” FarmEcon’s Elam said. “It bears watching any time one of these outbreaks happens.”

GFSF releases May Newsletter

Alexandria, Virginia, April 24, 2014

For Immediate Release

Contact: Eric Wu: ericwu@gicgroup.com

                               703-684-1366

GFSF releases May Newsletter

In a run-up to the annual Food Safety Summit, June 14-15, Beijing, host GFSF released its latest Newsletter. The May issue, “New Food Safety Picture” spotlights CFDA and break-through tracing technologies.  Excerpts from selected articles below

– Sophie Li, The Bureaucratic Architecture of China’s Food Safety Regulatory System

“The question remains whether the change is meaningful or more a bureaucratic re-shuffling.”
“What may be more meaningful than the formal architecture of the CFDA led reform is the departure from the top down approach where food safety regulation and enforcement come from Beijing.  Instead, there is some indication that further food safety reforms will percolate up from the provincial level.”

–Eric Wu, Applying Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) in Food Safety

“If this pilot (WGS—whole genome sequencing) project works, the CDC says it sets the stage to eventually overhaul how public health laboratories around the country keep watch on food safety, and to use the technology more routinely against other outbreaks.”

– Jiyang Kim, High Tech Food Tracing Technology in South Korea

“South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has built a tracking system (TFood System) for health functional food products and infant products, which will be compulsory, effective December 2014. When TFood System becomes mandatory, the government can access reports online by recording and managing food records in each phase from food manufacturing and processing to distribution and sales.”

– Richard Tracy, Cold Chain Technologies and Food Safety in China

“The foremost demand we are seeing is for accessibility to all components involved in traceability in both a real-time and historical fashion. Stakeholders in the cold chain want to see not only where their goods are but exactly what those goods are in real time.”

- Carlos R. N. de Aquino Co-Authors: Eduardo Platon,and  Luiz Eduardo R. de Carvalho Food Safety in Brazil

“The emphasis on food safety on the supply side of the agricultural value chain and on the demand side reflects a generally accepted recognition of the importance of agriculture to Brazil’s economy and future economic growth”

###

Fake duck blood investigation lead to more Chinese consumer anger

http://www.foodnavigator-asia.com/Markets/Fake-duck-blood-investigation-leads-to-more-Chinese-consumer-anger

Wal-Mart Cries Foul on China Fines

Over the past three years, Chinese authorities have fined Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT +1.15% $9.8 million, sanctioning the retailer for using misleading pricing, selling poor-quality products and even peddling donkey meat that turned out to be fox.

Wal-Mart has increased testing and inspections. Food testers at Wal-Mart distribution centers in China check more than 600 products daily to catch flaws before the food is sent out to stores. After Wal-Mart found the fox meat labeled as donkey in January, the company said it would start testing its products' DNA.

But Wal-Mart is also doing something rare for a Western company: Telling Chinese authorities they need to clean up their own act.

In the U.S. and most other countries, it is usually manufacturers, rather than retailers, that have primary responsibility for the quality of the products they sell, whether it is ketchup or dried beef. But in China, the manufacturers "aren't accountable. We're accountable," says Greg Foran, Wal-Mart's China chief. And while China's domestic companies are often criticized by local media for subpar quality, regulators seldom call out local retailers for faulty products or food-safety problems.

Analysts agree that Wal-Mart's cries of unfair treatment have some validity. "When the Chinese government wants to make a point on food safety, they go after a multinational rather than a Chinese company," says Christian Murck, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing. Other people say Chinese authorities and state media focus on foreign companies because their operations are often bigger, their names are better known and such an approach can help set an example.

Wal-Mart executives have met in recent months with China's Food and Drug Administration, urging officials to step up their inspections of all food purveyors. They plan to meet again this month. The agency didn't respond to requests for comment.

The Bentonville, Ark., company's pushback runs counter to what experts say is the safer strategy—keep your head low—for foreign companies in China: "It's not something you see often in China," says Ben Cavender, a senior analyst at consulting firm China Market Research Group. But Wal-Mart's combative approach may have an up side: "Wal-Mart is letting consumers know that there are other companies and players who should be involved in food safety, not just the retailer."

Four local Chinese grocers said regulators don't frequently visit their stores or issue fines. State-controlled Bright Food (Group) Co., which operates 2,200 outlets of Shanghai Nong Gong Shang Supermarket, regularly inspects its fresh products and faces surprise food-safety checks on occasion, but in the past few years the chain hasn't been fined, a spokesman says. China's largest grocery retailer by number of stores, China Resources Enterprise Ltd. 0291.HK +0.21% , declined to comment.

Both the Chinese government and the food industry face rising pressure from the country's growing consumer class to clean up the food supply. In a survey last year of more than 3,200 Chinese people, 38% said food safety is a "very big problem," up from 12% in 2008, according to Pew Research.

Experts say the government has improved food safety since 2008, when six infants died and more than 300,000 fell ill because dairy producers added the industrial chemical melamine to watered-down milk. Last year the country created the China Food and Drug Administration, a superministry that consolidated tasks previously handled by nine different bureaucracies into one. Officials have pushed agricultural consolidation as well, attempting to create bigger farm operations that mirror those in the U.S. and are easier to supervise.

A customer shops at a Wal-Mart store in Beijing. Reuters

China's food-safety laws say responsibility and accountability should be shared at every step of the food chain. But experts say those laws aren't well enforced.

"There's an overemphasis at the point where the product meets the consumer," says Lester Ross, a Beijing-based attorney with U.S. law firm WilmerHale who has represented foreign food companies. "That's in part because it's easier to do," he adds.

Wal-Mart says it ended relationships with 300 suppliers last year because they didn't pass the retailer's testing and safety standards, yet those suppliers had paperwork proving that they had passed muster with local food watchdogs. In the past two years, Wal-Mart has built up its ability to test products, adding DNA testing and food-safety trucks that can move to several stores in the course of a day, Mr. Foran says.

"But that isn't the way to resolve food safety," he says. "You resolve it by putting in place the right processes at the base. That is something the government should be held accountable for, as they are in most other countries."

In the U.S., much of the responsibility for food safety is on the farms, as well as the plants that package the foods. Retailers are responsible for keeping food at appropriate temperatures and selling items before their expiration date.

Wal-Mart doesn't disclose what portion of its $476.29 billion in annual sales is generated in China. But 408 of the company's 10,957 stores world-wide are located in the country.

In Shanghai, one of China's most affluent cities, the Municipal Food and Drug Administration says the government has increased testing and shares responsibility for food safety with retailers. Part of the problem is that enforcement is regional, says Gu Zhenhua, deputy director general of Shanghai's Food and Drug Administration.

A number of foreign companies in China have increased testing in recent years.

British retailer Tesco TSCO.LN +2.70% PLC has implemented microbiological testing in China, checking some products up to four times to ensure they are safe.

In a space at their Shanghai headquarters that resembles an air-traffic control room, managers for French retailer Carrefour SA CA.FR -0.05% monitor refrigerator temperatures and supplier data at their 236 stores in China. They can see on monitors the government's product recalls; consumer complaints; store stocking data, including which products are in which stores; and supplier phone numbers to call should there be problems with any of the goods.

In 2012 Chinese media said a Carrefour store in central Henan province had sold expired chicken and had mislabeled ordinary chicken as a more expensive organic variety. Carrefour responded by closing the store and apologized to consumers.

"Food safety in China is complicated, far more complicated than in other countries," says Loïc Frouart, Carrefour's Shanghai director of risk prevention.