To protect yourself, your family and guests from Salmonella, E. Coli and other food-borne illnesses, follow these key food safety tips”

Wash your hands

• Wash your hands for about 20 seconds with warm water and soap to get rid of the germs that can get into food and make people sick.
• Wash your hands after going to the bathroom, after touching raw meat, fish or poultry, and after taking out the garbage, sneezing, or coughing.

Keep foods safe from cross contamination

• Avoid cross contamination, which occurs when germs from raw foods get onto foods that will not be cooked or fully reheated to 165º F before eating.

• Put raw poultry, meat and fish in the “meat” drawer of the refrigerator, or put them on the bottom shelf in the refrigerator so the juices don’t drip on foods that won’t be cooked.

• Use a hard cutting surface with no splits or holes in it.

• Wash, rinse and sanitize the cutting surface and utensils after cutting raw poultry, meat, and fish, as well as melons. Make a sanitizer with 1 teaspoon of household bleach for each gallon of cool water.

Heat foods to their proper temperature

• In order to kill all bacteria, cook turkey, dressing containing turkey parts, other poultry and wild game to at least 165º F, ground beef and ground pork to 155º F, and fish, shellfish, lamb, other pork, other beef, and eggs to 145º F. (Most people will prefer turkey that has been cooked to an even higher temperature).

• Cold foods should be kept cold (lower than 41º F), and hot foods should be held hot (above 140º F).

Cool and reheat foods properly

• Cool food properly by placing it in uncovered shallow pans in the refrigerator.

• If you are taking prepared food to share with others, be certain that you keep it hot (above 140º F) or cold (41º F or below) during the trip and until it is served.

• If food has been sitting at room temperature for not more than 2 hours, refrigerate it or reheat it. If food has been sitting out for longer than 2 hours, throw it out.

• Take care with leftovers. Be sure the food has been cooled properly, then kept cold on the journey home.

Vegetables and fruit

• Wash and scrub fruits and vegetables under cold running water.

• Scrub the exterior of melons before cutting them, and then keep them cold at 41º F or below.

• Keep “starchy foods” like cooked beans (legumes), rice, potatoes and pasta at 140º F or above, or cold at 41º F or below. Be sure to refrigerate within 2 hours after the meal.

• Keep tofu and other plant protein foods hot (140º F or above) or cold (41º F or below).

• Sprouts must be kept at 41º F or below until used.

Donated foods

Meal programs and food banks see a large amount of food donated around the holidays, and this Thanksgiving is no exception. Public Health encourages your generous food donations, and stresses that the biggest need is for high quality canned protein foods, fruits and vegetables.

If you are donating fresh produce or a perishable food that has been kept continuously refrigerated at 41º F or less, call the donor agency before delivering to make sure that they have refrigerator or freezer space, and that they can accept what you would like to donate.

For additional information on food safety, please visit:

• Public Health’s Food Protection website

• Cooking Turkey Fact Sheet

• Public Health – Seattle & King County www.kingcounty.gov/health

This story was produced in collaboration with 

CDC microbiologist - Photo: James Gathany CDC

Federal funding for medical research, disease prevention and a host of public health initiatives could be sharply reduced if the congressional super committee fails to agree on a deficit-reduction package, triggering automatic cuts.

Public attention has largely focused on possible cuts to the huge entitlement programs for seniors and the poor, Medicare and Medicaid, but health advocates are raising an alarm about many other smaller programs they say need to be protected.

The bipartisan panel is charged with cutting at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years. If it can’t overcome the enormous political obstacles to a deal, automatic cuts would kick in as of 2013, half coming from defense, the other half from domestic spending.

Congress laid out this scenario – dubbed “sequestration” in legislative lingo – when it created the committee in August as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling and avoid the first U.S. default in history.

While the committee can chop Medicaid and Medicare as part of a negotiated agreement, automatic cuts would not affect Medicaid funding; there would be a 2 percent reduction in Medicare payments to hospitals and other providers. That would make the hit to many other programs all the more severe.

“I don’t know if a lot of people have appreciated how big a hit the discretionary health programs” could take if there are automatic cuts, said Richard Deem, senior vice president of advocacy for the American Medical Association. “I think a lot of people are going to wake up to that too late.”

At stake is federal money that, among other things, helps HIV patients pay for lifesaving medication, funds biomedical research and helps prevent and respond to food borne illnesses and disease outbreaks.

Automatic reductions, for example, could translate into less staff to handle food contamination, said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. Recently, Colorado cantaloupes sickened 116 people in 25 states with listeria, killing 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  “Someone has to go into stores and make sure the stuff has been taken off the shelves. I am very worried about what [automatic cutting] does to the public’s capacity to be safe.”

If the full $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts go into effect, funding for non-defense discretionary programs in 2013 would face reductions of 7.8 percent, dropping each year to 5.5 percent in 2021, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Richard Kogan, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, places the first year’s hit at over 9 percent, however.

Health advocates fear deep cuts will harm the public by reducing services and investment in several areas, including:

• Public health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is particularly vulnerable because it was hit hard in the last round of budget cuts, according to Benjamin. In fiscal year 2011, federal funding for the CDC declined by $740 million. “They’ve already cut deeply into the bone at CDC,” he said.

The agency plays an important role in detecting and responding to emergencies such as tornadoes, hurricanes, food-borne illnesses, and infectious disease outbreaks. It also helps fund state and local public health departments and labs, which Benjamin said is extremely important as states struggle with massive budget deficits.

The CDC also subsidizes the cost of vaccines for uninsured and underinsured children. The prices of standard childhood vaccines are rising, Benjamin said. “The more vaccines we require kids to have, the less money we have to pay for it. If we discovered tomorrow a marvelous new vaccine, we probably wouldn’t have the resources to put that into place.”

• Medical research. U.S. investment in biomedical research is beginning to lag behind some other nations, namely China and India, at a time when robust funding could help with job creation, NIH Director Francis Collins said at a May hearing of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education.

Collins said at the hearing that the BGI genome center in Shenzhen, China, “is capable of sequencing more than 10,000 human genomes a year. The capacity of that one Chinese institution now surpasses the combined capacity of all genome sequencing centers in the United States.”

“This critical area of scientific innovation stimulated by the U.S.-led Human Genome Project is now being developed more aggressively in China than it is here — a sobering story indeed and one that I hope would inspire our nation to redouble its efforts on the research front.”

Congress in recent years has given NIH small increases that haven’t kept pace with medical inflation, advocates claim. Funding actually declined in 2006. Lawmakers are still negotiating funding levels for fiscal year 2012, which began Oct. 1. House appropriators are considering a small increase in NIH funding, while their Senate counterparts are contemplating a small reduction.

Reductions in NIH funding “will lessen the chance of research breakthroughs in cancer. It will interrupt clinical trials at the National Cancer Institute,” said Dick Woodruff, vice president of federal relations and strategic alliances at the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network.

• HIV/AIDS. About 500,000 HIV-infected people currently get help with expensive care and lifesaving medication through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program. Ronald Johnson, vice president of policy and advocacy at AIDS United, says that automatic cuts would be devastating.

Ryan White help is a last resort for many people who are low-income, uninsured or underinsured. On average, a year’s worth of medication costs about $15,000 to $20,000, and total care for an infected person can run about $100,000, according to Johnson.

He also fears cuts to federal funding that help states provide free or subsidized HIV testing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent $800 million to states in fiscal year 2011.

While the programs’ cost may be significant, they have decreased the spread of AIDS, said Johnson. “If a person gets on treatment early and adheres to it, that person on the whole is less infectious, so the chance of transmission is reduced significantly.”

• Disease prevention. Prevention funding in the health law is already under fire, by both Democrats and Republicans. Republicans have pushed to repeal the funding and President Barack Obama said recently that he would support decreasing it by $3.5 billion over 10 years.

The prevention fund has provided money for programs aimed at reducing obesity and tobacco use, among other public health priorities.

Reductions are short-sighted, said Jeffrey Levi, executive director of Trust for America’s Health. “The irony here is that there is so much focus on health care costs, yet there is significant evidence that the kind of prevention programs that the [health law] is supporting can have a positive impact on health care utilization and costs,” he said.

While the House and Senate appropriations committees would decide the initial 2013 funding levels for each agency and program, across-the-board cuts in sequestration would occur on top of the initial funding decisions and apply equally to all non-exempt, non-defense programs within an agency, Kogan said.

Many lobbyists, representing all sectors of the mammoth health care system, say they doubt that the committee of 12 lawmakers will be able to reach consensus on issues that have stumped Congress for decades, including overhauling the tax code and reining in fast-growing entitlement spending.

The committee’s deadline for action is Nov. 23, after which Congress would have until Dec. 23 to approve any deal.

The committee’s task is made even harder by a divided Congress, ongoing battles about federal health program funding for fiscal year 2012, and a presidential campaign season that is already in full swing. Whatever Congress cuts this year could be restored in whole or part in the future.

Benjamin says lawmakers should look for acceptable savings in the big spending Medicaid and Medicare programs. If they don’t, “There will be all kinds of unanticipated and unintended consequences” from automatic cuts, he said. “The tradeoff will be having to cut something that you really don’t want to cut.”

Marilyn Werber Serafini is the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Robin Toner Distinguished Fellow based at Kaiser Health News.  The fellowship honors the late Robin Toner, The New York Times’ long-time health and politics reporter whose work  often framed the public debate on health issues. KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Photo by the QFamily

If you eat food contaminated with bacteria called Listeria, you could get so sick that you have to be hospitalized. And for certain vulnerable people, the illness could be fatal.

Unlike most bacteria, Listeria germs can grow and spread in the refrigerator. So if you unknowingly refrigerate Listeria-contaminated food, the germs could contaminate your refrigerator and spread to other foods there and increase the likelihood that you and your family will become sick.

Those most at risk for listeriosis—the illness caused by Listeria monocytogenes—include pregnant women, older adults and people with compromised immune systems and certain chronic medical conditions (such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, and transplant patients).

In pregnant women, listeriosis can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, and serious illness or death in newborn babies.

Recently, a multi-state outbreak of listeriosis tied to contaminated cantaloupes has caused illnesses and deaths. Listeria has also been linked to a variety of ready-to-eat foods, including unpasteurized milk and dairy products, Mexican-style or soft cheeses made with unpasteurized milk, processed deli meats, hot dogs, smoked seafood and store-prepared deli-salads.

Listeria monocytogenes

Donald Zink, Ph.D, senior science advisor at FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, says FDA is aware of cases of foodborne illness caused by bacteria that can live in the kitchen and spread to foods.

Consumers are advised to wash all fruits and vegetables under running water just before eating, cutting or cooking, even if you plan to peel the produce first. Scrub firm produce such as melons and cucumbers with a clean produce brush.

To further protect yourself and your family from Listeria, follow these steps:

Keep Refrigerated Foods Cold

Chilling food properly is an important way of reducing risk of Listeria infection. Although Listeria can grow at refrigeration temperatures, it grows more slowly at refrigerator temperatures of 40 degrees F or less.

• Keep your refrigerator at 40 degrees F or lower and the freezer at 0 degrees F or lower.
• Wrap or cover foods with a sheet of plastic wrap or foil or put foods in plastic bags or clean covered containers before you place them in the refrigerator. Make certain foods do not leak juices onto other foods.
• Place an appliance thermometer, such as a refrigerator thermometer, in the refrigerator, and check the temperature periodically.  Adjust the refrigerator temperature control, if necessary, to keep foods as cold as possible without causing them to freeze. Place a second thermometer in the freezer to check the temperature there.
• Use precooked and ready-to-eat foods as soon as you can. The longer they are stored in the refrigerator, the more chance Listeria has to grow.

“If you have leftovers in your refrigerator, it’s best to throw them out after three days, just to be sure,” says Zink. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

Clean Refrigerator Regularly

Listeria can contaminate other food through spills in the refrigerator.

• Clean up all spills in your refrigerator right away—especially juices from hot dog and lunch meat packages, raw meat, and raw poultry. Consider using paper towels to avoid transferring germs from a cloth towel.
• Clean the inside walls and shelves of your refrigerator with warm water and liquid soap, then rinse. As an added measure of caution, you can sanitize your refrigerator monthly using the same procedures described below for kitchen surfaces.

Clean Hands and Kitchen Surfaces Often

Listeria can spread from one surface to another.

• Thoroughly wash food preparation surfaces with warm, soapy water. As an added precaution you should sanitize clean surfaces by using any of the kitchen surface sanitizer products available from grocery stores, being careful to follow label directions.

You can make your own sanitizer by combining 1 teaspoon of unscented bleach to one 1 quart of water, flooding the surface and letting it stand for 10 minutes.  Then rinse with clean water.  Let surfaces air dry or pat them dry with fresh paper towels.  Bleach solutions get less effective with time, so discard unused portions daily.

• A cutting board should be washed with warm, soapy water after each use. Nonporous acrylic, plastic, or glass boards can be washed in a dishwasher.
• Dish cloths, towels and cloth grocery bags should be washed often in the hot cycle of your washing machine.
• It’s also important, to wash hands with warm water and soap for at least 20 seconds before and after handling food.

This article appears on FDA’s Consumer Updates page, which features the latest on all FDA-regulated products.

Posted September 30, 2011

PHOTO CREDIT: Cantalope by the QFamily.

A big part of summer for many people is attending fairs and festivals. There are always fun things to see and experience, including art work, music, games, and rides. One of the biggest draws to these events is the many different types of foods and drinks available.

Because foodborne illnesses increase during the summer months, it is even more important to follow food safety steps. Many foodborne illnesses are caused by consuming foods or beverages contaminated with germs.

Photo by David Ritter

One reason for the increase of foodborne illnesses in the summertime is that people are cooking and eating outside at places such as fairs and festivals more often.

Sometimes, the usual safety controls that a kitchen provides, like thermostat-controlled cooking, refrigeration, and washing facilities, may not be available when cooking and dining at these events.

Remember that food safety practices should be the same at fairs as they are at home: Clean, Separate, Cook, and Chill. Learn more about these steps here, and make this a food safe summer by reducing your risk of foodborne illness.

Consumers

What should a consumer consider before buying food from a vendor?

• Does the vendor have a clean/tidy workstation?

• Does the vendor have a sink for employees to wash their hands?

• Do the employees wear gloves or use tongs when handling food?

• Does the vendor have refrigeration on site for raw ingredients or pre-cooked foods?

• Has the vendor been inspected? Requirements vary by state, but in general temporary and mobile vendors, like those at fairs and carnivals, should have a license to sell food and beverages in a particular state or county.

• Check with the local health department to see if the vendors are licensed and if a food inspection has been completed.

Are there healthy food alternatives to consider at fairs and festivals?

When purchasing food from a vendor, look for healthy options first. If they are not available, consider bringing your own food to save money and calories.

Bringing food from home allows you to eat a healthy meal or snack as a family, while still enjoying the festive atmosphere around you. Don’t forget to keep safe food storage practices in mind.

If bringing food from home, what  are proper food handling and storage practices?

If you bring food to a fair or festival from home, be sure to keep food handling and storage times in mind. Don’t let food sit out for more than two hours. On a hot day (90°F or higher), reduce this time to one hour. Be sure to put perishable items in a cooler or insulated bag. For budget-minded folks, eat before you go to the fair.

What steps can you take to protect you and your family?

Wash Hands Often:

• Find out where hand washing stations are located.

• Always wash your hands right after petting animals, touching the animal enclosure, and exiting animal areas even if you did not touch an animal.

• Always wash hands after using the restroom, after playing a game or going on a ride, before eating and drinking, before preparing food or drinks, after changing diapers, and after removing soiled clothes or shoes.

• Bring hand sanitizers or disposable wipes in case there aren’t any places to wash your hands.

• Directions for washing hands can be found here.

Report Illness:

Anytime you suspect you may have contracted a foodborne illness,report it to your local health department, even if it is after you have recovered. The local public health department is an important part of the food safety system. Often, calls from concerned citizens are how outbreaks are first detected. If a public health official contacts you to find out more about an illness you had, your cooperation is important. In public health investigations, it can be as important to talk to healthy people as it is to ill people. Your cooperation may be needed even if you are not ill.

Food Vendors, Community Organizations, and Fair Organizers

Requirements differ by state, but in general temporary and mobile food vendors should apply for a  food license with the fair’s state or county health department.  Many community-based organizations set up booths to sell various foods at local festivals and fairs too. There are special exceptions, but it is better to be safe than sorry—get a license!  Contact information for local and state health departments can be found here.

Fair organizers should try to include a person trained in food safety throughout the planning process, as well as have them present at the fair.

It is important that food safety steps are followed so the food served doesn’t make anyone sick. Try to cook-serve, which means limiting the amount of food preparation performed offsite. In addition, follow the four basic food safety steps:  CLEAN, SEPARATE, COOK, and CHILL. Learn more about these steps here.

Now you’re on your way to a safe and healthy summer! 

PHOTO CREDIT: Ferris wheel by David Ritter.

More Information

• Foodborne Infections FAQs
• Handwashing Podcast for Children 
• Handwashing Tutorial for Adults 
• Foodborne Illness Peaks in Summer – Why?
• Foodsafety.gov
• The Safe Food Handling Fact Sheet

For additional food safety questions, visit the FSIS Virtual Representative, Ask Karen, or call the Meat and Poultry Hotline at 1-888-674-6854 (available in English and Spanish).