Karen Rowan
MyHealthNewsDaily

The rate of foodborne illness in the United States dropped by nearly a quarter since the late 1990s, according to a new report.

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the overall incidence of six common foodborne germs was 23 percent lower in 2010 than in the years between 1996 and 1998. 

"The 'big picture' is that we have seen declines in foodborne illness but there is still more that can be done to further drive down the incidence of these infections," said study researcher Olga Henao, leader of the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network Team at the CDC. 

However, the rate of foodborne illness was no lower in 2010 than in 2006, the researchers said, which may indicate that progress in reducing foodborne illnesses — which are largely preventable through following proper food safety practices — has slowed in recent years. 

"Foodborne illness continues to be a significant public health problem in the U.S. and around the world," said Douglas Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University. "For every step forward, there's a few steps back." 

The researchers based their findings on the rates of illnesses due to six types of bacteria: Campylobacter, Listeria, Salmonella, Shiga-toxin producing E. coli O157, Yersinia and Vibrio. At least 50 percent of illnesses due to these bacteria are transmitted by food. 

The researchers noted that other germs that commonly cause foodborne illness, such as norovirus, were not included in the data. 

"There are limitations — for example, they don't include Clostridium perfringens outbreaks, and I can show you three that have happened in the last month," Powell said. 

The findings were released Thursday by the CDC, along with a slew of other studies looking at rates of specific foodborne illness and their causes. The data for all the studies were gathered from the Foodborne Diseases active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), which was started in 1996 and is conducted by the CDC, 10 state health departments, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. 

"The analysis that these authors have presented is probably the most in depth-analysis that's been done, and it will help us focus our activities to improve food safety," Powell said. "The value of all these detailed surveys is that it allows the science and technology community to zero in on the problems much faster," Powell said. 

"This measure of overall change is a simple way to describe change in incidence of selected infections over time," Henao said. Together, all of the studies "can contribute to the development of policies and interventions that will ultimately lead to reductions in the incidence of foodborne infections." 

To look only at the overall drop of 23 percent would be "miss the nuance and intricacies in the data," Powell said. For example, there were increases in illness rates from several specific pathogens.  

[ Top 7 Germs in Food that Make You Sick ] 

The rate of infections from one type of Salmonella bacteria, called Salmonella enterica, was 44 percent higher in 2010 than in the late 1990s, with the greatest increases seen in children under age 4 and adults over age 60. Salmonella causes 1 million cases of illness and 350 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to one of the new studies. 

The rise is likely due to an increase in the amount of chicken and undercooked eggs that people eat. Chicken and eggs are the most common sources of these infections, according to the study. 

Outbreaks of salmonella were seen throughout the country between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, but changes in farming practices and consumer education helped to decrease the rates in the late 1990s. 

However, outbreaks during the 2000s, including the largest outbreak ever reported from eggs, have highlighted the need for further national public health efforts, the researchers said. 

Another study showed an increase in the rate of Vibrio bacteria infections in 2010, compared with 1996. Powell said that some of this increase may be due to more awareness of Vibrio and better detection methods.   

Vibrio infections, which are commonly caused by undercooked seafood, cause an estimated 80,000 illnesses, 500 hospitalizations and 100 deaths each year in the U.S. 

A telephone survey in which researchers asked people about eating specific foods over the past seven days showed that men are more likely to eat "high-risk" foods compared with women. For instance, 12 percent of men reported eating runny eggs, whereas 8 percent of women said the same, 7 percent of men reported eating pink hamburger where as 4 percent of women did. 

"Taken together, these studies point to the need for creativity in providing information to people," Powell said. Within the "farm-to-fork system" that produces our food, "there are risks, and steps need to be taken everywhere to reduce those risks." 

But even as researchers' have gained a more sophisticated view of how to combat foodborne illnesses, the germs have evolved too, Powell said. "Think about the grocery store — how many new products you see every year? Some smart bug is going to find a way to flourish in them, in ways we can't always anticipate." 

The studies will be published June 1 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. 

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featurepics.com

A resuable grocery bag was traced to an outbreak of norovirus that sickened members of a girls' soccer team in Oregon.

Oregon public health officials have traced a nasty outbreak of norovirus infections in a group of soccer players to an unlikely source: a reusable grocery bag contaminated with what some experts are calling “the perfect pathogens.”

The incident is raising questions, once again, about the cleanliness of the portable shopping bags that many consumers use to avoid the paper vs. plastic impact on the environment.

“We wash our clothes when they’re dirty; we should wash our bags, too,” said Kimberly K. Repp, an epidemiologist with the Washington County Department of Health and Human Services in Hillsboro, Ore. Her work is published this week in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Repp was an intern with the Oregon Health and Science University in October 2010 when she and other experts were asked to help unravel the mystery of sick soccer players and their chaperones. They had traveled north from Beaverton and Tigard, Ore., to Washington state on a Friday for a weekend tournament.

Less than 48 hours later, nine people were ill with unpleasant symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea. The question was: How did they get it?

One of the soccer players --  all 13- and 14-year-old girls -- had fallen ill on Saturday night and moved into the room of one of the parent chaperones. The pair went home early Sunday, with no further contact with other players.

Even so, seven other people became ill within days, stumping scientists momentarily.

CDC

Noroviruses are a group of viruses responsible for some 21 million cases of gastrointestinal illness a year, including 70,000 hospitalizations and 800 deaths.

“It involved really thinking outside the bag, so to speak,” Repp said.

Eventually, interviews revealed that most of those who became ill ate packaged cookies at a Sunday lunch. Where did the cookies come from? Turns out, the culprit was a reusable grocery bag of snacks left in the empty hotel room occupied by the first girl who got sick.

Quickly, the puzzle fell into place. The girl had been very ill in the hotel bathroom, spreading an aerosol of norovirus that landed everywhere, including on the reusable grocery bag hanging in the room.

When scientists checked the bag, it tested positive for the bug, even two weeks later.

“It was a knock out of the park,” said Repp. “We demonstrated norovirus transmission without person-to-person contact. That’s why this is different.”

The trouble with noroviruses -- which cause an estimated 21 million cases of gastroenteritis a year, some 70,000 hospitalizations and 800 deaths -- is that they’re tough bugs that can live for prolonged periods on objects and surfaces, said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

“Norovirus does have the vexing capacity to persist in the environment,” he said.

While the risk of contracting an illness from any particular reusable bag is low, Schaffner said, the Oregon study follows a 2010 paper by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University that found large numbers of bacteria in reusable grocery bags, including 12 percent that were contaminated with E. coli.

When scientists stored the bags in the trunks of cars for two hours, the number of bacteria jumped 10-fold.

Some critics dismissed that study, which was funded in part by the American Chemistry Council, which supports the makers of some disposable plastic bags.

But few have debated the study’s conclusion, which found that washing the reusable shopping bags regularly decreased contamination by 99.9 percent.

“You could just wipe it down with Lysol or Clorox,” said Repp.

Schaffner agrees. The most important tool to prevent norovirus, which spreads rapidly and infects quickly, is good hygiene, including careful hand-washing and thorough cleaning of the contaminated environment.

“You could wash the bag,” Schaffner said. “Or you could start over with a new bag."

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By msnbc.com staff

Diamond Pet Foods is expanding a voluntary recall to include puppy food over possible salmonella contamination, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The latest recall, announced Monday, covers Diamond Puppy Formula dry dog food manufactured by Diamond Pet Foods in Gaston, S.C. The puppy food was distributed in the following 12 states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

This is the third voluntary recall for the company this month. On April 6, the company recalled Diamond Naturals Lamb & Rice dry dog food made over possible salmonella contamination. On April 26, the company expanded the recall to its Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul Adult Light formula dry dog food.

So far, no dog illnesses have been reported, the FDA said.

Pets infected with salmonella can become lethargic and have diarrhea or bloody diarrhea, fever and vomiting, according to the FDA. Infected pets can also pass the illness on to other animals or humans. Pet owners also can contract the illness from handling contaminated pet products, especially if they have not thoroughly washed their hands after handling the pet food.

For more information about the recall, see www.diamondpetrecall.com. 

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Courtesy of Amy Karfonta

Amy Karfonta, a 22-year-old from Wisconsin, came down with salmonella symptoms days after eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant.

The first lawsuit spawned by a salmonella outbreak that appears to be linked to sushi -- which has now sickened 141 people in 20 states plus the District of Columbia -- was filed late Wednesday against Moon Marine U.S.A. Corp, a Cupertino, Calif., seafood importer.

The suit alleges that two Wisconsin women, ages 22 and 33, were hospitalized and still are recovering from salmonella poisoning contracted six to nine weeks ago when they dined, separately, at the same local restaurant, both consuming tuna rolls originally sold by Moon Marine.

“I was just in complete body pain from head to toe and the next day I got bloody diarrhea. I couldn’t even drink water,” said Amy Karfonta, 22, of Muskego, Wisc. Her symptoms appeared six days after she ate the suspect sushi. She then made two trips to local emergency rooms where doctors obtained a stool sample, re-hydrated her with intravenous fluids and examined her colon via a CT scan.

“When they saw how bad my colon was ulcerated, they first thought it could have been Crohn’s disease, or something where I may have had to have my colon removed at 22,” Karfonta said. Her most severe symptoms began to wane after the ER treatments.

The suit, filed by the Houston-based lawfirm Simon & Luke, with co-counsel the Gomez Law Firm, centers on a product called “Nakaochi Scrape” -- frozen backmeat shaved from fish bones and sold by Moon Marine to retailers and distributors across the nation. The “Scrape” wound up in nearly 60,000 pounds of raw, ground yellowfin tuna later recalled by Moon Marine after it was linked to hundreds of salmonella infections during the past two months.

A phone call made by msnbc.com to Moon Marine USA was routed to voicemail and the company did not immediately respond with a comment.

Nakaochi Scrape, injected inside tuna sushi rolls, “looks like ground tuna hamburger,” said Ron Simon, managing partner of Simon & Luke.

“The problem is this (Moon Marine) product got repackaged and resold. There are sushi restaurants that may not even know they’re serving this tuna; they may not even know it’s been recalled,” Simon said. “Also, it comes as a frozen product so it sits on the shelves for as long as six months.

“We’ve got 58,000 pounds of this stuff out there. That’s a lot of sushi -- 29 tons of scraped tuna back.”

Furious, on-the-ground detective work has been conducted, Simon said, to isolate the type of salmonella involved, find the 141 known victims of this outbreak, and determine the U.S. source of the tainted sushi. That work, executed in recent weeks by federal and state health agents, continues as authorities now work to retrace the overseas plant that originally produced this batch of Nakaochi Scrape.

More than 2,500 forms of salmonella are known to exist. When people come to doctor’s offices, clinics or hospitals complaining of severe abdominal pain and diarrhea, medical attendants typically obtain stool samples. Those specimens are sent to the state health departments for DNA typing to pinpoint which of the 2,500 salmonella strains the patients are harboring.

In this outbreak, the tests showed 141 ill sushi eaters all were hit with a rare type called salmonella bareilly, Simon said.

“It has a certain genetic code. When these people test positive, the health departments upload that DNA code into the computer that connects the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and all the other state health departments to see if anybody else has a genetic match. And bam, all of the sudden, there are 141 people that all share the same genetic code,” Simon said. “They are in 20 states and the District of Columbia.”

Health officials have interviewed many or most of those 141 people to ask what they ate the week before getting sick. Those answers also were uploaded into the national computer system -- “and I’ll say that about 80 percent recalled eating sushi,” Simon said. “The investigators dug a little deeper and found out everybody was eating spicy tuna rolls.”

This outbreak is uncommon, the lawyer added, because salmonella is routinely found in the guts of cattle, sheep, hens and infected humans -- not fish.

Simon’s second initial plaintiff is another Wisconsin woman, Amber Azzolina. She ate at the same local sushi restaurant on Feb. 14, consuming a spicy tuna roll, she told her lawyer. Two days later, Azzolina began feeling abdominal pain and passing bloody stools. Two days after that, her husband, Carmen, complained of a stomachache and headache. Amber Azzolina later spiked a fever of 101, was vomiting and still had bloody diarrhea nine days after that meal. On Feb. 23, she checked into a local emergency room where she was treated. 

For Amy Karfonta, the salmonella symptoms caused her to miss a planned physical and agility test to land a job with her local police department. She’s not sure, she said, when another opening at the department will occur.

Her health still has not fully restored, she added. She lost eight pounds due to the illness. She still faces a follow-up scope exam to determine how much her colon was damaged.

“That will be in late April because if there’s something still tender in there,” Karfonta said, “they don’t want to rupture it.”

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100 may now be sick from salmonella in sushi

American Meat Institute

Meat producers use blade tenderizers to treat tough cuts of meat, breaking muscle fibers and connective tissues.

On the eve of summer grilling season, the recall of more than a ton of beef potentially contaminated with dangerous E. coli bacteria -- including mechanically tenderized sirloin steaks -- is renewing calls for better labeling.

Connecticut Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro said that the Wednesday recall involving some 2,057 pounds of ground and texturized beef from Town & Country Foods Inc. of Greene, Maine, underscores why consumers should be told when meat has been mechanically pierced with needles or blades.

“Thankfully, thus far there have not been any illnesses associated with this recall, but these products must be labeled to protect American consumers in the future,” DeLauro said in a statement.

Mechanical tenderization is typically used on tougher cuts of beef or pork to break down muscle fibers or to inject marinade into meat. About 50 million pounds of needle- or blade-tenderized meat is produced in the U.S. each month, according to a federal study, but it’s not required to be labeled.  

Food safety advocates say the tenderized meat may increase the risk of foodborne illness because the needles or blades can drive bacteria deep inside. Federal officials already advise consumers to cook so-called “non-intact” steaks to a higher temperature -- 160 degrees -- for safety.

But meat industry officials and even a former federal agriculture leader say they’re not convinced of the risk of illness -- or that it’s worth slapping a label on every package, possibly discouraging consumption.

“We think it’s important that a good analysis be done before regulatory action is taken,” said Janet Riley, a spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service officials said the Town & Country Foods meat was shipped from April 4 to April 10 and included hamburger patties, stewing beef and sirloin fillets. The problem was discovered when company lab tests confirmed E. coli O157:H7 after the meat already had gone out, resulting in the recall.

On Monday, two days before the recall, DeLauro had sent a letter urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to require labels advising higher cooking temperatures to kill E. coli O157:H7 bacteria. The Democrat has been a longtime advocate of labeling.

Video: A ban on 'pink slime?'

“Accurate and appropriate labeling is critical in enabling consumers to make informed purchase decisions and also in ensuring proper food handling and safety,” DeLauro’s letter said.

Her view apparently has the support of Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, the U.S. undersecretary for food safety who told a congressional committee earlier last month: “We do believe they should be labeled,” as the blog Food Safety News reported.

But it’s at odds with meat industry officials, who say there hasn’t been enough research to tell if the mechanical process actually raises the risk of foodborne illness. Riley said some research indicates the problem may be associated with needle-marinated meat and not blade-tenderized meat.

And Dr. Richard Raymond, the former USDA official who previously held Hagen’s job, says he wasn’t convinced in the past and isn’t convinced now that labeling is necessary.

“The risk of choking and dying on that steak is far greater,” than the risk of E. coli poisoning, Raymond said.

He added that reported illnesses associated with tenderized meat have been very small compared to the volume of product.

In December 2009, some 248,000 pounds of tenderized beef were recalled after being linked to 21 E. coli O157:H7 infections in 16 states. Six months earlier, food safety advocates had warned the USDA of the risk of foodborne illness in mechanically tenderized meat.

Since then, the USDA has been considering whether to add labels warning that the products are “non-intact” and should be cooked to a higher temperature. USDA guidelines say that a whole cut steak should be cooked to an internal temperature of 145 degrees. But because the process can introduce bacteria into the middle of the meat, the agency recommends that non-intact steaks be cooked to 160 degrees, like hamburger.

Raymond said that could discourage rare meat fans from buying the product, or encourage consumers to simply ignore the warning.

In her letter to the USDA, DeLauro said she was encouraged that Hagen supported labeling during the hearing of the House agriculture appropriations subcommittee last month.

“But it has been working on the issue since at least 2009,” she noted. “Continued inaction only puts the public at risk.”

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Dozens of Kansas high school students and chaperones were being treated for symptoms of food poisoning Wednesday at a hospital in Mount Pleasant, Pa., after a band trip to New York, the hospital said.

About 160 students and chaperones made the trip on three buses to New York from De Soto High School, just across the Kansas border from Kansas City, Mo. They were returning home Wednesday morning when about 40 students, ages 13 to 18, and 10 adults fell ill.

The students and chaperones were being treated at Excela Frick Hospital in Mount Pleasant, about 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, NBC station WPXI of Pittsburgh reported. The Pennsylvania and New York state health departments were both investigating because the members of the caravan became ill after having eaten at an Italian restaurant in New York City on Tuesday evening.

"The common factor seems to be the chicken Parmesan," Alvie Cater, a spokesman for the De Soto School District, told the Kansas City Star.

"Roughly 25 were treated at the hospital, but more than that actually displayed symptoms," Cater said. "We're looking at up to 50 that displayed symptoms, but some of them were not severe at all."

The hospital said most of the victims were treated for severe dehydration and were expected to be back on the road later Wednesday.

NBC station WPXI of Pittsburgh contributed to this report by M. Alex Johnson of msnbc.com. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

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Five months after the first report of listeria infections tied to contaminated cantaloupe, victims of the outbreak continue to die. But just how many isn't clear. 

A lawyer representing those sickened says four more people have died after lingering illnesses linked to eating the tainted fruit last summer. But officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the agency has been notified of just two more deaths tied to the outbreak. Those deaths occurred "well before" the agency's Dec. 8 "final" report, but were logged only after, said Lola Russell, a spokeswoman for the CDC.

At that time, CDC reported 30 deaths and one miscarriage related to the outbreak, part of 146 illnesses in 28 states.

The discrepancy may lie in how outbreak-related deaths are reported by state-level officials, Russell wrote in an e-mail.

"It can be unclear whether a death is directly related to infection with listeria when a patient dies many weeks or months after first becoming ill with listeria infection, especially if the patient was elderly or had serious medical conditions that also can lead to death," Lola Russell wrote. "The count of outbreak-related deaths is not final and may still change."

Bill Marler, a Seattle food safety lawyer, said that three of his clients have died in the weeks since the CDC report. They include Paul Schwarz, 92, of Kansas City, Mo.; Sharon Jones, 62, of Castle Rock, Colo.; and Mike Hauser, 68, of Monument, Colo. Dale L. Braddock, 79, of Omaha, Neb., also reportedly died after contracting a listeria infection.

Russell, of the CDC, could not provide the states where the two deaths beyond the 30 the agency has previously counted occurred.

Marler and other food safety lawyers are suing producers and distributors of the tainted fruit, including Jensen Farms of Holly, Colo., where federal inspectors found evidence that poor sanitation, poor storage practices and dirty equipment caused the deadly outbreak. Illnesses were first reported on Sept. 2; recall of the entire crop of cantaloupes soon followed.

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Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP, file

White-tailed deer similar to this one were the source of an odd outbreak of E. coli food poisoning among students in a Minnesota high school science class.

A Minnesota high school science project that involved hunting and butchering deer -- including one road-kill capture -- and turning the meat into venison kabobs backfired when 29 students were sickened with a rare kind of E. coli food poisoning, investigators say.

The 2010 incident just now reported in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases highlights the risks of E. coli contamination, not just from factory-produced meat, but also from small, local providers.

Doctors first knew they had a problem in December 2010 when two kids from the same high school turned up at a Minnesota hospital with abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. Fearing they had a food poisoning outbreak on their hands, they quickly called in the state’s top-notch public health officials.

Both teens had taken part in a school environmental science and outdoor recreation class that involving hunting, shooting and butchering six white-tailed deer, explained Joshua Rounds, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Public Health. A seventh deer was harvested after being hit by a car, the report says.

The deer were processed on school grounds and then grilled and eaten in class a few weeks before the students got sick.

Epidemiologists interviewed 117 kids in five class periods and found that 29 definitely had become ill, but not with E. coli O157:H7, the strain commonly associated with food poisoning from ground beef.

Rounds suspected the deer might have carried another E. coli strain that also produces poisons known as Shiga toxins. He was right. Samples from the students and the deer meet turned up E. coli O103:H2, which is part of a larger category of non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bugs, known as STECs.

Scientists also turned up another E. coli strain, E. coli O145:NM that didn’t produce Shiga toxins.

STECs are becoming a more worrisome form of E. coli, so much so that federal agriculture officials are poised to begin banning six strains of the possibly lethal bacteria from some forms of beef in the nation’s food supply starting next spring.

Under the new regulations, the bacteria will be considered adulterants and it will be illegal to sell beef contaminated with the bacteria collectively dubbed “the big six,” including Shiga-toxin producing E. coli O103 and O145.

In the case of the Minnesota deer hunters, the source of the problem was clear.

People don’t usually get sick from eating hunks or steaks of muscle meat, Rounds said. In this case, however, the meat had been skewered and cooked only to medium rare. The skewers had dragged contaminants from the meat’s surface down to the center of the kabobs, which hadn’t been cooked to a high enough temperature to kill the bacteria.

Unless the entire hunk of meat is cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, there’s a risk of food poisoning, Rounds said.

Another factor was hand-washing when handling meat -- or the lack of it, Rounds said.

Not everyone in the class was as fastidious about cleaning their hands as they could have been.

“If you think about high school males, they’re probably not the best when it comes to food safety practices,” he said. “So you can have cross-contamination.”

The case is a reminder, Rounds said, that all meat, no matter where it comes from, should be treated with careful precautions.

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Nineteen people in seven states have been diagnosed with salmonella infections after reportedly eating ground beef from a chain of Maine-based supermarkets, government health officials said.

The illnesses have all been traced to Hannaford, a Scarborough grocery chain that recalled an undetermined amount of ground beef on Dec. 15, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. The beef was marked with a sell-by date of Dec. 17.

The strain of salmonella Typhimurium detected in the outbreak appears to be resistant to common drugs, which can make the foodborne illness more difficult to treat. Of 15 victims who provided information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, seven have been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.

Illnesses began on or after Oct. 8 and have been reported through mid-December. Illnesses that occurred after that time might not have been reported yet because of the lag between when a person becomes sick and when they reach out to health officials.

Consumers should check their homes for the recalled products, which are listed here.

Salmonella infections can cause diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps within hours or days. Illness usually lasts four to seven days. 

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FDA: Moldy applesauce repackaged by school lunch supplier

Winn Dixie

Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. have recalled 14.5-ounce cans of Italian Breen Beans because they might contain whole, in-shell peanuts.

A man expecting to find only green beans in a can of Winn-Dixie Brand Italian Green Beans was surprised this week to find a whole, in-shell peanut mixed in with the vegetables.

The discovery sparked a flurry of activity at the Florida-based grocery chain, which quickly issued a recall for 14.5-ounce cans of the beans with a best-buy date of September 2014.

“We are conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the peanut contamination in order to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future,” Mary Kellmanson, Winn-Dixie Stores Inc.'s group vice president of marketing,  said in a statement.

The manufacturer that produces green beans for Winn-Dixie also cans boiled peanuts using some of the same machinery, spokesman Eric Barnes said.

The mix-up is particularly concerning to people with peanut allergies, who could suffer serious, even fatal reactions to peanut-tainted beans.

So far, however, no one has reported illness, placing this recall in the category of industrial food mistakes that don’t appear to result in tragedy. In a year that saw sickness and deaths from foods including whole cantaloupe, ground turkey and sprout seeds, there were some simply odd recalls as well.

Take the goof-up that occurred in mid-November, when Diamond Crystal Brands Inc. of Savannah, Ga., issued a recall of 12-ounce GFS canisters that were supposed to be filled with sugar, but were actually filled with non-dairy coffee creamer.

Or the mistake that led to the recall of 875 pounds of center-cut steaks made by Chef’s Requested Foods Inc. of Oklahoma City. Retailers expected 10-ounce, bacon-wrapped prime steaks, but actually received -- turkey filets. The official reason for the recall was undeclared allergens of wheat and soy, not grumbling over missing out on a good dinner.

Other notable mix-ups this year included a recall in February of 15,760 pounds of frozen chicken and steak fajitas manufactured by Phil’s Fresh Foods Inc. of Boulder, Colo. The 7-ounce cartons of fire-grilled fajitas were pulled back because some steak packs might have included chicken and some chicken packs included steak.

Such mistakes may seem minor, especially compared with the massive bulk of food products that are packaged correctly. But Kantha Shelke, a food scientist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists, said they reveal potentially lax production or training protocols and could lead to serious problems for consumers.

“The food business is a really serious business. What you are making is going into people’s bodies,” she said. “No mistake is a small mistake.”

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 If you’re one of the many who often sneak bites of cookie batter while forming little mounds of the sticky, sweet stuff for baking, government scientists have a message for you. Stop it now!

A new report shows there may be some nasty germs lurking in ready-to-bake cookie dough.

“What our report shows is that you shouldn’t eat cookie dough raw, no matter where it comes from,” said the report’s lead author Dr. Karen Neil, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s supposed to be baked.”

Neil and her colleagues concluded that raw, ready-to-bake cookie dough was what caused 77 people in 30 states to become ill, 35 of whom became so sick that they needed to be hospitalized.

After learning about the outbreak, the researchers were able to track down the culprit by comparing the eating habits of 36 healthy volunteers to 36 people sickened by a deadly strain of E coli bacteria in 2009. Raw cookie dough consumption was the thing all 36 had in common.

When the researchers visited manufacturing plants where the cookie batter was being made their suspicions were confirmed: they found E coli in the samples they collected at the plants, according to the report which was published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Despite an exhaustive investigation, Neil and her colleagues still aren’t able to say which of the ingredients, or what part of the manufacturing process, led to the contamination of the cookie dough. It’s possible, Neil said, that flour might have been the problem.

Flour, she explained, doesn’t go through the kind of special processing to kill off pathogens that ingredients like pasteurized eggs, molasses, sugar, baking soda, and margarine do.

Neil’s investigation ultimately led to the recall of 3.6 million packages of cookie dough. The manufacturer of the dough isn’t named in the report. 

If you’re a fan of raw cookie dough and are wondering why it is that you can eat cookie dough ice cream, Neil explained that the preparation process for the dough in ice cream is different from the product that is sold as “ready-to-bake.”

“The cookie dough in ice cream was meant to be consumed raw,” she said. “It’s formulated as a ready-to-eat product. The cookie dough that is labeled “ready-to-bake” in the refrigerator section of the grocery store – or even the dough that you make at home – should be cooked before you eat it.”

Do you sneak bites of cookie dough? Tell us on Facebook.

Final tally on cantaloupe crisis: 146 sick, 30 dead

Government health officials issued a final tally Thursday for a months-long outbreak of listeria food poisoning in contaminated cantaloupe: 146 sick and 30 dead.

Those numbers reflected infections in 28 states tied to tainted whole melons from Jensen Farms of Holly, Colo., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Faulty processing and shipping practices at the firm's Granada, Colo., packing facility led to the dozens of illnesses and deaths -- and decimated the melon market in several states.

The outbreak is the worst since a California listeria outbreak in 1985 in which contaminated Mexican-style fresh cheese caused 52 deaths, including many stillbirths, according to the CDC.

Among 140 ill people who offered information about what they ate, 94 percent reported eating cantaloupe in the month before they got sick, including many who said it came from one region in southeastern Colorado. The outbreak of listeria monocytogenes, the first detected in melons, led to at least 142 hospitalizations and a miscarriage.

More than 310,000 cases of potentially tainted cantaloupes were shipped to at least 24 states between July 29 and Sept. 10.