Arizona Food Safety Specialists, LLC., Food Safety Resources Site www.azfoodsafety.com

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Salmonella warning for guacamole, salsa, tamales
Associated Press
5:19 p.m. CDT, July 23, 2010

IOWA CITY, Iowa — The Linn and Johnson County Public Health Departments are warning the public not to eat guacamole, salsa and uncooked tamales prepared by La Reyna Supermarket & Taqueria of Iowa City before July 19.

The products were sold at farmers' markets in Linn, Johnson and Dubuque counties and may be contaminated with salmonella. The departments say any guacamole, salsa and uncooked tamales should be thrown away and not eaten. The salmonella investigation was initiated by Linn County Public Health officials and illnesses were traced to products produced by the restaurant in Johnson County.

The owners of La Reyna are fully cooperating in this public notice and have measures to ensure the future safety of their products. ------

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The HACCP seven principles

The HACCP seven principles

Principle 1:

Conduct a hazard analysis. Plans determine the food safety hazards and identify the preventive measures the plan can apply to control these hazards. A food safety hazard is any biological, chemical, or physical property that may cause a food to be unsafe for human consumption.

Principle 2:

Identify critical control points. A Critical Control Point (CCP) is a point, step, or procedure in a food manufacturing process at which control can be applied and, as a result, a food safety hazard can be prevented, eliminated, or reduced to an acceptable level.

Principle 3:

Establish critical limits for each critical control point. A critical limit is the maximum or minimum value to which a physical, biological, or chemical hazard must be controlled at a critical control point to prevent, eliminate, or reduce to an acceptable level.

Principle 4:

Establish critical control point monitoring requirements. Monitoring activities are necessary to ensure that the process is under control at each critical control point. In the United States, the FSIS is requiring that each monitoring procedure and its frequency be listed in the HACCP plan.

Principle 5:

Establish corrective actions. These are actions to be taken when monitoring indicates a deviation from an established critical limit. The final rule requires a plant's HACCP plan to identify the corrective actions to be taken if a critical limit is not met. Corrective actions are intended to ensure that no product injurious to health or otherwise adulterated as a result of the deviation enters commerce.

Principle 6:

Establish record keeping procedures. The HACCP regulation requires that all plants maintain certain documents, including its hazard analysis and written HACCP plan, and records documenting the monitoring of critical control points, critical limits, verification activities, and the handling of processing deviations.

Principle 7:

Establish procedures for ensuring the HACCP system is working as intended. Validation ensures that the plants do what they were designed to do; that is, they are successful in ensuring the production of safe product. Plants will be required to validate their own HACCP plans.

FSIS will not approve HACCP plans in advance, but will review them for conformance with the final rule. Verification ensures the HACCP plan is adequate, that is, working as intended. Verification procedures may include such activities as review of HACCP plans, CCP records, critical limits and microbial sampling and analysis.

FSIS is requiring that the HACCP plan include verification tasks to be performed by plant personnel. Verification tasks would also be performed by FSIS inspectors. Both FSIS and industry will undertake microbial testing as one of several verification activities. Verification also includes 'validation' - the process of finding evidence for the accuracy of the HACCP system (e.g. scientific evidence for critical limitations)

Food Safety fallacies can lead to foodborne illnesses. Here are some common fallacies!

1. If it smells bad or looks bad, taste it to see if it is OK. ABSOLUTELY NOT!

Doing this can have serious consequences. The first rule of food safety is - If it looks bad or smells bad, DO NOT taste it, throw it out!

2. Let hot food cool before putting it in the refrigerator

The best way to handle this is to put the food in the refrigerator as soon as possible. The faster a food cools the less likely to spoil. By letting it cool at room temperature, the temperature drops slowly creating a situation favorable to microbial growth.

3. If a food gets moldy, just throw out the moldy portion. This is not recommended

Bread and cheese are the most common foods to become moldy. When mold grows on a product, what you see is only part of the mold.

When mold becomes visible on a product, you are seeing the highest concentration of mold. The mold is normally found throughout a product. Think of mold growing like a spider creating a web or roots to a plant

Moldy food products can cause health problems. Molds can produce toxic substances called mycotoxins. These substances can cause various health problems, especially if one has a compromised or weakened immune system.

For example, if someone is allergic to penicillin, eating moldy bread or cheese is not recommended because one of the molds which grow on bread and cheese is the penicillium species (this is where penicillin comes from)

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Saturday, July 24, 2010

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