Preventing Food-borne Illness

Beginning in July 2011, 33 people died and more than 110 others became ill across the U.S. after eating cantaloupes shipped from a farm in southeastern Colorado. It was one of the deadliest outbreaks of food-borne illness the country has ever seen. The fleshy orange melons, officials later determined, became contaminated with the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes at a packing facility run by family-owned Jensen Farms. An investigation conducted by the Food & Drug Administration and the Centers For Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) eventually identified dirty equipment and a missing antimicrobial wash step in Jensen’s cleaning procedure as likely contributors to the outbreak. Without the chlorine-based disinfection, melons sitting in pools of rinse water on the farm’s packing line might easily have spread the deadly bacteria from cantaloupe to cantaloupe. According to Sam R. Nugen, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “If the farmers had been able ...