| Partnership for Food Safety Education

The Poo Fighters Rock Food Safety Training in Minnesota

April 4, 2016

Great! Unique way to present info!

Fun and kept my attention for the whole time!

Very entertaining as well as informational.

I teach food safety/cooking classes at the center for independent living and this will be very helpful.

These raves were for the Minnesota Department of Health’s Poo Fighters 2015 food safety multi-state sold-out “tour”.

The department’s Sarah Leach used the clever Poo Fighters Band Tour theme to weave together training modules for instructors of certified food manager courses:

*The Band – human and economic burden, pathogen biology, symptoms, treatment

* Event Staff – foodborne illness risk factors, person in charge/certified food manager roles

* Poo Fighters Diarrhea & Vomit Tour – foodborne illness hotline, number of outbreaks

* Classic Hits – historic or well-known outbreaks

* New Releases – recent outbreaks

* Summary, Q & A – review and extend learning, self-correct and discuss quiz

Attendees acquired resources and skills for educating colleagues and the public on the topics of foodborne illness reporting and investigation in Minnesota. Sessions improved knowledge of foodborne illness and dispelled myths about transmission. The presentations used real-life examples from familiar settings to bring scientific facts and regulatory requirements to life.

Sarah Leach is the creator and “band” promoter of the “Poo Fighters” Tour. She is also a Registered Environmental Health Specialist/Registered Sanitarian, and the Principal State Food Manager Certification Program Coordinator for the Minnesota Department of Health. Want to learn more about doing a band tour in your community? Contact Sarah at Sarah.Leach@state.mn.us

Culinary Arts Students Make Food Safety Visit to Elementary School

August 22, 2015

Culinary Arts students at the Caldwell County Area Technology Center in Kentucky brought valuable food safety messages to younger kids at Caldwell County Elementary and Primary Schools.

In just a few days, kids learned all about handwashing, food temperatures and the “Danger Zone”, kitchen safety, food borne illnesses, and how to use color-coded cutting boards. The kids loved seeing the germs on their hands using the Glo-Germ kits and trying on hairnets provided by a nearby ConAgra Foods.

Thanks to these lessons, the kids are ready to Fight BAC! against foodborne illness.

Denver Loves Food Safety Education

June 26, 2015

Alison Peterson, a Food Program Supervisor for the Denver Department of Environmental Health (DEH) caught up with us to share wonderful activities of the DEH that protect public health through food safety education!

Denver Department of Environmental Health Public Health Inspection Division is passionate about education! DEH is dedicated to protecting the public’s health and safety by educating the food industry. DEH regularly offers basic food safety classes for anyone interested. The target audience is the every-day food employee. Our classes provide a comprehensive overview of day-to-day food safety concepts in a food facility. We do have a heavy focus on the biological hazards of food-borne illness and how crucial hand washing is by conducting GloGerm demonstrations.

DEH has always offered basic food safety classes. Over the past few years, we have really increased our educations efforts. We developed a new Power Point presentation, complete with “real” pictures. We added more classes to the 2015 schedule including Spanish classes! We created a colorful, fun pamphlet to hand out to operators, employees, and anyone interested in attending the class! We created a “food safety instructor team” of any inspectors interested in teaching this class. We met, we discussed, we talked food safety, and we all chuckled when someone mentioned “Oh, I can definitely talk about explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting in front of a group of people!”

Our educational program has improved so much that Basic Food Safety Class attendance has skyrocketed from 10-15 participants per class to almost 50 participants! We now have a team of four instructors (and two of them also speak Spanish)! We have also received numerous requests for off-site classes and at the end of 2014, conducted 10 off-site classes! In 2015, we have already conducted 3 off-site classes too! Our initiative this year is to reach out to as many food handlers as possible. We have partnered with State Food Safety to offer an online food safety class in multiple languages!

We have received great feedback regarding the availability of this educational opportunity. Our instructors created a post-class evaluation as well, where one participant concluded that, “The sharing of “real life” experience. All the pictures and stories really help things hit home!”

Jr. BAC Fighter Nabs Prize in Speech Contest

June 26, 2015

Anna Morris does her part to keep food safe.

Anna is pictured above after giving a speech during the the Food Safety and Preservation category in a speech contest. After answering the judge’s questions with ease, Anna took home second place!

Anna also shared a photo of her local Middle and High School 4-H Group at a meeting on food safety. They played trivia games to test knowledge on proper food handling and then learned all about how to prevent food borne illnesses. Everyone had fun learning valuable food safety lessons!

We’re so proud of BAC Fighters like Anna who do so much for food safety around the world.

A Foodborne Illness Mystery

June 26, 2015

Peter Wong is tackling food safety by writing a mystery about an outbreak of foodborne illness aboard a cruise ship. The book is the latest in the Galactic Academy of Science series, in which middle school students travel through time to learn enough science to solve a mystery in the present. In The Contaminated Case of the Cooking Contest, due to be published by Tumblehome Learning on June 1, 2015,middle school students Mae and Clinton are excited to be aboard a Caribbean cruise that features cooking contests for adults and teens. But when passengers start falling ill, Selectra Volt, their Galactic Academy of Science guide from the future, challenges the two teens to find the cause. Is the outbreak a result of poor food handling, or is someone purposely sabotaging the ship’s food supply?

Mae and Clinton learn about food safety through a series of time-travel visits to scientists, doctors, and inventors of the past and present. They visit Nicholas Appert, who invented canning to feed Napoleon’s army; Clarence Birdseye, who learned how to freeze fish from the Inuit in the Arctic; John Snow, who discovered the cause of a cholera outbreak in Victorian London; Typhoid Mary, who unknowingly caused illness in seven families she cooked for; Ferran Adria, a master of creative cooking; and present-day scientists studying food-borne illness at the CDC in Atlanta and a U.S. Army research facility in Natick, Massachusetts.

Between trips, Mae and Clinton compete in the kids’ cooking contest, help out in the ship infirmary, test food samples for bacteria, gather clues, and follow suspicious characters. As the ship sails through the edge of a hurricane and the ship infirmary fills to overflowing, Clinton and Mae race to gather evidence and sift through a pile of suspects. the book provides a fun way to learn about the organisms that contaminate our food, and how outbreaks can be prevented or stopped.