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Tune in every Tuesday for a brand new episode of Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast. Join Francine L. Shaw, the savvy CEO of Savvy Food Safety, and Matthew Regusci, compliance connoisseur and founder of Fostering Compliance, as they serve up the latest in food safety with a side of laughter.
Explore the ins and outs of food systems, responsible food practices, and food safety regulations. Stay informed about food safety awareness and the not-so-occasional food recall. Delve deep into the complexities of the food supply chain with our dynamic duo, who blend expert insights with a pinch of food safety humor. Whether you're knee-deep in the food safety industry or just passionate about what's on your plate, this podcast promises a fresh take on staying safe while eating well.
Expect candid conversations, personal anecdotes, and occasional guest appearances that spice up the discussion. Shaw and Regusci bring their combined decades of experience to the table, making each episode as informative as it is entertaining. From industry trends to must-know food safety news and regulations, they've got your back (and your lunch).
In essence, Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast is not just about imparting information; it's about fostering a culture of food safety. By shedding light on the intricacies of the food supply chain and the latest food safety news, it aims to promote awareness and encourage responsible food practices among consumers and industry professionals alike.
When it comes to food safety, knowledge is power, and a good laugh is the best seasoning. At the heart of every episode is one golden rule: Don't Eat Poop!
DEP E94
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Justin Dwyer: So, the simple fact is, with public health, like, we have to react. On a great day, yep, I'll go out, I'll hit a few inspections up, and there'll be great inspections. On a bad day, the, well, a not so great day, the first inspection is, takes me all day long. I'm stuck there. A really bad day has been a great day until I got to my last inspection, and now I'm going, like, eight hours into overtime.
Because I can't leave because it's just not safe.
Matt Regusci: That's a really good point. That's It's one thing for your first one to be like, Oh, it looks like I'm going to be here all day. It's another one to work the whole day and then, Oh shoot, I'm going to be here all night.
intro: Everybody's gotta eat, and nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points, from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans Francine L. Shaw and Matt Ragucci for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule.
Don't. Eat. Poop. Don't eat poop.
Matt Regusci: Hello, hello, Francine.
Francine L Shaw: Hi Matt.
Matt Regusci: So we are here still at the Illinois Environmental Health Inspector Association. I mess it up every single time. It's an acronym.
Justin Dwyer: Oh yeah, it's on my badge. I E H A. I
Francine L Shaw: E
Justin Dwyer: H
Matt Regusci: A.
Francine L Shaw: So for the people that are listening, we're recording multiple sessions in one day because we're at a conference and Matt just can't seem to get it together where we're at.
Matt Regusci: Literally the lanyard has it on there too. I know the acronym. All the words. So many words.
But we have a very special guest here, and I'm so excited to introduce him, Justin Dwyer. And Justin's running the conference, and he is also a health inspector at Illinois, health inspector. And I would love, Justin, for you to introduce yourself to our audience.
Justin Dwyer: Well, my name is Justin Dwyer. I'm with Peoria City County Health Department, which is located right in central Illinois. I do food safety inspections, well septic inspections, Uh, I've done vector and surveillance, uh, also do lead abatement inspections for children with elevated blood lead levels. And then also oversee our farmer's market program and our cottage food, which is like the food freedom for the, the county that I'm in.
Francine L Shaw: Cool. So we've talked a lot about health inspections, so you just brought up a couple of different things that. I'd like to talk about one of them being the children with the elevated... Can't talk.
Justin Dwyer: Elevated blood lead levels.
Francine L Shaw: I can't, I can't speak anymore. So yes, that did you have, and again, if we ask you anything that you can't speak about, please just let us know with the applesauce.
Did you have any of those cases to deal with the.
Justin Dwyer: So, so to our knowledge, we didn't have any cases directly associated with it. However, once the recall was actually placed as inspectors, we actually went out to verify that it all had been removed. We actually did the store that I was assigned and went to, we actually did find it still sitting on the shelves.
Which means we immediately pulled it and had it destroyed. Luckily though, we, I did actually ask them to try and scan it. It wouldn't actually scan. So if anybody had tried to purchase that product, they wouldn't have been able to.
Matt Regusci: Wow, that is so cool. Okay. So everybody who's listened to this and has listened to our previous one about the lead in that applesauce.
There was a huge outbreak, or not outbreak, but a huge recall on that because the kids were showing up with huge amounts of lead in their system and a lot of illness from it. And so you were tasked out there to make sure that was off the shelf.
Justin Dwyer: So any of the locations that it would have been associated with, We sent inspectors out to verify that it was not there.
Matt Regusci: That's awesome. Okay.
But I won't, I'm really curious about the elevated lead though, cause we don't really talk about that much. So somebody goes to the doctor or the hospital, a kid finds that there's the mom or whatever doctor finds that there's elevated lead levels. What is the process then on your side?
Like is it usually an isolated event or do you find pockets of it and what do you do with that?
Justin Dwyer: So in Peoria County, we have the South end of Peoria. We have a lot of older homes. Obviously, we know mid 60s and before, we're going to see a lot of lead paint. If those houses aren't being kept up, then we see the deterioration.
The moment you start having that deterioration, now you have the possibility of lead poisoning. The big thing you're going to see it is that one to two year old range, friction surfaces, windows, things like that. What happens is, as they, that lead paint rubs, it turns into dust. Dust falls on the floor, child crawls around, it's on their hands, and what do they do?
They put their hands in their mouth. And then they wind up getting poisoned.
Francine L Shaw: And even it starts to chip, because that lead paint is much different than latex paint and the paint today. It cracks, it's brittle, it comes off the walls differently in the older, I live in an old house. That we're renovating, and it has lead paint.
There's zero question that's lead paint, because it just looks much different than what the newer paint does. And it's the porch paint, when the rooms that we haven't gotten to yet, it just, it cracks, it's brittle. It just looks so much different. And small kids can pick up anything and put it in their mouth.
And I guess that's some of what you're dealing
Justin Dwyer: with. That we refer to it as, like, alligatoring. So it almost looks like the alligator skin. So, so even just walking up to onto a porch, yeah, but even walking up onto a porch, I can look and be like, yep, there's a 50, 50 chance. And then we'll go ahead and test it and determine where we find the lead paint when we go out to the home.
Wow.
Francine L Shaw: And there's a special process for, you don't just, for getting rid of that. You know what I mean? You can't just scrape it off and.
Justin Dwyer: No, and especially if you can't dry scrape, you got to wet scrape because you don't want to release any more toxins and then you have to isolate those areas. You either completely remove it, like for windows and doors, the best thing to do is to replace them.
Right. Pull the old one out, put a new one in. Some cases you can't. So what you might have to do is encapsulate and close it. On porches, we tend to use closed aluminum soffit on ceilings because you can't take all that ceiling out. It's cost prohibitive. So you just wind up enclosing it in and hope that it just stays there.
Francine L Shaw: It's as much of a nightmare as asbestos.
Justin Dwyer: Yes, it can be.
Francine L Shaw: If I were to have to compare the two to get rid of or make sure that it's safe for the homeowner.
Matt Regusci: Wow, that is so cool.
Okay, so what is your department, then?
Justin Dwyer: So, my department is environmental health. Yes.
Matt Regusci: Okay, so food safety is underneath environmental health.
So there's a whole bunch of different things like health inspections in restaurants and grocery stores are also underneath environmental health, which would be lead and all those other things. Yes. Fascinating.
Francine L Shaw: So, yeah, there's two more things that I want to talk about.
Farmers markets. I see your smile, we're not on, we're being videoed.
Justin Dwyer: I get this a lot. I somehow, I've become like the subject matter expert for the state when it comes to a lot of weird farmer's market questions. So a lot of other counties reach out to me when they have questions. Because I've worked with legislation and negotiating some of the laws that we currently have in place.
Francine L Shaw: So I, not really a question about farmer's markets. I've had some experiences with farmer's markets. Everybody tends to think that while it's a farmer's market, it's safe. We're thinking organic. We're thinking safe. Everything's done. I'm going to go there. I'm going to get my fresh food. What's the craziest experience you've ever had with a farmer's market inspection?
Justin Dwyer: I honestly, usually most of our farmers are really good. But the farmer's markets. In our area have been around, especially our, our riverfront market on Saturday mornings have been around a long time. The weirdest things though, I found it like various farmers markets we've had repacks are usually my favorite to run into because I'm like, Oh, it's March and you have grapes and the local grocery store happens to have grapes on sale this week.
So we do run into that occasionally, which there's nothing illegal about it. I just, you know, not really my favorite.
Matt Regusci: So they're pulling it from the grocery store, packing it into their local farmer box and putting it on the, and selling it like that as opposed to got it. Yeah. Not a lot of grapes in Illinois is in the middle of March.
Justin Dwyer: No, no, not too much.
Francine L Shaw: So, I had some crazy experiences. I thought I'd call for a police escort one time at a farmer's market over meat. The meat was like 70 some odd degrees that was in this meat cooler, this big, like when you think when you go to just a regular meat market, the store only sells meat, you know what I mean?
They have this meat, big meat coolers. It reminds me of my grandma when I was a kid and they had this small country store and I can barely see over top of this meat cooler. And as soon as I opened it, like the smell hit me in the face. It was, uh, it was bad.
Justin Dwyer: I know that smell.
Francine L Shaw: It was, yeah, I can smell it sitting here.
It was so bad. It was rancid. It was so bad. And immediately I'm thinking, You can't sell anything else that's in here because if it's not something that has died underneath, crawled underneath and died, this, whatever's in here is really bad. And they're selling stuff out of here. Most of the people that are buying product out of here are in a high risk population.
They're, I'm seeing who's in the farmer's market. So we shut down this little market that's there and taken the temperatures and it's 70, high 70s, low 80s, and it's like the temperatures are horrible. This product is no good, and this was before COVID, I could smell pretty well, even after, I'm thinking even when I lost my sense of smell, when I had COVID, I could have still smelled this.
It was so bad. And literally all these people started gathering around this one lady screaming at me. This is where I buy my meat. You can't do this. And they're super angry and just screaming. And like, when I say mob mentality, I had an assistant with me that day. She's six feet tall and she's like deer in the headlight.
Look, it was like that just genuine fear. It wasn't her responsibility to deal with this. We had so many issues in that municipality. We had the police, not 911, but we had their number on speed dial. And it was like, you need to call the police and let me deal with this. And they were there in short order, but literally we shut them down.
We destroyed the product and yeah, that people did not see us as helping them. They were really upset. That's when walking out the door that day, I'm like, one day I'm going to write a book.
Justin Dwyer: I've experienced things like that too, where we've been throwing things away and we denature it. We pour bleach on it.
We want to make sure people aren't doing it and you'll have somebody get all upset. Well, this could just be donated to charity and I'm like, no, it's not okay anymore. You can't consume this product.
Matt Regusci: So you can't sell the product, but go ahead and give it to homeless people because they don't get sick.
Justin Dwyer: That's, but that's the mentality and not realizing and don't get me wrong. That's a great idea, but I'm not going to give it to somebody that's going to get sick. Exactly.
Francine L Shaw: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Justin Dwyer: Like, that's completely counterintuitive to the entire point of what I'm trying to do.
Francine L Shaw: Get sick and die, but let's get down here and give it to the homeless people.
Justin Dwyer: But we'll give it away. No! Because if we donate the food, it's okay now. Right. That's the mentality.
Matt Regusci: Right, through the act of donation, pathogens disappear. Yeah. Or lead, or whatever it is, they just disappear. Mm hmm. Wow.
Francine L Shaw: At that point, I had a much different title for my book. How Kings like Francine, you can't do that.
Matt Regusci: I know, I told her to do it. Yeah, I told her to do it. But other wiser people like, no, don't listen to Matt on this.
Francine L Shaw: You shouldn't do that. Anyway, yeah, so yeah, that's one of, that was just like, so, so.
Matt Regusci: So when you're setting up, so you become the expert within the state on farmers markets and you also said cottage too, right?
Yep.
And so what's the, when people are trying to, or asking you questions or whatever, what type of advice are you giving them for both cottage and for, and for farmers markets in terms of food safety, environmental health, just in general?
Justin Dwyer: So the big thing, we always talk about proper hand washing. That's the number one.
Temperatures are going to be the next. Obviously, anytime we're doing cottage food or any food freedom, we're talking about food that's being made in people's homes legally.
Matt Regusci: If you explain food freedom, by the way, because we've heard that a few times, but like a real good definition of what is food freedom?
Justin Dwyer: Oh, the best definition I would say is it's a law that's going to essentially circumvent any food safety regulations like the FDA code that we normally would. It basically allows a product to be made in a person's home under whichever specific regulation it is, and then what they're able to do is then sell it to a consumer.
So in Illinois, you would register with the county that you reside in. Once you do that, you can make any of the foods that are allowed under the Cottage Food Act. You can sell it at fairs, festivals, markets. We only allow direct to consumer. We don't allow any wholesale. You can't ship outside of the state of Illinois.
But essentially, farmers markets, You can, there's festivals, pop up events, uh, you can sell your homemade products.
Matt Regusci: And so when we were talking with Doug Farquhar, this was part of that conversation. Great. If you're listening to this and you want to know his definition of it, it's really good. But basically once you, with the cottage law and the freedom act here, once you sell across state line, now you're an interstate commerce, right?
So now you have to abide by the FDA. But here, you, because it's only going to be in that municipality, that county, or the state of Illinois, are you guys going to make your own rules within those boundaries, right?
Justin Dwyer: Well, not us, because that's the legislator that decided and wanted. Right, as a citizen and the legislature.
Now, the one thing I am going to actually say, there is one plus that I found with cottage food. When you're looking at certain sections, we talk about at risk populations, they tend to be poor, they don't have a lot of money, they don't have a lot of opportunities. What are the chances that they're going to be able to open a retail kitchen and just manage to come up with that money?
So in these situations. People that want to side hustle, they want to have a little bakery, they want to sell these specific items, and we've seen it multiple times in our county, they'll start under cottage food, but within one or two years, they've now moved to a retail license. Several of them are now wholesale under the Illinois Department of Public Health.
They're now selling their products to legally in a commercial kitchen. So they were able to actually use that as a stepping stone. It's one of the only reasons I have some comfort level with cottage food is simply because it creates an opportunity in some areas of the community that otherwise they wouldn't.
Otherwise what they're going to do is they're going to still have their home bakery, they're going to fly under the radar, they're not going to have the proper labeling, they're not going to be registered with the local health department, they're not going to have the required training, they're not going to be following all those food safety steps that we've put in place each time that legislation has been adjusted.
Matt Regusci: Wow. That's a super good point. So you're able to create little entrepreneurship opportunities that then could turn into a bigger business, but under the cottage act and what you're talking about now, though, you are putting food safety things in place. Then you're talking about like it may be their home kitchen, but are you training them then how to prepare food, clean and sanitize?
Justin Dwyer: So one of the requirements, which if you look at food freedom laws across the U. S., I believe we're one of four or five states that requires the cottage food person or anybody that's under that cottage food light or registration that is making or packaging the product must be a certified food manager.
They actually have to go through that training. They have to go take the course for Illinois. It's the eight hour course, pass the exam. They turn that in with their registration. One of the things with in Illinois is we don't conduct routine inspections on the home kitchen. Now there is a way. So if we get a complaint, foodborne illness, we get very specific types of complaints.
We have the right to go to that home and conduct an inspection, basically to ensure that it's being made in a safe manner. If we find that there are issues, then we can suspend registration until such a time that everything is corrected. A couple years ago, one of my colleagues ran into this. They wound up figuring out that the food was being made in a hoarder house.
And so they got some complaints. They went in, realized the conditions. They were able to suspend registration until things were taken care of. Honestly, I don't know whatever happened to it after, but it is something that you do have to take into consideration.
Francine L Shaw: So I think it's great that you guys do that. You make them go through the steps to be certified and get that education. And like you said, not a lot of states do that. The education is important.
Matt Regusci: That's great because it's teaching them what temperatures to have food at, how long it can sit, washing the hands. It's a really big training. And so really a lot of people that probably wouldn't go through that actually are going to go through it through the Cottage Act.
That's pretty cool. All right. So what other crazy things have you seen in your, how many, what is it? Like How long did you say you've been doing this? 20 years? Just 10 years. 10 years. 10 years.
Francine L Shaw: Well water. Let's talk about well water.
Justin Dwyer: Sure.
Francine L Shaw: I live in the country, Matt just discovered exactly how rural it was.
Justin Dwyer: I walked in when he was zooming in on that map going, wait, there is nothing around you for a hundred miles.
Francine L Shaw: So it's like his, yeah.
Matt Regusci: I was just kidding. We were trying to figure out a bank and she's an hour and a half away from one bank of America and two hours away from Wells Fargo. I didn't quite understand when she says there's nothing around her that there's literally nothing around her.
Francine L Shaw: Yeah. Like you don't buy a hundred acres in the city. Anyway, so I, I have a well. Surprise Matt. I have a well. When we bought the house, we had the well tested, because that's, in my opinion, what you do when you buy a house with a well. Not a lot of people understand that you should do that.
What are the things that you look for? What do you do as far as wells? What is your involvement in that?
Justin Dwyer: So we will permit any new construction of wells. We provide test kits to some people that may want to test. We always promote, test your well annually, once a year, coliform and E. coli is what you're looking for, just to make sure you're, you don't become ill.
The big thing is with people that are on wells, I would definitely say, check your well cap, make sure it's not loose. If you can pull the top off, you got a problem. You want to make sure that you have a safe drinking water supply. And if the well's good, also you may want to check nitrate, nitrites, and just verify that those are within a safe realm.
You might need to purchase bottled water or find an alternative water source for cooking and drinking. But a lot of times, the wells we run into, there's no issues with them. And people use them, drink from them, yeah.
Francine L Shaw: You will, for Especially people that live in the city and have never had a well, the thought of well water is just, Oh my God, you drink water from a well?
Absolutely. There's nothing better than water that doesn't taste like chlorine.
Justin Dwyer: So prior to me doing this, I worked for Peoria Park District and I did education and we had a, it was a farm that we did education stuff on and they wound up running city water. Uh, to the area and the manager was so upset that this back well was going to be sealed because this is the best sun tea ever.
And I don't disagree. He would make sun tea. I know there's weird things with sun tea and food safety. I get it. But, but to him, that water was like the best tasting water ever. You talk about people that live in the country, they'll go get water and bring it in. He lived in the city. He would take water and bring it home because he just, he absolutely loved the way that that water tasted.
It's pure, clean water from the aquifer. Yeah. And yeah, he was so upset when it got sealed.
Francine L Shaw: Yeah. Yeah. I understand. I, we lived in town and we had town water for, see, I don't, we don't even call it city water. I lived in a town. Yeah. I saw. And I was so excited about going back to having well water because it is so much better.
If you're, like I said, if you get it, you want to get it tested.
Matt Regusci: Do you not drink sun tea? You've, I grew up on sun tea. We're talking about just putting a bunch of Lipton.
Francine L Shaw: Anything and setting it out. Setting it out in the sun. Yeah, my mom made it too all the time.
No, I don't drink it.
Matt Regusci: Oh, UV is a pretty good killer of bacteria.
Francine L Shaw: How long are we letting it sit out in the sun on? No, I don't drink it. There are a lot of things that I do that I know are a little bit risky. There are some things I do not do.
Matt Regusci: Yes.
Francine L Shaw: I've read too much.
Matt Regusci: Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: I just read too much.
Matt Regusci: Well, we know about you and the five second rule. Chocolate. Only one where you'll do that, where Mia is risk based.
Francine L Shaw: I will eat chocolate off the airport floor. No, I'm just kidding. That was a joke.
Matt Regusci: Okay, so we were talking a little bit yesterday about your schedule, and I think it'd be interesting for people to just know what goes in on the life of an inspector on a weekly basis. How many inspections do you do a week and what does that look like if your day goes to hell and what would a day go to hell look like?
Francine L Shaw: I think we just lost him.
Justin Dwyer: I'm going to start having PTSD now. That's that's every week. So the simple fact is with public health, like we have to react. On a great day. Yep. I'll go out, I'll hit a few inspections up and there'll be great inspections on a bad day. The well, a not so great day. The first inspection is takes me all day long.
I'm stuck there. A really bad day has been a great day until I got to my last inspection. And now I'm going like eight hours in overtime because I can't leave cause it's just not safe.
Matt Regusci: That's a really good point. That's it's one thing for your first one to be like, Oh, it looks like I'm going to be here all day.
It's another one to work the whole day. And then. Oh, shoot, I'm going to be here all night.
Justin Dwyer: Yeah, I try really hard to not go to my challenging ones like late afternoon.
Francine L Shaw: So what is really bad when you think I'm just going to do one more and I'm going to go to an easy one and it just turns into the inspection from hell?
Justin Dwyer: The two most common phrases I hear is, why would you pick today? When you walk in and announce yourself, or this is the worst day ever, you know, this is the worst day for you to show up. Yes, it's always the worst day for me to show up, but sometimes they're not lying.
Francine L Shaw: And you can't leave. And see, I always felt so I was in operations before I did inspections.
So I understood both sides and my employees, I swear to God, their brains just oozed out their ears. The minute the inspector walked in the door, they lost everything that they'd ever known. And I understand some of that because they got nervous. The inspector always made them nervous, but there were things that, honest to God, they never did until that inspector walked in the door.
So, as an inspector, I understood that there was a little bit of truth to some of that. When we talked earlier, I said that there's a difference between working dirt and filth, and I can overlook working dirt as an inspector, because I know that. I know what working dirt is, but when somebody's trying to tell me that their filth just happened and I need a putty knife to scrape it off the wall, the problem.
Justin Dwyer: I agree. Uh, and just, you know, both of you were in industry. I did the same thing. I spent years cooking in restaurants. I've been an executive chef. I've been a food and beverage director. I saw super shady things and that's why I went back and got a science degree in order to do this and come to, I guess, well, the dark side.
Uh, is what is commonly, at least my friends that are still in culinary, you know, jokingly say, you went to the dark side, like, you're the inspector, you're the devil. I'm like, look, you know, my, my biggest fear when I was running kitchens was the health department walking in saying somebody got sick.
It never happened to me.
And I feel very blessed that never happened, but I know, cause I know how people feel the moment I walk into the restaurant and like somebody said they got sick and you were on the list of places you can tell when they take it seriously because like their face will just turn white and they just, Oh my God, what happened?
And like, well, let's figure it out. Let's here's the products that they ate. We're going to walk through the entire process. From, through the back entry to how you're handling it, where you're storing it, how's it going out, what other products are coming in contact with it. Outbreaks are a huge thing to, that's a lot of time.
And that's the other thing too, for us, if we get a foodborne illness out, or a complaint, we have 24 hours to respond. So, I might, like we talk about a normal day, well 8. 30 I'm starting to pack my stuff up and I see an email pop up that says, we call it FBI foodborne illness. You're like, all right, well, I'm going to go ahead and change my entire schedule because that now takes priority for me.
Matt Regusci: Got it. So you get some sort of customer complaint, an FBI foodborne illness. And first off, what percentage of your time in a year are you managing those versus your preventative tasks of actually going out and checking up on these things and doing your inspections? And then when that happens, what are the steps from the time you get the complaint to the time where it's resolved?
Justin Dwyer: So the unfortunate thing is most foodborne illness complaints, we never find a true answer. And that's a simple fact. That's the retail side, unlike industry, where you're going to be doing all your zone testing and then you figure out exactly where it is and you do all the recalls on all the product. Sometimes you don't ever truly know what happened.
Matt Regusci: That's really a good point. And so you're talking about on the industry side, the supply chain side in the factory, for instance, the boar's head thing, we can go back and see, okay, well, where was the listeria? You can go test it. You can test the actual product.
You could find it. And then there's a whole bunch of people that ate in a bunch of different places. So you could pinpoint it back to that individual place. There's genetic traits on that listeria that you could pinpoint it back to that place as well. Versus a restaurant or retail, it could have just been that product.
Francine L Shaw: And it's usually gone.
Matt Regusci: And it's gone.
Francine L Shaw: Either thrown out, or it's all consumed, or it's just
Matt Regusci: Gosh, so for you then, on that side of things, you go starting off, I'm most likely not going to find the result. So when you do, that's gotta be both, uh, bittersweet, right? Cause it happened to one of your restaurants, which is a problem by the you also know that I could resolve this.
Justin Dwyer: The chances of a smoking gun are slim to none on the retail side. I know you've gone through those same and it's just it's really hard. One of the things we do is we pull a 72 hour food history. We want to know everything you consume 72 hours prior because it is not the last place you ate.
Matt Regusci: Most likely.
Justin Dwyer: Norovirus.
What 12 to 48 hour incubation period. But, uh, for where I'm at, any restaurant that's listed, we go investigate. So if they have 10 restaurants on there, we're going to 10 restaurants within 24 hours. We're going to go in, we're going to look. So, if there are norovirus type symptoms, I'm not going to find a smoking gun for that.
But instead, what am I going to focus on? Employee practices. Are they properly washing hands? Stop and take your time to make sure that they're washing their hands. Things that are going to be preventative measures to, well, avoid them from eating poop. Because we know norovirus is going to be your number one cause and that's where that's going to come from.
Last year, we had a large outbreak happen. Myself and one of my colleagues spearheaded the investigation. So it was an event with about 700 people at it. We had roughly 80 reporting ill. It was a banquet. It was a specific buffet line, and they ate off this specific buffet line, and they said that the pork tasted weird. Now, normally, so there's lots and lots of research going into this, right?
So you have a banquet center, and you have a caterer. So now we have two locations we have to go investigate. We're trying to pull all this data, all this information, we're sending out surveys. We're trying to get as much employee data as we possibly can, so we gather everything we can. We wind up figuring out this caterer made like 200 pounds of pork, and what they did was they toss it, they, so they cook 200 pounds of pork, they shred it all together, they put it on speed racks, they shoved it in the walk in cooler.
When we start looking at the illness was a very fast paced, watery diarrhea that came and went. 24 hours. It came in when it was done. So, of course, we're in our office. We're playing name that bacteria. We're trying to figure out what it is. And, of course, I think it's perfringens. We have a possibility of cooling.
Everything's lining up. That's my guess. And then one of the interesting things is while it's never been that I've ever seen fully proven, there have been case studies and outbreaks related to perfringens where people have said that there was a weird taste. There was actually an outbreak at a jail. And yeah, they, that was one of the reports.
The inmates were saying this meat tasted weird. I'm like, alright, well let's do this. So, my colleague went to the catering site, or to the facility that held the event. Myself and three other staff members, we basically create strike teams. We went through and literally, we went to the place that made the food.
We're there for four hours. We're walking through step by step every single product. I'm asking questions about the sugar cookie, how it comes in, how it's made, because you don't know. Then all of a sudden we start looking, so the pork is looking like the smoking gun. At this point, we're starting to see the epidemiology results come in and we're starting to look at the attack rates and everything like this.
And it's showing the pork is starting to show.
Matt Regusci: Yeah. And can you explain epidemiology? Like when you were talking about the epidemiology reports, so this would be local because it's a local incident, right? So what would those reports look like? And maybe briefly explain epidemiology as well. And then what those reports look like.
Justin Dwyer: So essentially, I think the easiest way to break that down is using statistics to determine what a rate of a disease.
Matt Regusci: And this is from like questions, a questionnaire that you're asking people, right?
Justin Dwyer: So, you know, in that situation, what we wind up with, you know, the catering list. So here's all the food we served.
So we put that on survey. We send the survey out digitally. We use a survey system called Red Cap, the state of Illinois has, we have access to. So we create this survey and we basically ask, where were you sitting? Which buffet line did you go through? Did you go through at the beginning, middle or end of it?
And then what products did you eat? So as you start gathering all that, the people that are reporting ill are starting to show that they ate these six items. So now you're narrowing down. And then what you wind up is you wind up with three items and that's what you truly, like, you're really going to investigate.
For us, the, like I said, the smoking gun really came out that the pork tasted weird. We were finding improper cooling and things like that. We wound up actually, they still had some left.
Matt Regusci: How long was this, how long was this process that they still had this left?
Justin Dwyer: So, they had made a large batch. So the event happened on a Saturday night, we started getting calls Monday afternoon.
By then, this is probably Wednesday, so this product actually wound up in the freezer. So, the product itself, they had kept some, because as a caterer, they might have to do tastings, so they were holding it back. Also, the other scary part was the product had gone out to other events. We started finding out what the other events were and we started reaching out to those and determined, was there anybody ill?
And luckily there wasn't. The fun part was, so I actually got to go down, the only time in my career I've ever pulled a sample. It doesn't happen as often as you would think it does. At least for a smaller community like Peoria, we're decent size, but we're not Chicagoland. So yeah, I want to pack in a cooler, I drive it down to Springfield, the state lab, state lab says, Oh, we've got to send it off to the CDC. We can't do this testing.
So that was the process. So this is all within a couple of days. The fun part too, is Illinois Environmental Health Association was holding their spring virtual conference. And I was supposed to be the emcee for all these of explained. So I was having to find people to like cover for me.
While I'm trying to run around and do this investigation, days of work, days of work, just trying to go through and figure out what the issues were.
Francine L Shaw: So I take it. It was the pork.
Justin Dwyer: So insult to injury on it. CDC got back to us six weeks later and said, Oh, we're not testing that right now. And that was that.
I'm not trying to be mean, but they weren't running testing. So we never, once again, I told you finding the smoking gun, almost impossible in retail, even setting off for lab testing. And The chances of it being that, because the thing with profringens is cooling and reheating issue. So if it wound up a specific sheet tray of meat that the profringens grew, it was isolated.
So 200 pounds, it might've been 20 pounds of that was actually the culprit. So truly, what are the chances that happened to be? When we know that all these people got sick because it must have went to this other event.
Matt Regusci: Well, it depends on how they test it too. Are they going to test a PCR so you could find the protein or are they going to test it culture where they're not going to be able to regrow it again because it's frozen?
Justin Dwyer: Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: Well, and you just answered my question because I was going to say, even though we all know that several people can eat the same product and only one or two might get sick, I was going to ask about the other events. Was the first one older? People and then the other ones weren't or but you just answered my question. It may not have come off the same sheet. So
Justin Dwyer: but yeah, one of the events I believe was like a senior type event, which freaked me out really quick because we know at risk populations. Those are the ones we're really mindful of. That was a really crazy event. That was the biggest outbreak I ever dealt with.
I've dealt with three or four the past 10 years. But yeah, that was the craziest one I ever did.
Francine L Shaw: We're not going to test it. I'm sorry.
Matt Regusci: I'm like, no, really? Yeah. That's the difference between on the industry side of things, right? Cause on the industry side of things, somebody will find a lab and send it off.
And there's going to find a nice, 017025 lab for that particular thing, and they'll get it tested. The government's nevermind.
Justin Dwyer: So the funny thing is when that finally came back, I think I was away at a conference. And you guys met a couple of my colleagues here. They were all basically like trying to figure out who was going to call Justin.
None of them wanted to call and tell me that I'm not calling Justin. So, on our end too, I, when I got back, I looked at our director. I said, well, if we ever have that situation again, I'm not sending the whole sample. Like I'll cut the sample. We'll keep it in the freezer. We'll see what happens. Then we'll send it to a private.
I'm like, I'll pay for it. I need to know what happened. I need closure. Yeah. Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: Next time. It's not all going. I'm keeping part of it and I'll send it somewhere.
Matt Regusci: Super anticlimactic.
Francine L Shaw: You and me both. Yeah. Yeah. And I had to ask the question. I'm sorry.
Justin Dwyer: But you know that once again, like if you want to understand what public health is: you will spend three days chasing your tail, to find out that you didn't have a tail.
Francine L Shaw: Wow.
Matt Regusci: Okay.
So I want to ask you about the conference because you're the chair of the conference and this has been really cool. There's amazing people here. And just give the audience a little bit of detail about what the conference is. Why you have this, how frequently it would happen here in Chicago and the type of people that you have here speaking and stuff.
Justin Dwyer: So, Illinois Environmental Health Association, I guess, backstory on it. We put a bid in to host the FDA Retail Food Safety Seminar. Like this year, there are four of them happening throughout the country. Two on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, and then one in Central, Central States here in Chicago right now.
And with that, essentially, you bid to the FDA, you say, as an organization, we say, we would like to host this event for you. So you go through the entire process, you put the bid in, FDA says good, and then you start planning. Planning for this conference started last October, and just trying to figure out what you want to do.
Do you want to do a single room, all food? Do you want to combine it with a different conference? For us, we're combining it with our annual education conference. So normally, October November, we would hold a conference just for the state of Illinois and cover food, water, sewage, and then any other general items that we want to do, which we are doing downstairs in our breakout sessions.
So we've got three rooms that are running concurrently to the main room. Those three rooms are covering food, water, sewage, general EH. We have academia and industry speaking. Uh, and then in our main room is all the food safety. So a lot of FDA speakers, our keynote speaker, Deborah Blum, author of The Poison Squad came and spoke, which was phenomenal yesterday.
Absolutely amazing. You guys were our featured speaker this morning, which I know the crowd loved. Tomorrow, Dr. David Dyjack with National Environmental Health Associations, our featured speaker, but just trying to bring as many different speakers, many, a lot of different topics. We reach out, we ask questions to our membership, and FDA sends out polls, like, what topics do you need to know about?
So maybe it's, they need to understand, have a better understanding of additives, or they want to have a better understanding of, like, food fraud. Where are we finding fake food? How are we finding it? All these different topics, things that they're concerned about, what they need training on and those are the ones that we're gonna pull in first.
And we're gonna make sure that the topics that the people attending need, they're able to get it. The attendees, for the most part, are pretty much all regulators. Down from the peons like myself, boots on the ground doing the inspections, through the directors of environmental health, administrators of public health departments, and then of course we have industry here as well, and academia.
They weigh in and give us a, a little more grounding and understanding of some of the things.
Francine L Shaw: So I just want to say, we'll call this a regional conference, is that correct?
Justin Dwyer: It's considered a national conference. But it's the central region is where it's being held.
Francine L Shaw: I've not been to a conference like this in a really, really long time.
Most of the conferences that I go to in the last several years have been either been international or they have been like the Food Safety Summit and the National Restaurant Association. You've done a phenomenal job. I just want to say that because I've been to, it's just incredible. The speakers have been amazing.
The people here have been amazing. And just you've, kudos, you've done a, you did an amazing job.
Justin Dwyer: I appreciate that. But I can tell you without my board and without the, it takes, it takes an army to do this. And while I was the, I guess, for lack of a better term, the puppet master for most of it, There were a lot of people on the ends of those strings that were getting done what I needed done.
And without them, I could have never, ever done this conference.
Francine L Shaw: And I understand that. I know that you have a huge support team and they have done a lot to help you. But you guys, I should say.
Matt Regusci: Yeah, in fact, we were just at a talk yesterday about How do you had an epidemic professor talk about using AI for food safety?
And that was fascinating how he was training the inspectors on how to help restaurants be able, if they're missing an SOP and they don't really know how to make it, how they could use AI like ChatGPT to pull the regs and did I say that wrong? Gemini or one of the other ones? Pull the regs and create an SOP for very specific purposes and.
It was fascinating. I'd never seen that done before, and that would be something very beneficial. And so by training up 250 of your closest friends and family in the health inspector world, you're really training up an army to go out and benefit the industry is really cool.
Justin Dwyer: Yeah. Uh, I believe that was Dr. Nathan Libbey.
Matt Regusci: Dr. Nathan Libbey. Yes.
Justin Dwyer: Yeah. Yeah. Phenomenal speaker. He's spoken previously, but I know he's always cutting edge. So we felt like that, this was a great conference to... A couple of years ago he spoke. So, you know, bringing him back in and say, Hey, what do you want to talk about? Because I know you're cutting edge.
And the fun part is a lot of these speakers I reach out to and I'll go, what do you want to, do you want to talk? And they'll go, sure. What do you want to talk about? Or what do you want me to talk about? I don't like, I don't care because whatever you're going to be passionate about talking about is going to push out to the audience.
If I'm like, I need you to talk about X, Y, Z and make it prescribed, they may not be that comfortable. So, if I need somebody to talk about water safety, I'm going to let you go after what you're interested in going after, and it's going to make for a better speaking experience.
Francine L Shaw: And you're right. It's more difficult for me if somebody says, okay, I need you to talk about this and it needs to be within these parameters.
It makes that much more difficult for me than if somebody is just, so what do you want to talk about? And I get to pick the topic and. Because I tend to pick something that I'm much more passionate about, and it makes it a whole lot easier for me to speak about that topic. Yeah, in fact, I, there's something that I wanted to ask Dr. Libbey about, and I, he left before I got a chance. So, I'm going to reach out to him. He was amazing.
Matt Regusci: Absolutely amazing. All right.
Well, Justin, this was an absolute pleasure. This conference has been great. We're excited about the rest of the day. And I just thank you very much for inviting us. And we have some advice for you.
And that is do not eat poop.
Justin Dwyer: I was not planning. Thank you very much. Thank you for being here. Thank you.