Public health units from across the province were also ordered to collect

Tag : Health Food
Two-thirds of Maple Leaf meat samples collected from Torontohospitals and nursing homes tested positive for a virulent strainof listeria just before the country's largest food recall,according to confidential data obtained by the Toronto Star and the CBC.
The test results show a dramatically high percentage ofbacteria-laced ham, corned beef, turkey and roast beef was beingserved to hundreds of vulnerable hospital patients and seniors.Experts say it's more contamination than they have seen and furtherevidence of a health risk that should have been known to the publicsooner.
"There shouldn't be any positives," says Rick Holley, afood safety expert at the University of Manitoba. "The realityis if you did a survey in the market, you might find one or two atmost out of this sample that are positive ... And it is aparticularly virulent strain of listeria. It's one of the badones."
The lab tests, conducted by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency andcompiled in a document labelled "confidential," reveal 17of 26 samples collected on Aug. 14 and 15 tested positive for thepathogen.
Some samples showed contamination of more than 20,000"listeria monocytogenes," or individual bacterium, pergram of meat. Experts say anything above zero is dangerous becausethe bacteria, once present, multiply. These tests prompted thenational recall of various Maple Leaf meat products.
The listeria outbreak has killed 20 people. Seniors are morevulnerable because of their weaker immune systems.
The samples were collected by Toronto Public Health inspectors from13 Toronto nursing homes, hospitals and an HIV/AIDS hospice onorders from the provincial Ministry of Health and the CFIA as partof their probe into the outbreak.
Public health units from across the province were also ordered to collect samples. A federal government source confirmed yesterdaythat half of the provincial samples tested positive for listeria.
But the results in Toronto were worse.
"I'd never seen anything like this," said Dr. VinitaDubey, Toronto's associate medical officer of health. "Thefact that so many came back positive shows how contaminated thesource was."
She said the samples of meat were unopened, ruling out anycontamination from food handlers in the institutions.
"From a public health perspective, it means that someone couldopen the package and eat and it would have already had that levelof contamination in it without (the) impacts of dirty hands orknife."
Positive tests show up on meat with "best before" datesranging from early August to Oct. 1, which suggests the meat fromthe North York plant was being contaminated over nearly two months,said the University of Manitoba's Holley.
"Whatever the defect was here, it had to be a continuingsource of contamination. There had to be a reservoir of thebacteria growing."
The particular strain listed in the test results