Web 2.0 and Food Safety

With thanks to Doug Powell, I am able to report that Web 2.0 has finally extended into Food Safety. 

With the recent Norovirus outbreak in the US, Hope College officials informed the Health Department they had a database that contained all of the students email and text messaging addresses. Over three thousand five hundred students were contacted electronically and were asked via text message to reply to an email address to describe their symptoms and how long they were ill. The Health Department says in the end about 540 students responded. Officials say the information was crucial for determining a plan of action and slowing the spread of the virus.

What a way to use student communication to get out a Food Safety Message! The question is: How can this method of communication be expanded to prevent or contain future outbreaks?

Food Safety – A Mixture of Oddities:

Mercury in Fish

The Codex Alimentarius Commissions CCFAC and CCFFP suggested that Mercury in Fish is a concern, but that there is benefit to eating fish, even for children and pregnant women. These international bodies are at pains to point out the neurological damage that Mercury can cause in Children and Unborn Foetuses and are very strict in their advice to especially pregnant women. They advocate consumption in moderation and with the types of fish such as tuna, swordfish and shark being avoided. Catherine O’Neill, Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law, as a guest blogger for Bill Marler, points out that according to the Washington Post, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seeking to rescind its warning that women and children should limit their intake of fish.

 The FDA is now suggesting that the benefits of consuming fish outweigh the risks of neurological damage caused by Mercury. 

Professor O’Neill rightly asks whether the FDA’s reversal is supported by the science. Scientists within other US governmental agencies have questioned the recommendation and have called it “scientifically flawed and inadequate”. According to Professor O’Neill “One does not have to be too much of a cynic to wonder whether the FDA’s change of course is of a piece with the numerous other instances in which the Bush Administration has reinterpreted science that calls for greater – not lesser – protection of human health and the environment.”

Furthermore, one wonders whether the argument of “balancing” the “risks” and “benefits” of fish consumption and Mercury, as presented by the fishing industry have not swayed this opinion?

 

Campylobacter – Getting infected in Switzerland and by Mountain Biking

According to the Swiss SonntagsZeitung as many as 90% of chickens in Switzerland are infected with Campylobacter, prompting the Swiss Federal Veterinary Office to call a crisis meeting of food safety experts and the poultry producers in December 2008. What is really scary is that according to the report , the Federal Veterinary Office was only expecting about 45% to be infected. 

On a different note, don’t go Mountain Biking in British Columbia (Canada) or Wales unless you're seriously into infection control measures. According to Doug Powell (of Barfblog fame) hundreds of mountain bikers competing in separate races in British Columbia and Wales in the past year were stricken by Campylobacter, apparently from contact with sheep faeces-laden mud. The source of the BC infection was not as well characterized.

The National Public Health Service for Wales (NPHS) have published a report which recommends the following (as per Doug Powell):

·         Participants should avoid using soiled drink and food containers

·         Pre-packaged food should be eaten out of the wrapper

·         Where possible, hands and utensils should be washed before consuming food and drinks

·          No open food should be served at events.

·         Drinks produced in large volumes for consumption by participants should be dispensed using a method which does not require the repeated immersion of utensils.

·         Organisers should consider providing facilities to wash hands and water bottles with clean, running water

·         Wherever possible, courses should be re-routed to avoid areas which are heavily contaminated with animal faeces

·         Mountain bikers, particularly those who are vulnerable to infection, should be alerted to the potential risk of acquiring zoonotic illnesses from participation in events which cross land used by agricultural and other animals.

The Next Phase

Seth Godin in his blog, on the 4^th of December, pondered the costs of being in touch, to have the latest information at your fingertips. But do you actually use all of that information?

From a business perspective that makes me wonder why I prepare a news section for my website on a weekly basis? Who gains from my work? Am I not duplicating the efforts of others? I may be distilling information, but is it relevant? Are people getting value for money by logging on to my website?

You may be thinking, why is a business blog asking these questions? The answers stem from a Huddlemind workshop in which the Trigger of Need was discussed. The Trigger refers to the cycle you go through when wanting to make a more significant purchase. It’s that process of searching for an item, researching properties of various makes and models, evaluating the properties, narrowing your list of possibilities, making the purchase and finally having a positive experience using the item. And so the message that I should be portraying is: does the information I distil from websites across the globe make people’s lives better? Do I supply enough information, on time and in a way that is easily absorbable? In other words, do people have a useful experience visiting my site?

The answers to this conundrum are evident in this blog – my website had to adapt or die. The resultant change includes the creation of this blog. From now on the information will be presented such that you have a choice to opt in to get RSS or other feeds, the control to opt out at any stage and I hope to entertain with accurate, reliable information.

My next blogs will focus on food safety, environmental issues and innovation in separate, discreet entities to start this process of re-innovating my message.

All Blogs have to start somewhere ...

I had the great fortune of attending two amazing workshops in Cape Town in late November. 

The first was hosted by IQuad (www.iquad.co.za) and focussed on Strategic Innovation. The second was hosted by Huddlemind (look them up on Facebook) and focussed on the future of marketing in our strangely connected Web 2.0 world.

The upshot of the situation is that the message put forward by both was strangely similar: In order to stay relevant in business today, you need to be flexible, adaptable and be willing to re-invent your message as and when the business environment requires it.

The approach between the two workshops was completely different.

Strategic Innovation: The method of setting a strategy around a table and then re-hashing the same thing next year is considered to be old-school. And yet it happens regularly, including the development of marketing plans and planning for new products. Strategic Innovation suggests that your strategy must be approached creatively without losing the focus on the bottom line. It’s the focus on flexibility and the willingness to try new approaches. It’s moving away from spending 80% of your R&D focus on a few products that have to recover the development costs and make a significant profit over the next four to six years. Again this latter thinking is old-school. The idea is that all facts of the business must be open to innovation.  

Marketing in the Web 2.0 world: Did you know that a few years ago, three prime time TV adverts would get you 80% coverage. Today the same coverage would require one hundred and twenty adverts across many channels. Why? People today are wired in a different way; they don’t cluster around the TV anymore for entertainment and information. Both can now be obtained via the internet, at home, at the office, in a coffee shop, at the airport or on your phone.

The focus is to get enough information when you need it, packaged in a way that you can access it, accurate and reputable. Information by word-of-mouth or from newspapers is still the most trustworthy. So to get your message across you need to be able to satisfy these needs without sacrificing your core values embedded in that message. And you need to get people talking about it; either in conversation or electronically, in blogs, by text messaging, on social networking sites .... 

So what does this have to do with my first business blog? Absolutely everything! I have been extremely fortunate to have Liz de Speville as my mentor in developing my business. Liz helps people develop their personal and business image and message and is a life coach to boost. Liz helped me develop my message both for my business and the business website (www.biophys.ltd.uk). Since the initial phase of developing my message Liz has been continuously pushing me to improve that message and present it in different ways rather than a staid website. It took these two workshops to give me a window to the world that she was seeing (by the way we live 11.000km apart) and to realize that I have to re-invent and re-present my message. And this blog is the first step towards that.