EHO Knows: Barf Blog w/ Dr. Douglas Powell

[00:00:00]

Shane: Welcome back to EHO Knows where we’re gonna have the second half of our interview with Dr. Douglas Powell. Doug did bath log, which when I was trying to be putting together a blog, it really was the number one. Pinnacle of blogging when it came to food safety, and so it’s awesome to be able to talk to him now and just find out about the history of Bath blog, but also his history, the highs and the lows.

So welcome back, Doug.

Douglas Powell: thank you. Um, yeah, blogging was big back in 2005. I have five daughters and five grandkids and. They’re all telling me some new app to get on the chat with them. And I say, no, use email. You, you know, I’m too old for this stuff. But blogging [00:01:00] was big and I would always go, I was traveling a lot back then and I go on airplanes and people would ask me what I did and I said, oh, I’m a professor of microbial food safety.

And they go, oh yeah. Well there was this one time I really got sick. And I thought, well, that’s interesting. You don’t really know what you’re talking about, but you tell a good story. And I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I had all these people contribute?

Shane: soundbite for EHO knows as well. That’s a really interesting story, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. So we’re on a roll here for soundbites describing EHO noses and my contribution.

Douglas Powell: So I just said. Yeah, let’s start a blog and we’ll get all these people to contribute. Well then it turns out people are eager to talk about it, but they’re not so eager to write. So we took it up [00:02:00] and we started a blog ’cause it was the hip thing to do. And I had a bunch of kids who were a lot brighter than me working in my lab and could figure it out.

And I just shared these stories and when it first started it was so overrun by spam in the first couple months that we had to pull it. And it went down for a couple months and then we figured out, they figured the kids figured out some anti-spam stuff and we got it up and running and yeah, it had. I don’t know, tens of thousands of free subscribers back in the day and was a big thing, and it’s, it was an accomplishment, but now it’s, it’s an afterthought.

It,

know.

Shane: guess so. [00:03:00] Noting down there, just a couple of immediate, um, take homes for environmental health officers listening to this. One is you are either young and hip and happening and you understand the latest technology. And so jump on board and start doing something with the technology. Um, or two, it doesn’t matter if you’re not young hip happening, you’ve got someone in your team or you know, someone who probably is young hip happening and they can either do it or help you do it. the second one is nowadays if you start talking about, you know, what’s the current version of blogging? And you have to say it’s TikTok or it’s reels or, um, it’s YouTube. It’s content creation. But what’s really cool is everyone’s got a smartphone. You can pull it out, you can record something, you know, you are walking into summer. [00:04:00] feral restaurants and, and whatever out there. And you’re going pull out your camera and just start recording. And so in one sense, now, it’s even easier to do what you were doing back then now just in terms of sharing, uh, your stories, sharing your news, um,

Douglas Powell: Well, it’s certainly easier, and my ex-wives have discovered that.

Shane: yeah. Uh, and so, but what you were doing was going, wait a minute. I’m seeing this stuff. I’m hearing this stuff. And so let’s now, share and take, and so you said you had tens of thousands of subscribers, so you are talking about food poisoning around the world, and lows. People wanna still know and hear about that. Um, so, uh, me, one of them, um, were your typical subscribers then?

Douglas Powell: Oh, it was all kinds of government agencies. We [00:05:00] were in, I don’t know, a hundred countries, just people all around the world. Some of them were students, some of them were professors, some of them were regulatory. I didn’t really care. Uh, I just wanted to tell a story and. I did write a book in 1997, and blogging became a lot easier than writing a book

Shane: Yes,

Douglas Powell: because you couldn’t do it in half an hour,

Shane: yes.

Douglas Powell: whereas a book takes a year.

Shane: small tip. If you’re a regular blogger, you can then just concatenate everything together and turn that into a book. Um, but yes, it takes a lot of effort to sit down and write a book from scratch, whereas, um, blogging, Just regularly nowadays you don’t blog, you just regularly post to Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever.

And that’s probably the closest we’d get to the concept of blogging.

Douglas Powell: [00:06:00] Well, that’s because that’s because the internet used to be free, but now everyone’s figured out how to charge a buck for it,

Shane: Yes,

Douglas Powell: and I don’t have the resources that I used to have, so I’m not willing to pay. So I just go where it’s free and people like you search me out and that’s fine.

Shane: yes.

Douglas Powell: I’m just, and maybe I’ll write a book, maybe I won’t.

I don’t know. I’ve said before, all the news just repeats itself. It’s the same thing over and over. But I do encourage e eh, hos and inspectors, if you see something, just click, click your phone. Everyone’s got a camera today, so everything’s recorded. And yeah, post it.

Personally, I hate TikTok [00:07:00] and I hate video posting.

We were doing videos before YouTube was invented,

Shane: yes. Um,

Douglas Powell: and we didn’t know why. We just thought, yeah, we should put this on camera.

Shane: okay.

Douglas Powell: And we made these goofy videos and we didn’t know why. We just did it ’cause it was the right thing to do and shared it and people sort of liked it.

Shane: Uh, I listened to a podcast about traffic controllers in the us and there they talk about as soon as something goes wrong, they’re basically morally obligated to share it with every other traffic controller, organization, whatever, in the us because they’ve run, run under the fundamental assumption that safety is more important than your reputation. And so if you do something that screws up, hold onto that knowledge, share that knowledge so that someone else doesn’t screw up and kill someone. Um, but when it comes to food safety, [00:08:00] we don’t have that approach. We then think, oh, wait a minute. Uh, we don’t wanna shame people or whatever, but we can be disclosing this information in a confidential way.

In terms of not naming businesses, though, that’s questionable because when you see something really, really bad, it’s so tempting just to go. a look at this, but as an environmental health officer, share the knowledge, but use the appropriate methods to, um, attempt to shut these places down. Um,

Douglas Powell: I was always at a public university, so I viewed it as my obligation to share it with the public. And I’ve been threatened with lawsuits dozens of times over the years. None has been successful.

Shane: yes,

Douglas Powell: It’s just small mirrors, um, because you can’t refute the data.

Shane: yes. so in the, the previous podcast you, [00:09:00] mentioned golden arches. Um, and so yeah, how do you talk about major food, um, poisoning outbreaks and incidences without naming. Particular ones, and the joke is often than not, they’re in the media anyway. So all you are doing is repeating what was public knowledge,

it

Douglas Powell: well I have citizenship in Canada, the US and Australia and the US does not have public healthcare whereas Canada and Australia do. So outbreaks in the US are much more likely to end up in civil suits, which brings lawyers in, which drives media stories, which means it gets more public attention.

Whereas in Australia and Canada, they tend to be glossed over. so I just always viewed it as my obligation and I encourage your [00:10:00] EHOs and inspectors that it’s their obligation. If you see some shit,

let it be known. You don’t have to name them, you don’t have to put your name on it. But get it out there. Take off.

Shane: And if you wanna share it with thousands of other environmental health officers, become a guest on EHO knows. Uh, and the worse the story, the more likely you are to be on. Uh, that’s a serious invite, by the way. So anyone who’s got a really bad story, um, yeah, seriously share it, um, and get the news out there. Um, you also made the comment that we live in a world dominated by the news cycle. And so here in Australia yes, a couple people get food poisoning. And so it’s the lead story. Two days later, something else comes and the media’s long since moved on. whereas in the us ah, yes. Now we get the court case.

Now we get the. Big, big payouts or [00:11:00] whatever, so at least it’s got a couple chances to pop up in the news cycle. Whereas here,

Douglas Powell: Yes.

Shane: outta sight, outta mind.

Douglas Powell: Well, and you know, even under the current US president, a lot of public health people I know in the US are reluctant to release information now because they’re worried if I stick my head up, I might get chopped off

Shane: Yes, and I’m hoping to go to the US next year, so we’re just gonna cut this segment out They go through my social media and I go, but I never used the

Douglas Powell: because you’re afraid of getting chopped.

Shane: I just, and it wasn’t me. I’m really a fan. Oh. But it is interesting how, yeah, we now, mate, live in an age of being silenced and we won’t even go there at the moment. In a year’s [00:12:00] time we’ll revisit this and we’ll go, oh yeah, we boldly spoke up against the T word. Um, yes. what were the highs with Bath blog?

Douglas Powell: The highs were are,

if I have enough media experience to know that if I did something wrong, I would hear about it and people kept me in check. And yes, entertainment’s important, but content has to be at least 51% of any message

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: always has to be fact based. But scientists don’t pay enough attention to the entertainment part, and politicians don’t pay enough attention to the content part.

That’s my general take. So they would all let me know when I was wrong, and if I had to make a correction, I’d just say, yeah, I was wrong.

Shane: yes.

Douglas Powell: The highs [00:13:00] were

just all the people who checked in every day, and people like you who say, you know, it was fundamental and how I thought about foodborne illness, and a lot of it was just, I, I can’t plan it, I’m, it just happened.

Shane: Okay. Then the, the flip side, what were the lows?

Douglas Powell: Well, the lows were. When I left the University of Guelph and went to Kansas State University

the university in Canada tried to seize all of the barf blog accounts and say they owned them. And I said, no, you don’t. But I had predicted to myself that this would happen and had one of my bright young [00:14:00] kids get them down to Kansas beforehand.

Shane: Yeah.

Douglas Powell: So that was a low point and, and just. The people who said they would do things and yes, we’ll collaborate and blah, blah, blah. They had no intention of doing it.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: That was a low, those were low points, and I was always of the motto, I’m at a public institution, taxpayers are paying my salary. I owe it to them, and you’re at a public institution and you’re making me these promises and you’re not coming through.

Shane: Yes. And. Challenge as to who owns it is really, the future who’s going to keep it going? Um, and I guess, you know, if you’re talking about having [00:15:00] tens of thousands of subscribers, there’s in that commercial value. Not that you are after commercial value, but you’re suddenly then walking away with this, this entity. but you’re trying to get information out, not it.

Douglas Powell: I don’t think there’s any air. Uh, the students I have had are doing their own thing. They’re doing podcasts and whatever’s hip for today. So they learned that part. But do they care about the content? I don’t know. And it’s not up to me to decide it will become what it becomes. And you know, a lot of it’s still there on the internet.

There was a few years it was down, but you can still search a lot of it before 2021. [00:16:00] And I’ve had universities who say they’ll host it around here, but they never do

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: too much liability.

Shane: Yes. and one of the. things about the internet or one of the tough things about the internet is content is around forever and a day. Uh, and so he was something that was regularly creating content. The internet, absolutely, loved it because regular content and once you start getting up there in Google, when other people search for something, you’d be, um, popping up a lot of the great stuff that you’ve produced still available.

The only problem is it’s slowly disappearing into the background because there’s new trying to, um, be produced.

Douglas Powell: Yeah, and I can’t worry about that. I mean, that’s just gonna happen. it’s not my intent to change the world or [00:17:00] anything like that. I’m just providing information and people will do with it what they want.

Shane: So what happened in 21 to Bath blog?

Douglas Powell: well I moved to Australia to support my then wife and I was tired of being a professor for 20 years and had a 2-year-old and was content just to stay at home and hang out with the kid. And about five years later I started having some health problems, which are still largely unexplained, but I can still write and still read and things like that.

but it costs money now and I don’t have the resources and. Everyone else is run by human resources and they don’t wanna risk anything. [00:18:00] So, the information’s there. I’m still have a lot of information. I still try to get it out there where I can on the few free platforms that are available. I, I’m still getting, even on LinkedIn, I’m getting 10,000 hits a week.

Shane: Yes, because that’s where I, um, saw

Douglas Powell: I,

Shane: just popping up every second day because you’re still out there. Um, but nowadays you don’t have to create all the content. All you have to do is share and comment on, and that’s raising the public awareness.

Douglas Powell: I guess that’s my role in life. I’m not gonna be a hockey player. Ice hockey that is to you folks. Um, I’m watching a hockey game in the background

Shane: Yeah.

Douglas Powell: because it’s evening in North America and morning here. I’m not gonna be anything much. [00:19:00] Um, just a humble servant who provides information for those who want to know.

If you don’t want to know, that’s your business.

Shane: Yeah.

Douglas Powell: It’s not mine.

Shane: in one sense that’s truth, but it’s also false in that we are now being shaped by all this, you know, crap that, uh, let’s pick on Facebook because they’re easy to pick on. But it’s the same in LinkedIn and it’s the same in absolutely every other social media platform. unless there’s someone who’s drip feeding good content in and having the chance of it popping up in front of people, uh, then. The only thing that we’re gonna be exposed to is, is all the crap. Um, and so you need lots and lots of individuals just to be drip feeding, uh, stuff in. And so if you’re not doing it well, then we’re just being Yeah. Saturated.

Douglas Powell: That’s why we did that [00:20:00] cooking show paper back in 2004 was because people were just being inundated with crap

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: and pointed it out.

Shane: Um, and so definitely anyone listening, uh, if you, haven’t got your, your LinkedIn profile being saturated with Doug’s, uh, comments, just look for, uh, Douglas Powell, him once connect or whatever, and then there’s just these little tidbits coming through. How often are you on LinkedIn these days?

Douglas Powell: Well, like I said, it’s free so I take advantage of it and I still put in the odd sardonic comment, but I can’t do as much as I used to be able to do with the blog. Um, I gotta find something else to do and food safety is getting [00:21:00] redundant ’cause all the news just repeats itself. We, you know, your EHOs have all seen the disaster stories.

And the people who run the restaurants who mean well say, well, this is the way we did it. And, but it’s microbiologically wrong I don’t know whether it’s repetition or repeated this, it, it’s more than I can do and I have no real air. Someone will take it on.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: Again. That’s not up to me.

Shane: Uh, in one sense, food safety is guaranteed to be a losing battle because, um, yeah, bugs are always finding more creative ways of, uh, winning the war. But every time we start winning the war, that allows people to become blase because there’s no problem. And then it [00:22:00] suddenly takes a major outbreak for the pendulum to swing the other way, be back in the media and have people do it. And then we start to win. We start to win, and it disappears out of the public awareness. Bugs start to win again, and suddenly you have another major outbreak. So in one sense, we can never, ever win the food safety war, uh, by the nature of bugs and by human nature. Um,

Douglas Powell: Oh, I totally agree. And my example would be coronavirus or COVID. I can’t call it COVID because the COV stands for coronavirus and then the COVID-19, well nineteen’s a strain, so I call it coronavirus. And like I’ve said, you’ve had trillions of bugs inside of you. They’re evolving much faster than we can keep up with.

And we did hand washing work back in the [00:23:00] 2008 because the US Insurance company said, we’re not gonna cover for hospital acquired infections anymore. So you have to start taking hand washing. Seriously. ’cause all the hospitals were reporting Oh yeah. All our nurses and doctors wash their hands. 95% compliance.

Well that was total bs. ’cause no one’s gonna write down on a survey that they don’t wash their hands.

Shane: Do you wash your hands? Absolutely.

Douglas Powell: Absolutely. And so. We have a number of experiments we’ve done where we send, in this case, we trained nurses to be spies, to watch their colleagues and how much they actually wash their hands. And, and I mean, these were [00:24:00] in cancer wards and the compliance was like 30%, not the 95 reported. And we reported it and they went, nah,

Shane: Yeah.

Douglas Powell: We reported it. But then coronavirus comes along and all of a sudden you’ve got hand sanitizers everywhere and people are really uptight about washing their hands. And that’s fine. But even now, because the media coverage has stopped in Australia. There’s no media coverage. There’s no mass yet. Nursing homes and hospitals are still overrun by Coronavirus.

Last week in Queensland alone, there were 3000 new coronavirus cases, and I think I got that from [00:25:00] a US site,

Shane: because we don’t care about it here in Australia anymore. It’s, it’s volunt and truly old news.

Douglas Powell: outa mind, O site, outa site, outa mind, whatever.

Shane: Yes,

Douglas Powell: You know? And

people think they have the flu or, and now we’ve got all these anti-vaxxers, and I’m not quite that old enough to remember polio, but I know people who had it and it’s not fun. it was a revolution when the vaccine came along and now you’re seeing measles throw up to 2000 cases in the US reemerging.

’cause they got an anti-vaxxer running human health and services and it’s just ridiculous.

Shane: And,

Douglas Powell: Bugs don’t work that way.

Shane: historically you had herd immunity. As long as everyone else around you was immunized, you were fine. [00:26:00] but we are gonna have a really interesting time in a couple years time when there’s a huge number of babies born, not being immunized anymore, um, children, and then suddenly,

Douglas Powell: I don’t think. It would be interesting. I think it’ll be tragic.

Shane: yes. Uh, and then the bizarre one will be, will it be city based based on is this a red or blue state? And will we be able to see that play out? will it be socioeconomic in terms of those who follow that advice versus those who stand up against it?

getting me thrown out of the us so I, I might well just give up and your hope of going

Douglas Powell: as I mentioned before, my undergraduate degree is in molecular biology and genetics, and in the early two thousands when genetically engineered food was [00:27:00] really taking off in the US and Canada, I was pretty vocal in saying, this is fine. And we got death threats at my lab and people were just nuts.

And I said, how many people have gotten sick? None.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: So what’s the problem? And all food is genetically modified anyway. It’s just this is faster and whatever. And I deliberately stopped working on genetically engineered food and concentrated on foodborne illness because that’s what was making people sick it.

And I just thought those people on GE were, and we made a couple videos and just thought it was ridiculous.

You know, talking about monarch butterfly populations, there’s a whole bunch [00:28:00] of stuff that goes into that. Uh, not just one crop or the use of one gene in one crop. And now in Australia and North America, that’s, it’s widely used in crops that are processed like canola and corn, but not fresh stuff because the supermarkets say we can’t reveal to people we use insecticides.

Shane: Yes, yes,

Douglas Powell: that was a learning experience. we all have our myths and our, uh, mythologies that we aspire to, but then there’s reality.

Shane: yes. Last week you, we were talking, we do a preliminary quick interview, so I vaguely know what I’m talking about. Um, but. You made a point that there was one thing that you had given up on and I said, [00:29:00] so why did you stop doing that? And you made the comment because, uh, you gave up because people just don’t change.

Douglas Powell: Behavior is,

it’s poorly understood. It’s studied a lot, but I don’t think they understand what they’re studying. And people, and I learned this going to the farmer’s market when I was in my early twenties. People go to the same stalls, they buy the same food. Why? Because it’s faith-based, it’s trust-based, and they’re all Mennonites, so it must be fine.

So.

Shane: I.

Douglas Powell: You know, and that just does not drive with the data that’s out there. So there’s things I’ve given up on. Maybe that’s age, maybe it’s experience. I don’t know. [00:30:00] I’m glad you va you said you vaguely know what you’re talking about. That at least shows a li a degree of humility.

Shane: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Humility here. Sorry. I’m an engineer. Uh, I am not an environmental health officer, but I know that if I talk to EHOs, I get some really cool stories,

Douglas Powell: Well, I, I used to teach engineers, believe it or not. In the early 1990s, the University of Waterloo, which is just down the road from Guelph, is Canada’s largest engineering school, and there’s more people at Microsoft from Waterloo than any other university in the world. And in 89 or the late eighties, there was a shooting at Concordia University in Montreal, in which a student got a high powered [00:31:00] rifle and went in and deliberately picked out the female engineers and killed 15 of them

Shane: yes.

Douglas Powell: at Concordia.

And so the engineering profession decided, well, we have to teach our engineers more about risk in society. I would go into this classroom of a hundred engineers, be expected to talk for three hours of, which is way too long, and talk about risk and society and how they’re viewed. And I just said, you guys know more about what’s going on than I do.

I don’t know, crap. Um, you’re up on date, this is how you’re viewed. And yeah, people aren’t gonna change. The, that’s really embedded in us, whether it’s how we’re [00:32:00] raised, how we rear our children. We get down to customs like food. I mean, food should be a boat sitting around the family table. And enjoyment, not a microbiological quiz, which is why I don’t get invited to dinner very much.

Shane: But they should be just the things that are taken for granted. Um, and, but like you said before, you know, we learn from our parents and learn from their parents, and so suddenly. We need to be breaking that cycle with education. arguably what’s really interesting nowadays is, uh, that cycle has been broken because we get all these kids who are leaving home who have never cooked before, never learned how to cook, and then suddenly they’re thrown into the world of fast food and they have absolutely no idea because at home [00:33:00] they never step into the kitchen to do anything there.

So we now live in a really weird stage where maybe it is the celebrity chefs that, you know, kids nowadays learn how to cook because they’re not doing it at home.

Douglas Powell: I dunno. I’m baffled by it all. Um. Universities long ago stopped being a source of knowledge. they’re off the charts. Um, my youngest Canadian daughter chose not to go to university and I said, go for it. So she teaches skiing out in the slopes of British Columbia,

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: where I’ll use Aussies to go visit in the,

Shane: Yes. So,

Douglas Powell: in the Canadian winter.

Shane: missed the, the subtlety there, university professor going, uh, that’s a great idea. Skip University. Um, it’s, yes, there’s potentially better things you

Douglas Powell: We can get it all on YouTube. [00:34:00] And one of the guys I had the most respect for was a carpenter from Denmark who I worked with through high school and first couple of years of university in the summer. And he was self-taught, but sort of an armchair philosopher. He knew how to run a childcare. He knew how to do Danish folk dancing.

He was a prisoner of war in World War II and his son-in-law was a university professor and he just thought he was a gas bag.

Shane: Okay.

Douglas Powell: So I have a lot of respect for farmers and people who actually produce the food, and they are willing to learn and adapt, but you have to make the solutions [00:35:00] easy enough that it can work on the farm.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: And for doing dump tank water, whether it’s tomatoes or rockmelon, just use a pool strip pH monitor because the chlorine is bound by organic material and becomes ineffective.

So changing it based on smell doesn’t work. So just stick this little strip in for a minute and you got your answer.

Shane: So in hindsight, looking back upon um, uh, lifetime of achievements, two questions. What are you super glad that you did, and what do you wish you hadn’t done, should have done, or whatever?

Douglas Powell: I am really glad I had five daughters. Now my. [00:36:00] 33-year-old who’s number three of the four, she’s now 33. She used to ask me this question and I’d say, you know, the thing I’m proudest of is I wrote all these papers and they still get cited every day somewhere around the world. And I get it on a Google Scholar and it’s from these journals I’ve never heard of.

And she would go look at me and go, really? I go, yeah. And she did that three or four times and you know, eventually I learned and finally I said, no, that’s not what I’m most proud of. It’s the fact that I had you kids and provided information

Shane: yes.

Douglas Powell: and tried to be a decent citizen.

And I’ve made mistakes. We all do. Um. What things do I biggest regret? Oh,

breaking up [00:37:00] with girls I probably shouldn’t have. It always involves the opposite sex. believing people who I thought were sincere and had absolutely, they didn’t care about anything except themselves. So I’ve been hopelessly naive and I’m still optimistic and hopelessly naive, but just try and trudge on.

Shane: yes. And that is probably a magical line just to, um, to finish on.

Douglas Powell: Is a good line to finish on. Yes.

Shane: for everyone listening, I, I really got the sense that it is a hard battle. It is a marathon. It’s not a quick sprint. Uh, and there’s definitely rewards along the way, but there’s a lot of, either hardship or just mundane day in, day out. And I suspect [00:38:00] that that describes the life of most EHOs where they don’t feel like they’re making a difference, where it’s just doing the same old, same old, um, but someone has to be doing it and it does make a difference.

And you suddenly do discover that, Hey, here’s your fan club. Um, and so. It’s, uh, someone has to be doing it and, and someone has to be on the sideline just cheering along. So Doug, thank you very, very much,

Douglas Powell: I agree fully with that summary.

Shane: with, uh, bath Blog, but you are lecturing your, uh, si your papers, which I haven’t read, sorry. and for being the person there who’s just each day

Douglas Powell: I have to make TikTok versions.

Shane: Yeah, just make them shorter so that I can just quickly watch them in five seconds and then scroll on. Uh, so thank you very much Doug, for being on EHO knows.

Douglas Powell: Thank you.

Shane: And, if you haven’t subscribed, subscribe, and if you haven’t contacted me with an awesome story, [00:39:00] contact me with an awesome story. And I have finally remembered to do a call to action at the end of one of my videos. So thank you very much for watching. Thank you. Bye.