EHO Knows: Global Gut Quiz w/ Dr. Douglas Powell

Shane: [00:00:00] Welcome to EHO knows. In this episode, I get to meet someone who I’ve always thought was a total legend when it came to food safety. For years, I used to watch or read Bath blog. And finally, today I get to interview Dr. Douglas Powell. So thank you very much for coming along onto EHO Nose.

Douglas Powell: Glad to be here. Thank you.

Shane: the amount that you know, and the amount that you’ve written on in terms of food safety and food disasters is absolutely amazing. Uh, and so what I thought today is I’m just gonna rattle off a whole bunch of foods tell me when or where some major food poisoning outbreak has happened. Um, and so really, uh, what we going to do is just show it happens everywhere, uh, but a bit of a test of your knowledge and it’s gonna be an interesting insight into the world of food poisoning. Um, so let’s start with low [00:01:00] hanging fruit sprouts.

Douglas Powell: Raw alfalfa sprouts or mung bean sprouts, or even being sprouts, they’re served on every sandwich even at hospitals in Australia. And they’ve been, they’re responsible for outbreaks almost every week, somewhere in the world. The biggest one was in Germany in 2011, in which 53 people died and a couple hundred got sick from e Coli oh 1 5 7.

And what happens is the sprout gets contaminated as it’s forming and you can’t wash it off. And washing sprouts is something people don’t do anyway. Now in Southeast Asia, they blanch or cook the sprouts ’cause they know not to eat any raw vegetables. But in Western cultures we want things minimally processed.

So that was the big [00:02:00] outbreak and that was shocking at the time that it was just so large and so dramatic. But they happen every week

Shane: so

scale so large?

Douglas Powell: Well, the seed was imported from Egypt. It turns out because a lot of Europe, their south is Spain and Northern Africa, and so it was imported from Egypt and that initial seed had become contaminated, and then it was just served in sandwiches and at cafes and restaurants all around Germany, and it wasn’t cooked,

Shane: the start of the outbreak and identifying the cause and shutting it down.

Douglas Powell: Oh, it would’ve been months.

Shane: And.

Douglas Powell: You know, they, they notice an uptake. There’s surveillance systems [00:03:00] which monitor people being sick. But to actually identify a microorganism, you have to provide a stool sample, which isn’t inconvenient and a lot of people don’t like to do it. so it takes a while.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: But that’s a blue thing of people like environmental health officers and inspectors and disease detectives, we call them.

that’s what they’re, they’re supposed to do and they figured it out.

Shane: this case coroners a lot of them.

Douglas Powell: Yeah.

Shane: Okay, so Sprouts. Um, the old favorite rice I.

Douglas Powell: Rice is problematic because like a lot of food, it’s grown in the ground and people don’t realize that potable water is really. A fairly recent invention. It’s only 150 or so years old. [00:04:00] Back in the Roman times, they didn’t feed water to their slaves. They fed them wine because it was fermented to get rid of all the disease causing organisms and, and the outbreaks of cholera.

In the 1870s or so, that’s when that famed epidemiologist snow in England. He put a tap on the local, well, because there were so many people dying of cholera and they were getting all their water from a local pump and just through basic epidemiology. I mean, they didn’t know about microorganisms, but he figured out everyone was getting it from going to this common pump.

So he put a lock on the pump and it disappeared.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: So there’s these, I don’t know if they’re accidents, [00:05:00] but you know, we know a lot more now and we can do DNA sequencing and identify the bug and make it more specific. I’m not sure that makes us more knowledgeable, but it helps provide solutions to problems that are out there.

Shane: so any really, really big rice poisoning outbreaks.

Douglas Powell: There have been many, in fact, I had one myself when I was in high school, grade 12, and it’s very common to go to a Chinese restaurant and you order rice and it was back in the seventies and people used to leave Chinese food out all night. Well, because it’s grown in the soil, it accumulates something called Clostridium, which is a soil-borne bacterium that is also a spore former, and that means it’s resistant to boiling.[00:06:00]

It is not neutralized until you get to 120 degrees Celsius. And that’s why we have autoclaves and things for Petri dishes and hospital instruments. And if you leave it at room temperature for anything more than two hours, those spores will germinate and that stuff grows and it will make you very sick very quickly.

So the only thing you can do is refrigerate. But back then people didn’t remember that. And when you go to a Chinese restaurant, you never know what they’re doing with the rice. I mean, with. The acknowledgement to your EHO Friends. I don’t really like going to restaurants that much anymore because I don’t know what’s going on in the back room.

Shane: So, how bad was the food poisoning then?

Douglas Powell: Oh, I was on the [00:07:00] toilet every 20 minutes for 12 hours.

Shane: so.

Douglas Powell: It’s not a lot of fun, but when you’re young, you can handle it. When you’re old, it’ll kill you.

Shane: What, what I find amazing about this and um, and this is probably a big take home lesson for eh hos, know, of all these outbreaks and there’s ones that have, killed or, or hurt, you know, of people and the one you remember most and the one you lead with is the one that impacted you directly. Uh, and so we can be as academic as we like, and we can talk about, you know, hundreds of people have had food poisoning, thousands of people have died from this, you know, bang, bang, bang. But the moment it’s you is excavating your bowels on the toilet or

Douglas Powell: Yeah,

Shane: gut up, that’s

Douglas Powell: many, uh, dictators have known that statistics don’t matter. It’s when it comes [00:08:00] to you and when it comes to foodborne illness in the West, we’ve decided that one is too many. And if it’s your child that gets sick or an elderly relative that’s too many and you want answers, how did this happen?

Shane: And so what we wanna do is be taking the food poisoning message from, you know, statistics out there, and trying to make it personal and saying, Hey, you don’t want this to happen to you. You don’t want it to happen to your customers. So yes,

Douglas Powell: Well, that’s good. And people learn from stories. They don’t learn from facts. Um, you embed the facts in the stories, but stories are what gets people’s attention. And if it’s personal, then that’s all the better. I mean, Socrates figured this out. You have an appeal to logic, you have an appeal to emotion, [00:09:00] and you’re have an appeal to fact.

Shane: Okay. There’s just a soundbite to advertise. EHO knows for next time as well. Uh, but once again, it’s, it’s a really good point because we can talk about the science, but it’s the story that people remember. Okay? So, uh, sprouts, rice, chicken.

Douglas Powell: Chicken has been associated with a lot of problems over the years. and in fact, the reason I got to do my PhD was because my supervising professor had migrated from the UK and the then UK Ag Minister had said that salmonella was endemic in UK poultry and she got fired. And so he was sympathetic to the emotion argument and how public perception can run with things.

Even though scientifically she was correct, and there are [00:10:00] still problems even in a lot of Western co countries that say salmonella is not in the eggs yet. We know scientifically it is, but government, especially in Australia, is reluctant to acknowledge that even though the science says it’s there and people, you know, you hear these stories like, well, this is the way my grandparents cooked it and I never got sick.

Well, you don’t really know that unless you take a stool sample, unless you can link it to an actual practice. It’s just sort of passed off as, oh, I have the flu. Well, the flu is actually a completely different disease that’s a lung disease, whereas gastrointestinal is you’re stomach. And you’re pooping and barfing and sometimes die.

So chicken [00:11:00] and up until very recently it was quite common to wash chicken. You would take a whole chicken and that’s because they used to have feather sticking out of them. So you, and it wasn’t that long ago. Now we just go to the store and buy a chicken and by washing it, the cross-contamination of that tap water hitting the surface and being aerosolized and spreading around the kitchen is actually much worse than not washing it at all and just cooking it and making sure it gets to a tip sensitive digital thermometer, verified degree.

Which in chicken is about 75 or 71 Celsius.

Shane: Yeah, I’ve, uh, actually seen photos of hand [00:12:00] basins in kitchens filled with raw chicken being washed. And you going, okay, let’s just double

Douglas Powell: Yeah.

Shane: just splash it everywhere, but let’s, you know, cross contaminate with our hand washing facilities. Um, so that one was absolutely horrific. Uh, plug for episode one was, uh, the egg that took out an entire restaurant and gave, uh, about a hundred people food poisoning. Uh, so if you haven’t watched that one, head back to episode one. Uh, but yeah, so chickens, eggs, just an absolute classic what’s probably been the largest food poisoning outbreak due to, uh, eggs.

Douglas Powell: been hundreds. Um. There’s currently one in the US state of California in which 60 people are sick. And a lot of this has to go back to watching the movie Rocky, where he drank raw eggs and people say, oh yeah, that’s good. Lots of [00:13:00] protein. Well, yeah, and lots of salmonella. So, and biologically, you know, we get old and our immune system, it doesn’t matter how fit you are, you can run all you want, do whatever.

Once you reach about 55, your immune system starts to decline. It’s a biological metric that can be measured. And by the time you’re 80, you’ve got nothing left. So I used to talk about eggs and. I would say cook them. And, but then when you even crack an egg open, you got that little dribble and it’s like, oh, cross-contamination.

I hate the phrase cross-contamination, by the way. I can’t find anything snappier, but I mean, the stuff’s everywhere and it’s just mind boggling that people now [00:14:00] considered easy. So I used to talk about eggs and now that I’m 60, almost 63, I’m using frozen liquid pasteurized egg whites because I don’t have to worry about cross-contamination.

I don’t have to worry about them, not whether they contained salmonella or not. While the policy wankers debated,

Shane: Yes,

Douglas Powell: I just taken into my own hands, and that’s about the only thing you can do. And I found them at Kohl’s. Once I asked around.

Shane: yes.

Douglas Powell: Because they’re not particularly common, but when you ask, they’ll point you in the right direction.

Shane: Once they search and ask five people where it is. So, okay, so,

Douglas Powell: Yeah.

Shane: chicken, eggs. How about beef?

Douglas Powell: beef, we have a culture of eating raw beef for whatever reason. [00:15:00] Um, whether it’s steak, tar, tar in France, uh, there’s a Japanese dish, which is also raw ground beef. And they’re baffled at why they get outbreaks. it’s raw beef. That’s why. And, stakes are essentially sterile on the inside if it’s a proper state.

And it’s a muscle cut, but it’s the outside that becomes contaminated during the slaughter process. So you have to sear the outside to kill off whatever’s there, but the inside can be pink or at a lower temperature. But when you grind beef to make hamburger, you’re putting the outside on the inside.

Shane: Yes,

Douglas Powell: So that means you have to cook all the way through.

And that mistake has been made over and over [00:16:00] and over and continues today.

Shane: we’ve got all our gourmet, um, chef programs where they’re showing pink hamburgers on the inside. Um, so it’s now trendy to have half cooked hamburgers, which is great if you’re making it fresh, but not so good. If you bought the mince three or four days ago.

Douglas Powell: Okay. There’s a couple things there. First of all, fresh is irrelevant. What does fresh mean?

Shane: Hopefully less time between it being slaughtered and having, yeah. Hitting your plate.

Douglas Powell: A hamburger, the outsides on the inside, so it’s there. And the other thing is color is a terrible indicator

Shane: Yes,

Douglas Powell: for whether it’s safety eat or not. And this was worked done at Kansas State University in the early nineties or late eighties, I forget, which showed that [00:17:00] 30% of hamburgers that were deemed pink inside were actually safe to eat.

They had reached the sufficient temperature. 30% that were browned inside were unsafe to eat.

Shane: Okay.

Douglas Powell: They had not reached the sufficient temperature. Colors a lousy indicator. It’s subjective like anything else, the only thing you can rely on is the thermometer. That’s your data. And without it, and fast food chains have figured this out and they make stuff idiot proof.

So you can have a teenager flipping burgers or whatever. But my eldest daughter started working at the coffee shop, at the local hockey arena and I said, do you make hamburgers? ’cause I always like to act stupid and ask dumb questions [00:18:00] or what people think are dumb. And she said, no, we’re not allowed to.

We’re only allowed to deep fry stuff. And serve coffee. And I said, well, the oil can be hot, so be careful.

Shane: Yeah.

Douglas Powell: I said, why aren’t you allowed? And they’re not allowed to cook hamburgers because it’s just someone handling it and someone getting in touch with it and not cooking it properly. And all the myriad of bad things that can happen.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: Fast food has idiot proofed a lot of it from the supply chain all the way through to the way they cook things. And that’s why it’s generally safe.

Shane: helps when your hamburger is about, you know, three millimeters thick, and it’s just rather than a decent, um, patty.

Douglas Powell: Well, that depends too. A couple of the big outbreaks in the US were on kids [00:19:00] meals where the hamburger was like that, and. It turns out the fast food chain was deliberately undercook them because of customer complaints. They said, we want our beef not to be so cooked. And what happens with those small patties is the edges curl up and provides an insulator to the inside so it doesn’t reach the high enough temperature to kill off the bacteria.

Shane: cook one side, it curls up as a clamshell, they flip it over, and then

Douglas Powell: Yeah,

Shane: the rim that’s then touching the hot plate.

Douglas Powell: that was found out in the eighties and McDonald’s and the other chains changed the way they cook burgers

Shane: Yes. Uh,

Douglas Powell: just to avoid lawsuits primarily.

Shane: yes. Next one. Fish.

Douglas Powell: I have a [00:20:00] motto, raw is risky, whether it’s seafood, beef, chicken, eggs, whatever. I had to go to a Christmas dinner last week at a Chinese food restaurant and I said, I don’t really care what I get as long as it’s cooked.

So it was cooked thoroughly. Um, whatever that means. I, I mean, you can’t take it. I do walk around with a little thermometer in my nap sack, but by the time it gets to your table, you don’t know if it actually reached temperature beforehand or not. So it’s not much use, but A lot of food safety is really faith-based, and you mentioned those celebrity cooks, which I think are a terrible [00:21:00] source of misinformation when it comes to food safety.

And in fact, the most pa, the most popular paper we ever published was in 2004. We looked, the Food Network was taking off in the US and had all these celebrity chefs and they were complaining about inspectors and things like that. And my father, who didn’t really know what I did, but he knew I did something to do with food safety.

He said, you watch these cooking shows, they’re always complaining about inspectors and they’re doing stuff wrong. So. Here’s me and my father talking about how to make Turkey stock and make it safe and all this stuff. And he’s telling me, watch these cooking shows. So we watched a bunch of cooking shows, had some students do it, and they found that a food safety basic mistake was being made about [00:22:00] every two minutes.

And the food networked in Canada called me and said, you know, we’re entertainment. And I said, yeah, I get that you want entertainment, but you can at least embed the facts. And they said, oh, well, we’d like to work with you. And they called a few more times. And then about six phone call, it was on speaker phone with about a dozen lawyers

Shane: Wow.

Douglas Powell: and they said, if you ever say anything again like that, we’ll sue you.

Shane: Wow. Okay. But

Douglas Powell: Yeah. Doesn’t mean much.

Shane: Yeah. It’s weird, but your input. But don’t do anything that makes us look bad.

Douglas Powell: Yeah.

Shane: Yes. Okay.

Douglas Powell: So there’s a lot, there’s just a lot of mistakes being made out there that are fairly basic. [00:23:00] It’s like teaching your kid how to drive a car, right? You think you know how to drive a vehicle, so you teach your kid well, all you’re doing is passing on all the bad habits you have to the kid.

Be better to get an outsider in.

Shane: having been to some countries, which I won’t mention, uh, when you end, end up with an entire population that drives like that, then you know you’re in trouble. Um, and so. Yes, but that’s it. We basically pass on what we know. Okay, so worst fish born food poisoning outbreak.

Douglas Powell: Hi, we’re talking about fish. Um, there’s been a lot. When I was first in Australia, I got the chance to go to Dubai to do a review of a university graduate program with another professor from Australia and they, ’cause it’s Dubai, they took us out to some fancy meal and [00:24:00] it was all raw seafood. And this guy was a microbiologist who did raw seafood and he said, don’t touch any of it.

He said The ocean is a human dump that always has been. So our rivers, you gotta cook it.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: so there’s been some major fish borne outbreaks, usually related to raw. There’s always outbreaks with raw oysters. Uh, the most famous one was in 2011 or maybe earlier in the UK with one of your favorite celebrity chefs, Blumenthal, who has this little restaurant in the uk, the Fat Duck.

And he only serves 20 or 30 people a night. And you got a reserve for a year and ahead. [00:25:00] And he made 500 and some people sick with norovirus. And it turns out, and I mean foodborne outbreaks are never just one cause they’re a culmination of things. And it turns out they were getting customer complaints, but they didn’t act on them.

Their staff were getting sick, but they didn’t act on them. They didn’t report it to the local health inspectors. And when they finally did, they went in and said, it’s norovirus in your raw oysters. And then the chef turned around and said, well, that’s because they’re dumping raw sewage in the ocean.

Shane: Yes,

Douglas Powell: And my response to that is, you are the chef.

It’s your responsibility to know where you’re getting the stuff from that’s coming from raw poop. You better know that and take steps to, to avoid it. [00:26:00] And I don’t know who came up with raw oysters as a food group anyway. They must have been really hungry.

Shane: yes. Oh, it’s just totally, totally bizarre. okay, so, uh, fish relatively easy. I’m gonna pick something that hopefully is, is not gonna be a cause of major food poisoning outbreaks. go with something safe like bread.

Douglas Powell: Well, no, it’s not a cause of outbreaks because it’s cooked, so that kills off the bacteria and viruses. It grows moldy over time. But that’s a fungus and that’s a quality issue, and there’s a big difference between quality and safety. So there’s a yuck factor there, but it’s not gonna kill you or make you sick.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: So bread is relatively safe again because it’s cooked.

Shane: Okay. So it’s the line [00:27:00] between what’s a potentially hazardous food and what’s just something that’s gonna be foul to eat.

Douglas Powell: Yeah. But Western culture wants more foods that are minimally processed, raw, if you like. And that’s why we have these advisories for women who are expecting a child, do not eat any refrigerated, ready to eat foods like deli meats, smoked salmons, any of those because they can contain listeria, which is a bacterium, which happens to grow at about four degrees centigrade in their fridge.

And it also produces a, a toxin which crosses the placenta and induces still burst.

Shane: Yes,

I’m expecting my, uh, first grandchild in the next week and talking to my daughter-in-law. She’s [00:28:00] first child, so she’s avoiding absolutely everything. meanwhile she’s talking to mothers who already have children, and so, uh, they’re then happily munching into all these things. And the line of argument is, I did a little bit last time.

Nothing bad happened, so therefore it’s basically a free for all this time.

Douglas Powell: That’s the way my grandparents did an argument.

Shane: Yes. and so yeah, total, misunderstanding of, of probability. And so yes, if I can do it once and it hasn’t killed me, then I can do it as many times as I like.

Douglas Powell: That is a poor understanding of statistics and probability

Shane: yes.

Douglas Powell: because you can do lots of things many times and that one time we’ll catch up with you.

Shane: I walked

looking both ways, and I got to the other side. So from now on, I just walk across the road without looking.

Douglas Powell: I was talking to him this [00:29:00] the other day with a person here whose kid was learning to drive and he never looked over his shoulders to check the blind spot. And I said, well, when I was a kid we always had to. And he, today’s kid is like, well, we have mirrors and we don’t have to. I’m like, don’t rely on that.

Look over your shoulder. And when my kids come to Australia, I tell them, cars don’t pay attention. You have to watch out for them.

Shane: yes. So, uh, nowadays they’d say, oh, cars do pay attention, and we live in a whole new age. But having said that, something always sneaks on through. So, um, okay. Really obscure one.

Douglas Powell: And of course the biggest risk is not eating at all ’cause that’ll kill you.

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: So people will make do and do all sorts of weird things. But [00:30:00] as I’ve said in Western cultures, we’ve decided one is too many and we take what steps we can to reduce that risk.

Shane: Yes, but at the end of the day, we still have to eat there’s always gonna be an element of risk. Um, okay, let’s go for something really, really obscure Chocolate. Uh.

Douglas Powell: Chocolate was thought not to be a vector of foodborne disease until fairly recently because bacteria need water activity to grow. So some moisture and chocolate was regarded as low, low moisture food. But there have been numerous outbreaks now that, I mean, this is what happens. You get outbreaks. So people start looking and then they find out, oh yeah, that’s what it was.

And then a lot of cases of [00:31:00] salmonella linked to chocolate. And whether it’s in the manufacturing plant or in the process that it goes through or whatever, it’s showing up and it’s not as safe as you want it to be. I was never a fan of the dark chocolate. I don’t really like, I’m, I’m all for the milk chocolate.

He uses pasteurized milk

Shane: Yes,

Douglas Powell: and that’s fine.

I don’t eat much chocolate anymore anyway, but whatever.

Shane: Uh, hoping to have a guest on who will talk about a chocolate, uh, food poisoning outbreak in the uk. The cause of it was probably the most obscure, uh, thing, and it was purely being on site to seeing this [00:32:00] event happen that then suddenly explained why you had a, you know, one in a a thousand, one in a million chance of having a block.

But if you have one of those blocks, you were history.

Douglas Powell: And that’s common in outbreaks of foodborne illness and why EHOs and inspectors are so important is because it’s being on site and seeing what actually happens. That’s when the pieces come together, and we always use the phrase, be the bacteria. Think about where that bacteria can go and where it’s gonna flourish.

And when you do that and you approach these things, like there was an outbreak on, rockmelon or cantel lobes in the US a dozen years ago. And it wasn’t until the inspectors went on site and, I mean 20 people died or something. And what [00:33:00] happened was, first of all, rock melons are at a very soft shell and the bacteria are very easy to go inside, so you can’t wash it off.

but this particular grower was using a conveyor belt that had previously been used for potatoes.

Shane: Okay.

Douglas Powell: And you know, he’s a farmer and he goes, oh, I got this conveyor belt. I’ll just throw the melons on it. ’cause they put them in a dump tank to make them look shiny and. Clean for the consumers and that’s where the salmonella was coming from, conveyor belt.

So yeah. And that wasn’t put together until the person went out and saw it. So there is a role for shoe detection in all of this.

Shane: Okay. Talking about gum shoes, we will finish with our last one. Water. [00:34:00] What could be risky about water?

Douglas Powell: Everything. Like I said, potable water’s only 150 years old. Um, it’s been a huge source of disease. There’s been a lot of outbreaks involving a parasite cryptosporidium. I was in Milwaukee in the early two thousands. That sickened hundreds and kills a lot of people, and it got into the water supply. Now, the most famous one was in a town called Walkerton, which is about an hour and a half north of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

And it was e coli oh 1 5 7. Got into the municipal water supply and

I had a friend, I mean, the national news was broadcasting from Walkerton and helicopters were flying over [00:35:00] all the time, transporting people to London, to the medical facilities. And my friend was a dairy farmer on the edge of town, and he lived across the road from the farmer who was implicated. And the water guy actually tried to blame the farmer.

Because they found an old well on his farm, and lots of farms have old wells where you need water. You just dig a hole and then you forget about it. Well, it had rained, so it washes all the poop into the well back. That gets sucked into the city system. Well then it turns out that the water control guy was sort of a drunk and was adding chlorine based on smell, not using [00:36:00] any kind of test, and just sort of did it when he won.

And there’d been a lot of spring flooding and all these people got sick and at the, I was very active at the time and served on the inquiry. And it was amazing. You know, they initially were shipping bottled water to the area ’cause they thought that’s what people needed. But no one bothered to tell them, don’t brush your teeth with that water.

You’re contaminating yourself. Don’t shower with it. And that wasn’t until weeks later,

Shane: my in-laws have a

Douglas Powell: and it was because some bright pediatrician picked up that this kid had bloody diarrhea like an infant. And bloody diarrhea shows up in infants because [00:37:00] they’re wearing diapers. And when you get blood in a diaper, you go Uhoh, something’s not right.

And she went, I know what that is. It’s Deco I oh 1 57, which attacks the kidneys. And then works its way through all your organs and kills you. And so she reported it, but it took, you know, days for and weeks for word to get out but locals won’t know what to do and they figured it out. But, um, there is a gap that needs to be filled and that’s people on the ground that need to do that.

The voice heard as much as, as ugly as the repercussions might be. You still have to stand up and speak out.

Shane: Yes. in this particular case, it was contamination coming from agriculture, getting into the town water supply, combined with [00:38:00] someone who wasn’t quite doing their job, combined with,

Douglas Powell: Yeah.

Shane: lack of communication, slow communication.

Douglas Powell: All those factors contributed.

Shane: So when you talk about somewhere like, uh, New Zealand, now let’s just pick on New Zealand because that’s it.

Douglas Powell: They’ve had a lot of outbreaks of crypto and water.

Shane: but they’ve got the problem that their two big industries cows. Uh, we’re not gonna make any sheep jokes anymore, but, but cows and tourism, and now they’ve got the problem that they’ve got so much cow poo on the hills washing down into their beautiful, fresh rivers. And so now you’ve got a conflict.

Which one are you gonna go with? Um, let alone the environmental health impact of, well, wait a minute, someone’s gonna be drinking that water further downstream. Um, and so an interesting conflict,

Douglas Powell: Well, in Canada we have a disease called beaver fever, and that’s from when people go [00:39:00] off in the north and. Go trapping and they trapped all the beavers for their pelts and ship them off to England and whatever. But no one really thought, where are they pooping? And they were pooping in the rivers. Well, they would go down to the river and drink the water and end up probably with crypto,

Shane: Yes.

Douglas Powell: we call it fever, fever.

Shane: Uh, but then you go into, uh, Thailand, I remember seeing recently you still have people living right down on the water and then washing in the river, hooping in the river. in the river. and then going to the floating markets where they’re then pulling fish, you know, they’re breeding fish.

Then pulling it out so that you can eat fresh fish, you know, prepared there in front of you.

Douglas Powell: [00:40:00] Yeah, fresh doesn’t mean a lot.

Shane: It

layer of organic to yes.

Douglas Powell: Oh, organic is not a food safety system. It is a production technology. And we investigated this maybe 20 years ago and all they taught all, they’re so worried about chemical contaminants that they forget microbiological basics and. Their argument was, well, we have so many good bacteria, it out competes the bad bacteria.

And I’m like, no, it doesn’t work that way.

Shane: Yes. Yeah, let’s,

Douglas Powell: So I think organic’s a huge rip off, but supermarkets and retailers will market whatever they can do to make the buck a buck. And to me, food is 21st century hucksterism. It’s no different than magic men in the

Shane: yes.

Douglas Powell: [00:41:00] late 19 hundreds.

Shane: at this stage, we’d just like to think a sponsor of the EHO knows podcast Woolworths, uh, the fresh food people. Uh, yes. I wonder if that one will lay in. They’re not a sponsor, by the way, and we are not making any derogatory comments about Woolworths, but it did make for a really funny joke. yes.

Okay. Um,

Douglas Powell: You are funnier than you think you are.

Shane: yeah, tell my wife that. okay. So that’s probably a really good place to finish up this episode because we’re about to do a double one. And in the next episode I wanna talk to Doug about, um, about his history. Um, but Bath blog, like, uh, anyone who, read it, We will explain to the Gen Zs what a blog is.

Uh, we will in the, um, show notes also explain what newspapers are and other obscure things that will be referenced. Uh, but in the next one it’s, it’s, it’s gonna be looking at [00:42:00] how one person can over a lifetime be educating, making a difference. And we’ll cover the highs and lows of doing that. Uh, but for this episode, thank you very much Doug for, uh, passing the

Douglas Powell: you.

Shane: with flying colors, demonstrating that it really doesn’t matter what you put in your mouth, risks involved, uh, but we still have to do it. Um, so thank you very much.

Douglas Powell: Thank you.