Food Science Prof Making Headlines
March 20, 2012 - News Release
University of Guelph food science professor Keith Warriner is emerging as one of Canada’s top experts on the recent meat recall. Warriner has been providing insight into the latest E. coli contamination in frozen beef products, explaining how it happened and how it can be prevented.
Warriner was on Canada AM Wednesday morning and was interviewed by CTV National News reporter Sandie Rinaldo live at noon. His interviews are also featured in the online Globe and Mail.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has expanded an earlier meat recall due to possible E. coli contamination to include more than 135 products under a variety of brand names. The frozen beef products affected all came from a Saskatoon-based food-processing plant that has since stopped operations.
Last year, Warriner, a food safety expert, emerged as one of Canada’s top experts on the new strain of E. coli, and he did dozens of media interviews on the topic.
Warriner and his research team have developed decontamination methods to improve food safety, including an effective way to sterilize seeds used to produce bean sprouts, alfalfa sprouts and other types of sprouts – culprits in several major food-borne illness outbreaks around the world. They have also tested the effectiveness of an all-purpose sanitizing system that is supposed to neutralize bacteria and pesticides on food and surfaces.
Warriner also discovered a method that could effectively eliminate Salmonella contaminations by combining an antagonistic bacterium naturally found on tomatoes with viruses that infect the pathogen and introducing the solution to the plant.
