The FDA inspectors investigating the outbreak found a number of food safety flaws at the Jensen Farms facility in Colorado and concluded that probable causes of contamination were the use of unsuitable new processing equipment and washing the melons with unchlorinated water. They found various problems at the plant, mostly relating to design flaws and the difficulty of cleaning some of the equipment. It appears that Jensen Farms was not following safety guidance on melon processing issued by the FDA to producers. Yet two recent third-party food safety audits at the plant gave it a high rating, despite apparently identifying some of the problems uncovered by the FDA. Tellingly, the House report states very clearly the FDA view that, had the guidance been followed, the outbreak may well have been prevented.

Not surprisingly this has lead to calls for tougher auditing standards in the USA and much debate about the value of food safety audits in protecting the consumer. There are certainly some interesting questions about how food safety is regulated, primarily in the USA, but also elsewhere. When a food poisoning outbreak occurs it is easy to blame auditors who didn't flag up relevant problems in time to prevent it. But put yourself in their position for a minute. An audit is only a snapshot of an operation on a single day. It cannot hope to identify every potential problem. Furthermore, auditing must be done against a standard. If the operation complies with that standard it gets a high mark. So the audit is only as good as the standard being used. It is not the auditors job to point out problems outside the scope of the standard.

I expect the auditing industry to get bad press over this outbreak in the coming weeks, but I don't think they necessarily deserve it. You could equally put some blame on the FDA for not being forceful enough in pushing their safety guidance. In the end it comes down to the fact that food suppliers must take overall responsibility for the safety of their own products. A high mark in an audit does not mean that a food business can afford to be complacent. Food safety should always be at the top of the agenda and it can always be improved.

One story that caught my eye this week figured only briefly in the news, but in its own way could prove to be equally important. In November, three children from the same family in Scotland became ill with botulism. The investigation found a link with a jar of Loyd Grossman brand Korma Sauce used to make a family meal. Type A Clostridium botulinum toxin was detected in residues taken from the glass jar containing the sauce and from its lid, as well as from the remains of the meal. The sauce was immediately recalled, but no other cases have been reported and further investigation has failed to find contamination in other jars from the same batch. What are described as "exhaustive" investigations of the production and distribution of the sauce have also failed to identify how the contamination arose. The processing facility has been described as "state of the art" and only one jar from a batch of nearly 2,000 seems to have been affected. So how did the toxin get into that single jar?

The food industry knows an awful lot about how to control Clostridium botulinum in heat processed foods - the main reason why outbreaks caused by commercial food products are so rare - but much of that knowledge relates to traditional canning processes. As new packaging and processing technologies designed to improve product quality become more prevalent, the established processing guidelines have to be developed and extended. This is done with great care and new processes go through an extended validation procedure to make sure they are safe. It should be virtually impossible for contamination to occur, but in this case it seems that somehow it did. That's why it is so vital to find out why. Faulty packaging or abuse of the product in storage or preparation would make it a one-off of limited concern, but if there are any loopholes in the accepted safe processing guidelines for heat processed foods, they need to be found and corrected quickly. Let's hope that 2012 is a better year for food safety. Happy New Year!

Putting culinary considerations before the health of diners appears to be a surprisingly common phenomenon in the higher-end of the catering business and two of the news stories we report this week seem to bear this out. The first concerns a finding by the UK Health Protection Agency that 13 out of the 18 Campylobacter outbreaks recorded in England so far this year were linked to chicken and duck liver pâté served by hotels and restaurants. Apparently many recipes call for chicken livers to be cooked only lightly, remaining pink in the centre, before they are used to make pâté. Unfortunately the liver of a chicken is very likely to contain high numbers of Campylobacter and just searing it briefly on the outside is not enough to kill all the bacteria. The result is a very high-risk dish indeed.

The same could be said of recipes using raw shellfish. Recently published research for the Food Standards Agency found that about three quarters of oysters harvested from around the British coast contain norovirus. It was therefore not surprising to read just days later that a Health Protection Agency investigation had concluded that the extended 2009 norovirus outbreak at Heston Blumenthal's famous Fat Duck restaurant was probably caused initially by a typically exotic dish containing raw oysters and continued because of persistent contamination in the oyster supply. Reassuringly, the Fat Duck has announced that it is no longer serving raw oysters.

I cannot believe that food safety is not a part of the training that chefs undergo before they are unleashed on the public. So why are these 'Russian Roulette recipes' still acceptable in certain corners of the catering trade? I think I'll eat in tonight.

This week the European Commission announced an Action Plan designed to tackle antibiotic resistance. This sounds terrific, but the devil as always is in the detail. The Plan sets out a rather impressive sounding "12 concrete actions" for implementation over the next five years. While some of these are very welcome, strengthening the law on veterinary medicines and medicated animal feed for example, others are a trifle vague to say the least. I'm not sure that "Improve awareness raising on the appropriate use of antimicrobials" counts as a concrete action. It sounds more like an aspiration to me. Then again, perhaps I will have cause to eat my words in five years time. I hope so.

The past week also saw the publication of American research looking at the effect of non-therapeutic antibiotic use in food animals and fish farming. This found fairly clear evidence that the practice is widespread and leads to the promotion of antibiotic resistance in bacterial pathogens. The authors of the study come down fairly decisively on the side of banning the indiscriminate use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animals and point to the experience in Denmark, where the practice is already banned. The prevalence of resistant bacteria in Danish livestock has decreased, but more importantly, the same effect can be seen in people.

Using antibiotics as feed supplements has surely had its day. Raising awareness is all very well, but the time has come for decisive action. If that doesn't happen, we may lose the use of drugs that have saved countless lives over the last 60 years. There may be alternatives to antibiotics, but they will not be ready to take over any time soon. The efficacy of these life saving drugs needs to be protected at all costs.