Public Health Institute - Week Two Review

Food Safety Risk Management
Same professor as Food Safety Risk Asessment, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. Different guest speaker, which was cool. This time it was a guy from Industry giving us his perspective. We did a project on Scombrotoxin in fish, which was pretty cool. Not only did I get to learn about a new disease, but we did a management assessment on it, and mostly I learned to KEEP FISH COLD at all times. Or else you'll be a very unhappy camper. Very, very unhappy. Imagine the worst allergic reaction you've ever had and multiply it a couple of times; that's what happens when your fish is full of histamine.


Avian Influenza
This class was really awesome. We spent Tuesday learning about "people factors" and Wednesday learning about "animal factors". We had a ton of guest speakers, and I have a much better idea about the whole chain that would contribute to a pandemic. Thursday we went to the MN state labs and got cool tours. They have a lot of cool low-tech and high-tech stuff, and I wouldn't mind working there! Then we got to the cool part of the field trip - the live animal market in south St. Paul. You go in, pick out your chicken(s), buy it, slaughter it, defeather it, and process it to your liking. You leave with chickens in a bag, happy as a clam. It's SO COOL. They also sell goats, cows, pigs etc, but you don't slaughter those because of safety concerns. You buy it, they slaughter and quarter it, and you take it home in buckets. If you ask real nice they'll use their band saw to cut the bone into pork chops. I'd rather buy meat there - where you know the health of the animals before they're slaughtered, you can inspect the meat and the sanitation yourself, and then you are responsible for all of the post-slaughter processing. It strikes me as a far more transparent method than going to the grocery store and picking up a pre-packaged chicken.