Food safety
revere | September 26, 2008The Chinese food contamination scandal continues to widen. The European Union (EU) is now banning imports of all Chinese baby foods that contain milk. The problem is the presence of melamine, a cheap chemical used to make plastics that looks like protein in the screening assays used to see if food products meet standards for protein content. It was added by unscrupulous Chinese pet food manufacturers a year ago, resulting in the illness and deaths of thousands of cats and dogs in the US and Canada. The thinking is that melamine combines with cyanuric acid in urine to produce lattice crystals…
revere | September 17, 2008We've discussed the component of plastics bisphenol A (BPA) here before (here, here) but yesterday the Journal of the American Medical Association published a significant paper with an accompanying editorial that deserves mention. A panel of the FDA was scheduled to meet the same day to review FDA's draft assessment that BPA was not a safety problem in the US food supply and environment. As a result of the JAMA article, the ranking member of the Committee on Finance, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has written to the Commissioner of the FDA asking for a clarification of the FDA's position on the…
revere | September 15, 2008Two of my grandsons were here today. They are just babies (16 months and month and half) but one of them is a little colicky. He looks like he is having cramps after downing his formula. But compared to some babies in China, it's nothing. The formula they've been drinking was adulterated with melamine, the same adulterant responsible for pet deaths from tainted dog food not long ago (see here, here, here). Dozens of poor babies have kidney stones. One has died. If you've never had kidney stones, this might not mean that much. But I've had them. Twice. The pain is excruciating. It's been…
revere | September 14, 2008Suppose you were a cattle dealer and the US Food and Drug Administration, one of the federal agencies tasked with keep the food supply safe issued you a court order, twice, prohibiting you from putting your product into the food supply until you complied with a legally required record keeping system. The agency had their eye on you because the meat you produced had been found repeatedly to have illegal levels of antibiotics making it unfit for human consumption. But you didn't care and you violated the court orders. So the FDA went after you and you were found in criminal and civil contempt…
revere | September 1, 2008This really makes me crazy. I've already ranted about it at least twice (here and here), going back to January 2005. I thought this one was settled in the only way commonsense would allow. But commonsense isn't very common with some judges.
Here's the gist. Back in 2004 a small meatpacker, Creekstone Farms, wanted to test its cattle for mad cow disease (BSE or bovine spongiform encephalopathy). There is no cure for BSE. In fact there isn't even a treatment for it. It's fatal 100% of the time. The best you can do is prevent it. You do this by not allowing cattle that harbor the agent, an…
sporte | August 6, 2008Microbiologist develop some strange habits when it comes to food.
Some take a fatalistic approach. They reason that microbes are everywhere, we're going to die anyway, we might as well eat dirt and make antibodies. You know these people. They quote things like the "10 second rule" when food drops on the floor, tell you we're all getting asthma because we're too obsessed with cleanliness, and let their dogs wash their dishes.
Eeew.
With a few possible exceptions, I'm in the other camp.
I'm the one who freaks out if the cover is left off the salad dressing during dinner. I brush my…
revere | July 30, 2008The FDA is saying they still aren't sure how over 1200 Salmonella stpaul cases resulted from food chain contamination but they are saying its from jalapeno peppers grown in Mexico. This from a press release July 25:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is advising consumers that jalapeño and Serrano peppers grown in the United States are not connected with the current Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak.
However, the FDA continues to advise consumers to avoid raw jalapeño peppers--and the food that contains them--if they have been grown, harvested or packed in Mexico.
[snip]
The more narrow…
revere | July 26, 2008We've been saying this for a while. The produce industry has taken a big hit and their successful lobbying is one of the reasons. But it's not just their fault. It's also the fault of the Bush administration:
One of the worst outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S. is teaching the food industry the truth of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for because you might get it."
The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and…
revere | July 22, 2008The tomatoes-peppers-cilantro-? Salmonella story is starting to break, although which way is hard to say at this moment. Beginning about 3 pm yesterday afternoon newswire stories began to report that the FDA had found a single jalapeno pepper in a small distribution center in McAllen, Texas, contaminated with the same uncommon Salmonella serovar (S. stpaul) implicated in a large outbreak that has infected over 1200 people in 43 states. This is the first time any food item has turned up positive for this Salmonella strain in the 14 weeks federal and state authorities have been trying to nail…
revere | July 20, 2008The US FDA is lifting the warning on eating tomatoes it issued on June 7 because of the country's largest produce-associated foodborne Salmonella outbreak. The source of the Salmonella infections, all said to be "genetically identical" isolates of an uncommon serovar is still to be discovered, although epidemiological evidence associated it with salsa containing fresh tomatoes. Later the possibility that other salsa ingredients such as jalapeno peppers or cilantro might be the culprit has been raised. So far no one seems to know how that thousand plus cases became infected with the Salmonella…
revere | July 19, 2008About a year and half ago, in a post entitled "One donut, black", I noted the claim of a food company that it would soon be able to sell donuts spiked with caffeine. I wasn't sure I would ever see such a thing, but I was too skeptical. Not only is that company still on track with its product, but another company has now announced its intention to put caffeine into bakery goods. All for our benefit, of course:
After announcing the development of a proprietary way to encapsulate caffeine for foods using vegetable-derived lipids last year, the company has worked in collaboration with bakery…
revere | July 8, 2008The FDA and CDC still don't know the origin of the massive Salmonella outbreak, now extending to 40 states. They have lots of reasons, and under current conditions it's not an easy problem since the production channels for things like tomatoes are labyrinthine. There's lots of mixing, matching, diverting, and who knows what else going on as a tomato goes from a farm or hothouse to your table or local salad bar. We know this because FDA and CDC have been telling us so as explanation for why they still don't know where a single clone of Salmnella saintpaul has managed to infect almost 1000…
revere | July 5, 2008Three food safety stories in the news this Fourth of July weekend. All three are worrisome but the third is the most worrisome of all. What are the first two?
You know them. The first is the largest produce associated multistate Salmonella outbreak on record (now over 900 cases in 40 states) rages on. Have they found the contaminated tomatoes? No. But now they think the tomatoes might be jalapeno peppers. Or maybe cilantro:
Investigators are seeing more signs that the salmonella outbreak blamed on tomatoes might have been caused by tainted jalapeno peppers and have begun collecting samples…
revere | July 1, 2008As the tomato Salmonella outbreak heads past the 800 case level, it's time to ask some questions about why we don't know the source of what is the largest produce associated disease outbreak on record. CDC has its own explanation, namely, that figuring out where tomatoes come from and where they go is much harder than they thought. Said another way, the experts in foodborne disease outbreaks at CDC and FDA didn't know much about the industry. Since tomatoes have been a frequent cause of Salmonella outbreaks, that seems odd, except that my experience with CDC in recent years is that it is full…
revere | June 13, 2008If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the US Senate couldn't even manage a paltry 60 votes to stop a filibuster of a bipartisan and none too strong global warming bill. This kind of failure isn't new. The US slow motion fall in environmental leadership has been going on for decades. In the Bush…
revere | June 9, 2008Last fall the animal slaughter giant Tyson Foods, Inc. was selling chickens with a USDA approved label, "raised without antibiotics." Some people thought that was a bit misleading insofar as Tyson routinely used ionophores in their feed designed to prevent a fungal disease in the birds. The USDA classes ionophores as antibiotics. The agency had "overlooked" the additive and when it was forcefully brought to their attention, they asked Tyson to add words to their label indicating it used no antibiotics that could cause antibiotic resistance in humans. Tyson added the words in December but…
revere | June 4, 2008What do the US states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Illinois and Indiana have in common? They are locations of reported illnesses from Salmonella Saintpaul infections, forty in Texas and New Mexico alone, with 17 hospitalizations. Thirty more cases have been reported in the other seven states. The cases are connected by being genetically identical. S. saintpaul is a less common cause of human infection than other non typhoid Salmonella strains and the bugs isolated from these cases are said to be identical. This makes a common source the only reasonable…
revere | May 29, 2008Earlier in the month there was a hilarious piece on Fox News (where else?) by hack lawyer turned hack commentator Steven Milloy trying to counter the extremely bad publicity one of his closest friends was getting. This close friend was a chemical, bisphenol A (BPA; see here and here) which just got panned by the Canadian government, the US National Toxicology Program, Walmart, Nalgene (maker of BPA containing water bottles) and even the Washington Post. Here's Milloy turning away from the scientific evidence and standing on his head, a contortion guaranteed to bring you face to face with an…
revere | May 11, 2008The subject of a recent post, rabies, put us in mind of another rare, invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease, Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD). There is now pretty good evidence that the outbreak of CJD in Europe since the 1990s is caused by the same agent that causes Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease. The incriminated transmissible material is an unconventional agent, an infectious protein (now called a prion). When a prion from a BSE case in cattle is consumed it causes a disease very like CJD in humans. Technically it is called new variant CJD (nvCJD…
revere | April 29, 2008We've covered the FDA failure leading to their overlooking benzene in soda pretty often (at least if pretty often means here, here, here, here, here, here and here). It's like the guy who went to the doctor complaining of pain in his belly. "Ever have it before?" the doctor asked. "Yes, twice" the patient said. "Well, you have it again."
In this installment we learn that the benzene, a known human carcinogen, doesn't really have to be there. Recall how it got there. Two preservatives commonly added to soft drinks, ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and sodium benzoate, react to produce the benzene…