Food safety

On a couple of occasions (here, here) we've taken note of the scientific controversy regarding the plasticizer, bisphenol-A (BPA). I shouldn't really put it this way, because as the leading BPA researcher, Fred vom Saal of the Univeristy of Missouri said in the Washington Post over the weekend, there is no meaningful controversy any longer. Now that NIH's National Toxicology Program has finally presented its draft report on BPA expressing concern over possible carcinogenic and developmental effects, vom Saal's statement seems pertinent: "The scientific community basically said, 'This argument…
We frequently observe here that almost everything in public health, from the societal level to the molecular level, is a balancing act. With most benefits comes a risk and with many risks a benefit. Of course there is a problem when the benefits and risks accrue to different parties as when the public runs the risks and the corporation gets the benefits. So that's one problem in making the trade-offs. Another is when the risks and benefits are completely different, essentially non-comparable. We often try to solve this by measuring them on a common scale like total number of lives saved or…
About a month ago (March 1, 2008) we brought you the story of how a highly reputable and knowledgeable scientist, Dr. Deborah Rice of the Maine Department of Maine Department of Health and Human Services, was bonced off of an EPA scientific advisory committee because the chemical industry trade group, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), objected that she had a bias. How did they know? Dr. Rice, as part of her duties as toxicologist for the State of Maine, testified before its legislature that on the basis of a review of the scientific evidence she believed the deca congener of the…
I've eaten beef jerky on occasion and rather liked its spiciness. I'm not an aficionado, however, and didn't know much about it. I did look at the Wikipedia article on beef jerky where you will find more than any sane person would want to know about the food aspects of the subject, but with the increasing concern about food safety and particularly the safety of the meat supply in the US and elsewhere I was curious about it from the public health perspective. For those who don't know, here's the wikipedia description: Jerky is meat that has been cut into strips trimmed of fat, marinated in a…
I eat a lot of salad. Not because I think they are healthy but because I like salads. When I go to lunch at the hospital cafeteria I usually eat from the salad bar, and believe me, that's not a pro-health measure. You'd know what I mean if you saw the salad bar. But green leafies are supposed to be good for us, too, so that's a bonus. But a new study from CDC suggests that they are not quite as healthy as they once were: Over the past 35 years the proportion of foodborne outbreaks linked to the consumption of leafy green vegetables has substantially increased and that increase can not be…
Ex-Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer made a critical mistake in his relations with a prostitute: he had sex with her. Sex is bad, at least in America. You'd think a politician would know better than almost anyone. You don't have sex with prostitutes. You take campaign money from them: The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents food, beverage and consumer products companies, spent nearly $1.6 million in 2007 to lobby on food safety and other issues. The trade group spent a little more than $1 million in the second half of 2007 to lobby the federal government, according to a…
(Source unknown) It's a lousy disease, but Radio New Zealand's headline has to be one of the more amusing headlines I've seen in ages: "Listeria sandwiches on sale at hospital cafe": Listeria has been found in packaged sandwiches sold by a cafe at Middlemore Hospital, Auckland. Food contractors to Counties Manukau District Health Board, Spotless Services, informed the DHB of the situation on Friday. The contamination was found in Naturezone Thai chicken sandwiches, sold by the Aviary Cafe on Monday, 3 March. (Radio New Zealand) So what's this Listeria stuff about, anyway? This material is…
Even in the world of giant beef recalls in the US this one stands out: 143 million pounds. This dwarfs (by a factor of four) the previous recall record of 35 million pounds, and as the AP report observes, amounts to two hamburgers for every man, woman and child in the United States. This one has an added twist: not just safety but animal cruelty: The federal agency said the recall will affect beef products dating to February 1, 2006, that came from Chino [California]-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., which supplies meat to the federal school lunch program and to some major fast-food chains.…
I'm glad the FDA has gotten serious about people knowingly importing and selling tainted food from China. They have indicted two Chinese nationals living in the US and an executive of an American company. It would be nice if they did this for foods that threaten human beings, but for the next 347 days I guess I'll have to settle for crimes against pets. Several companies are involved, including Suzhou Textiles, Silk, Light Industrial Products, Arts and Crafts I/E Co. LTD. (SSC), a Chinese export broker that exports products from China to the United States; and ChemNutra, Inc., a Las Vegas,…
After our recent rant on the necessity of supporting the public health and social services infrastructure instead of cutting taxes, President Bush has replied. He is cutting the infrastructure: President Bush's $3 trillion budget for next year slashes mental health funding and rural health care and freezes spending on medical research, among the cuts outlined in budget documents obtained by The Associated Press. The budget for the Department of Health and Human Services would be reduced by almost 3 percent under the Bush budget plan to be released Monday. The $2 billion in HHS cuts are about…
There's a lot of stuff about tainted food in the news, whether it is toxins in imports or questionable additives in US products (e.g., bisphenol A in hard plastics). This stuff is not on any food label, of course, but there is a lot of detailed stuff that is on labels and increased concern about food seems to have made label reading more common. I've always wondered if the detail was encouraging or discouraging people from reading labels. How many people read labels really? Quite a few, it turns out, at least if you believe a new report, Label Reading from a Consumer Perspective, by the…
Being a poultry worker, in any country is not wonderful. There's the risk of bird flu, of course. And lots of opportunity to be seriously injured. And its strenuous, difficult, low paying and dirty work, which is why it employs so many undocumented workers. It also turns out it is a great way to pick up drug resistant E. coli: Poultry workers in the United States are 32 times more likely to carry E. coli bacteria resistant to the commonly used antibiotic, gentamicin, than others outside the poultry industry, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg…
It is taking the Occupational Safety and Health Administratiohn (OSHA) a long time to write rules to protect flavoring workers from a serious lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans, linked to artificial butter flavor used in microwave popcorn. According to the public health blog, The Pump Handle (which has been instrumental in keeping the diacetyl story alive), OSHA has initiated a rulemaking. But meanwhile another factor is pre-empting OSHA's tardy start. The market: ConAgra has removed a controversial chemical from its microwave popcorn that gives the snack a buttery, creamy taste,…
Concern about cutting down the rain forests is not just a conservationists hobby horse. As more and more trees are cut down for their wood and the land cleared for agricultural use the unplanned consequence is that more an more mobile and traveling humans come in contact with animals for the first time. These animal populations are reservoirs for many viruses, some, like Ebola and AIDS, make their way into new homes, human bodies. The rain forest is no more than an incubation period's travel from major cities. But this isn't the only way animals and humans are thrown together in intimate and…
I'm traveling so I'll let other bloggers do the heavy lifting. And I can always count on flu bloggers of note, Crof and SophiaZoe. Both discuss and link to reports of H5N1 in refrigerated turkey meat sold in stores in Poland (I particularly recommend SZ's excellent summary of the safety issues). While I don't have a lot to add to their coverage, I'd like to inject just one more issue related to finding the virus in meat An ongoing debate is the relative contributions of migratory (wild) birds and domestic poultry to spreading H5N1 geographically. There is evidence for both mechanisms, and…
Suppose US agribusiness food animals were being fed a poison that killed a few tens of thousands of Americans a year. Would we want them to stop? Maybe we weren't sure but had more than ample grounds for suspicion. Would we want scientists and the government to be looking into it and maybe even halting it until we had a clear answer? I would hope so. But that seems to be the situation with antibiotics and factory farming. Yesterday we posted about the discovery by Dutch scientists that methicillin resistant Stophylococcus aureus (MRSA) had a home and probably an origin in pigs and cattle in…
Puffer fish are notorious. Considerable delicacy in Japan (a taste adopted by some non-Japanese Foodies), they come with a side of risk: some puffer fish have the potent lethal toxins tetrodotoxin and/or saxitoxin, neurotoxins more than 1000 times the lethal potency of cyanide: Symptoms start within 20 minutes to 2 hours after eating the toxic fish. Initial symptoms include tingling of the lips and mouth, followed by dizziness, tingling in the extremities, problems with speaking, balance, muscle weakness and paralysis, vomiting, and diarrhea. In severe intoxications, death can result from…
Fumigating the soil before planting pretty much kills any pests that might be in it. Unfortunately the fumigant tends to seep up through the soil and expose workers and others nearby. When the highly toxic fumigant methyl bromide was banned under the Montreal protocol as a greenhouse gas an ozone depleting gas, growers started looking for a replacement. Now the EPA has approved one, methyl iodide. If you know any chemistry, you might suspect that replacing one halogen with another might not solve the problem. Indeed methyl iodide is nasty. If you want to use it you must employ a certified…
When the Topps Meat Company recalled 300,000 pounds of frozen hamburger on September 25 because of E. coli contamination that was bad. It got worse on September 30 when the recall was expanded to 21.76 million pounds, the third largest recall in US history. It got worse yet when it was revealed that 28 people in Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania states have fallen ill from eating the contaminated meat. Maybe the worst yet comes from a Chicago/McClathy Tribune News Service report that the US Department of Agriculture waited 18 days after learning…
You're in a crowded bar near the airport and your co-worker is trying to tell you something important. She wants you to do something before you drive her car to the garage for her. She is heading out of town. But you can't hear her over the din from the crowd. It's too noisy, too much cross talk. Later you discover she was telling you the gas gauge is broken and the tank almost empty. But you know that. After you ran out of gas on the freeway. Now imagine you are a developing fetus. Genes in your nervous system are turning on and off in a precise sequence in response to what's going on in…