Product safety

Food poisoning can be a miserable experience and sometimes you feel like you want to die rather than endure another minute of the agony, but people rarely die from food poisoning. At least for most causes of food poisoning. The exceptions are the exceedingly rare cases of botulism and the much more common occurrence of listeriosis, infection with the organism Listeria monocytogenes. Listeria is a really nasty bug and serious cases are often fatal. The most at risk are the elderly, the immunocompromised, and pregnant women, biologically immune altered, and their fetuses and neonates. Listeria…
I've mentioned my shit box of a car pretty often here, usually in connection with trying to get someone to buy it. I had another flat this morning from a rim that is so rusty it doesn't hold a seal anymore. I thought I'd replaced it at the junkyard last week but it seems they replaced the wrong rim. That's what happens when you buy tires and rims at the junkyard. I'm not really in to cars, which is why I can keep driving my 14 year old monstrosity. It gets me from A to B, which is what I want. It doesn't have much hi tech stuff, although I like that kind of thing. My next car maybe. It does…
About 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…
The 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…
We take for it granted that technology can be used to tag objects in various ways, useful and otherwise. The anti-theft devices used on retail clothing stores are a familiar example. Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) are used for this purpose as well as for security access. I have a device like that on my windshield for automatic highway tolls on the turnpike. Hospitals also have a strong interest in keeping track of lots of items like pharmaceuticals, equipment or even ordinary sponges used in surgery. Counting and keeping track of sponges is routine so none are inadvertently…
Every time I write about the hazard of phones some readers flip out. The hazards of non-ionizing radiation, whatever the evidence (and it is controverted, difficult, ambiguous and contradictory), seems to acquire a junk science label from people who don't have much training or experience in evaluating the kind of evidence that forms the basis for some of the claims. OK, rant over. This isn't about the hazards of non-ionizing radiation. But it is about a health hazard from telephones: Constantly cradling a telephone receiver between the shoulder and ear to free the hands for other work can…
If 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…
Last 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…
If you aren't in the business of figuring out if a chemical is a health hazard you might never have heard of the EPA's IRIS (Integrated Risk Information System) database but suffice it to say it is a wealth of valuable information on the topic. Considered authoritative by many states and countries, its judgements have become the basis for official standards. It's been around since the start of Reagan's second term (1985) so there is no claim it is some kind of fringe environmentalist fantasy. It's not the Last Word but it's a loud voice and taken seriously by anyone tasked with protecting the…
Over the years I've seen more than enough of the murderous destruction "the magic mineral, "asbestos, has caused in the lives of workers and their families. Exposure to asbestos causes a serious, often fatal, scarring of the lungs called asbestosis and also two different kinds of cancer of the respiratory tract: lung cancer and mesothelioma. Both cancers are usually fatal, but while lung cancer can be caused by other agents like cigarettes and various occupational chemicals, mesothelioma is mostly a result of exposure to asbestos. "Meso," as it is often called, is a horrific disease. It…
The 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…
We'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…
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…
It's official. Living in one of the 120,000 trailers FEMA supplied after Hurrican Katrina is bad for you: Federal health officials on Thursday urged hurricane victims to move out of trailers supplied by FEMA after tests showed dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes. Tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on more than 500 trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi showed formaldehyde levels that were five times higher than levels in a normal house. The levels in some trailers were nearly 40 times what is normal. The CDC said people should move out quickly -- especially children,…
This week sees the tenth anniversary of an important event in the American environmental movement, although few people know it (even some who were there had forgotten the date). In late January, 1998, a group of 32 environmental scientists, activists and scholars sat down together at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin to hash out a consensus statement on The Precautionary Principle. After a grueling three days, the statement was put into final form on January 25 (just in time to see my beloved Green Bay Packers lose the Superbowl. Is history repeating itself? Aargh!). In…
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is supposed to make sure toys and other consumer products are safe. They recalled 472 products last year. That's a pretty good record for a Lilliputian agency that has a staff of only 400. This is George Bush's dream -- shrinking the size of the government. CPSC started out life with 800 staff. If Bush's budget recommendations had been adopted by Congress it would have had to cut another 19 positions -- 5%. For once Congress didn't go along. They increased CPSC budget from $63 million to $80 million. The agency's head, former industry lawyer Nancy Nord,…
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…
If you are like most people you probably aren't alarmed about the dangers of nanotechnology. In fact if you are like most people you probably don't even know what nanotechnology is. I'll resist the temptation to say general knowledge of the emerging technology of the very small is even smaller. Despite the fact most of us have no clue, there is a surprising amount of nano products already in the marketplace, incorporated in products from food containers to golf clubs. But there remain doubts about safety. Nanoparticles are so small they don't act in ways we understand, either physically or…