Food safety

DDT has a checkered history, to be sure. Many of us remember walking through clouds of it in our childhoods, as it was sprayed willy-nilly for nuisance mosquitoes. The discovery that it was persistent in the environment (didn't break down) and harmed birds by thinning their egg shells (Rachel Carson's "silent spring") eventually led to its withdrawal from use. It is banned in the US, although it is not banned worldwide and is still used for vital public health purposes. Most of the actual uses during its heyday were for economic or aesthetic purposes with no public health rationale. Its…
If regulators in the state of California, a slate of scientists and doctors including 6 nobel laureates in chemistry and environmental and farmworker groups were all against registering a new toxic fumigant for fruits and vegetables, who would you expect to be in favor of it? If you guessed the Bush administration lap dog agency, the US Environmental Protection Agency, you'd be right. But it wasn't that hard a question. The fumigant in question is methyl iodide, marketed by Tokyo-based Arysta LifeScience Corp to take the place of methyl bromide, being phased out as a greenhouse gas under the…
Leukemia Drug Adulteration Chinese generic versions of the anticancer drugs, methotrexate and cytarabine hydrochloride, have been reported to be contaminated with an undisclosed substance according to several wire reports this morning. Several children in a Shanghai hospital were reported to suffer leg pain and difficulty walking after being injected with methotrexate. A common drug used in many chemotherapy regimens for leukemia, methotrexate is not normally associated with these side effects. The Xinhua news agency reported that the drugs had been traced to one manufacturer, Shanghai…
The argument about whether bloggers ever do real reporting is not very interesting to us, but suffice it to say there are numerous instances where they do the same thing as journalists, even in the tiny public health blogosphere. A case in point is my colleague. Dr. David Michaels at The Pump Handle (TPH), who has been dogging the story of flavoring workers lung (aka popcorn workers lung) from the outset, and has even broken a few stories. Today's post at TPH may be the most significant entry yet. But first, some background. It is now known that an ingredient in microwave popcorn with…
I'm at the beach and as you might expect there are a lot of seafood restaurants. While I'm not a big fish eater, I do appreciate the really neat kinds of food poisoning you can get from fish. Like scombroid: Scombroid fish poisoning is an acute illness that occurs after eating fish containing high levels of histamine or other biogenic amines. Symptoms typically include facial flushing, sweating, rash, a burning or peppery taste in the mouth, diarrhea, and abdominal cramps and usually resolve within several hours without medical intervention. More severe symptoms (e.g., respiratory distress,…
As more and more people take their meals already prepared ("ready to eat" or RTE) from supermarkets and delicatessens, so will more and more people take their pathogens the same way. It's not that the kitchens that prepare RTE food are more dangerous than home kitchens. On the contrary, they are probably safer, as there is a strong incentive to use good food preparation hygiene. Indeed in the past most foodborne infection came from improperly prepared and cooked food in the home. Now, however, with so many meals either eaten or prepared outside the home, this is changing. And while the…
Another food recall, although this one is for spoilage: Kraft Foods voluntarily recalled their Knudsen cottage cheese in seven states, but told consumers not to worry: the affected cheese isn't making people sick, it just doesn't taste right. The cartons affected include nonfat, low fat and small curd cottage cheese, and low fat cottage cheese with pineapple bearing a "sell-by" date of Aug. 31 or earlier, company spokeswoman Elisabeth Wenner said Thursday. The cheese, processed at a plant in Tulare, was spoiling before that date. Eating it wouldn't make consumers sick, but it might taste bad…
If the Chinese team in the 2008 Olympics works half as hard as its government to perform spectacular and intuition-defying acrobatics, it should have the gold Medal sewed up. Consider the latest in the "China is taking food safety very, very seriously but it's no big deal" event. China has announced it is banning 18 food products, including preserved fruits, candied garlic, grilled crab, peanuts and a fruit drink. "After many years of joint efforts, China has enhanced its food safety levels by a large margin. Food safety qualification rates are continuously increasing," said China's health…
The turkeys were doomed anyway, so the discovery they had a "mild strain of bird flu" didn't seal their fate, which had already been hermetically sealed. The birds showed no sign of illness. The evidence for infection came from finding the presence of antibodies to the low pathogenic strain prior to being sent to slaughter. The US Department of Agriculture reassured everyone: no human has ever caught bird flu after eating properly cooked poultry or eggs. So who cares? It turns out lots of people in the poultry industry elsewhere care a great deal: But officials in Japan, Russia, Turkey, the…
Just as the safety of the food supply is coming under increased scrutiny we have the Castleberry Foods botulism recall, now involving a variety of brands of Hot Dog Chili Sauce and dog foods. Both have something in common you wouldn't necessarily think of at first (unless you knew about botulism). Both chili sauce, which you put on your cooked hot dog just before eating, and dog food are eaten by their respective consumers without further cooking. This is characteristic of foodborne botulism because the botulism toxin, one of the most deadly and potent toxins known, is also heat labile.…
When I was a young-un no one ever heard about food allergies. Of course there were food allergies. We just never heard much about them. But now we not only hear about them, we hear about people, often children, who die from food allergy. Often peanut allergy. What's really weird about this is that in my day kids lived on peanut butter. Now some of them die with the slightest whiff of peanut antigen. And there seems to be peanut antigen in a lot of things, either by design or by cross contamination of equipment. Peanut antigen, you might think, is one of the most potent food allergy proteins…
This is a follow-up to the Salmonella outbreak at the Taste of Chicago 2007 outdoor food festival we reported a couple of days ago. The size of the outbreak continues to grow, with 636 reported illnesses, 66 of them laboratory confirmed as Salmonella serotype Heidelberg (one of the more common serotypes; CBS2, Chicago via ProMed). Fifteen people wound up in the hospital. An unusual aspect is that authorities have been able to pinpoint the source as a particular menu item, Hommus Shirazi, served at one booth at the fair. Even more unusual is that pictures of the booth and the Hommus Shirazi…
I must confess to a (possibly unhealthy) fascination for the topic of food poisoning. You know the kind. First you're afraid you're going to die. Then you're afraid you're not going to die. When I taught the food sanitation course I loved showing 1960s US Army "barf films" meant to train food handlers. I could never figure out if it was real vomit coming out of the mouths of the recruits hanging over the sides of their barracks cots or staged. I still don't know. Anyway, with such obsessions you can understand why my attention was drawn to the story of salmonella poisoning that occurred last…
When last we looked at the benzene-in-soda lawsuit the dominoes were starting to fall as Coca Cola settled (for general background see here, here, here, here, here and the Environmental Working Group site). Sure enough, the rest of the soft drink makers have now settled. PepsiCo and several other soft drink manufacturers have agreed to a settlement in a lawsuit brought against the companies alleging their products contained cancer-causing benzene. The companies said they have agreed to reformulate - or have already reformulated - the drinks to make sure the ingredients they contain will not…
Caffeine doesn't bother me. I seem to be able to drink it at bedtime and then go right to sleep. But there are a lot of people caffeine does bother. A lot. So how much caffeine is in various foodstuffs, like carbonated beverages, is a matter of interest. It is added intentionally for its CNS stimulating effect. In other words, it's a drug. The fact there is caffeine in the product is on the label but the amount isn't. Colas, pepper-like beverages and citrus beverages usually or often contain caffeine. A paper published ahead of print in the Journal of Food Science shows there is huge…
We've spoken on several occasions about heavy metal contamination of herbal products, especially in light of this highly-cited JAMA paper. Part of the problem is that plants will bioaccumulate heavy metas, especially when grown in soils rich in these natural and industrial products. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Chinese are having issues with foods grown in "hot spot" soils such as those on former industrial sites or subjected to mining runoff (free full-length article reprinted at Moneyweb) Ms. Lai, along with 57 other villagers, was eventually diagnosed with high levels…
A lot of Republicans have claimed public discontent over the War in Iraq is a creature of a press out to distort the "successes" of a Noble Crusade. The President himself has said things along this line. So has Whitehouse Press Secretary Tony Snow. We expect governments and their toadies to blame someone else for bad news and the press is a handy whipping boy. So there's nothing surprising to hear the same story line from Bush's counterparts in the Chinese government (or as they used to be called in my youth, the ChiComs): China's food safety problems are partly a result of misunderstandings…
The folks who sell carbon monoxide monitors use the phrase "a-colorless-odorless-gas-that-can-kill-you-in-your-sleep" as if it were one word. I guess they use it often enough that it is one word to them. In fact people do die from carbon monoxide, around 500 every year. A sign of monoxide poisoning in the emergency department is an unconscious patient with cherry red lips. Carbon monoxide poisons by latching tightly to hemoglobin, preventing this protein from carrying out its function of binding oxygen. The bound carbon monixide produces carboxyhemoglobin instead of oxyhemoglobin. Carboxy…
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the most incompetent and dysfunctional in the federal government (Katrina is one example; but only one). DHS also has a very expansive view of its role. Almost everything is a matter of homeland security. That includes epidemic disease, where there remains uncertainty as to who will do what to whom in the event of a pandemic. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), they also want to give the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) the bird: In an effort to prepare for H5N1, the USDA rolled out a series of measures including…
With all the concern about contamination of imported food ingredients, especially from a major exporter like China, you'd think the US Food and Drug Administration would be eager to make whatever information it has available to US food producers as quickly as possible. You know what's coming next: Lee Sanders, a senior vice president with the American Bakers Association, requested FDA documents on imported honey in 2002. The Washington-based association wanted to know about a pesticide in honey imported from China, she said in an interview. "You would hope that those types of requests would…