CDC: Salmonella outbreak more resistant to antibiotics than usual

(CNN) -- Federal health officials said Thursday that a recent salmonella outbreak may be more resistant than usual to antibiotics, leading to higher hospitalization rates.

Twenty-two of the 78 people diagnosed with salmonella as a result of the outbreak have been hospitalized, said Dr. Chris Braden, a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
One person has died due to the outbreak, which has been detected in 26 states.

The outbreak can be traced back to a Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation plant in Springdale, Arkansas. Cargill announced an immediate voluntary recall Wednesday of approximately 36 million pounds of ground turkey meat potentially contaminated with Salmonella Heidelberg bacteria.

Braden urged consumers Thursday to check the packaging on any ground turkey products they may have purchased recently, and to use extra caution in handling such products.

"We've identified the 36 million pounds that need to be recalled," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters at the Wisconsin State Fair in suburban Milwaukee. "Hopefully, that will provide some greater level of certainty and surety to consumers. We've gotten information out about precisely what those products are, the expiration dates, the specific brand names. I'm thankful that we're finally able to figure out precisely where the problems might be."

"I'd say it's one of the larger recalls," said Joel Brandenberger, president of the Washington-based National Turkey Federation. Indeed, the weight of the product recalled is equivalent to the weight of more than 36 fully-loaded Boeing 747 commercial airplanes.

Cargill's plant in Springdale processed the suspect fresh and frozen ground turkey products between February 20 and August 2, the company said in a news release.

The company said it has suspended production of ground turkey products at the processing facility until it can determine the exact source of the bacteria strain.

Other turkey products from Springdale are not affected by the recall. Nor are products from Cargill's three other turkey processing facilities in the United States.

"It is regrettable that people may have become ill from eating one of our ground turkey products and, for anyone who did, we are truly sorry," said Steve Willardsen, president of Cargill's turkey processing business. "We go to great lengths to ensure the food we produce is safe and we fully understand that people expect to be able to consume safe food, each serving, every time."

Consumers may return any opened or unopened packages of ground turkey items listed on Cargill's website (www.cargill.com/turkey-recall/) to stores where they were bought for a refund.
About 5 billion pounds of ready-to-cook turkey meat are sold in the United States each year, Brandenberger said. That's nearly double what it was 40 years ago, he said.

It works out to 17 to 18 pounds of turkey per person per year, of which about 10% is ground, he said. The recalled meat represents slightly more than 6% of the national production of ground turkey in a given year, he said.

Each year, about 260 million turkeys are raised in the United States. Brandenberger predicted the recall will have little impact on turkey consumption. "The fact that the government and everybody involved worked through this issue pretty quickly to resolve it will maintain consumer confidence in ground turkey," he said.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service released a public health alert for frozen or fresh ground turkey products that underscored the importance of following cooking instructions and general food safety practices when preparing any raw meat or poultry.
It recommends meat be cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit (74 Celsius).

Infection with the bacteria can cause people to develop diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps 12 to 72 hours after infection.

The sickness usually lasts four to seven days, and most people recover without treatment.

But severe diarrhea can require hospitalization and, if the infection spreads from the intestines to the bloodstream and then elsewhere in the body, the bacteria can prove fatal, according to public health experts.

The aged, infants and people with impaired immune systems tend to be at highest risk.

CDC: Salmonella outbreak more resistant to antibiotics than usual

Is Your Meat Habit Giving You Diabetes?

 By Tom Philpott


The United States has one of the highest diabetes rates in the developed world—and the malady is spreading faster here than it is in most other rich nations, a recent Lancet study (registration required) found.

I've always associated our diabetes problem with the steady rise in sweetener consumption since the early '80s, triggered by the gusher of cheap high-fructose corn syrup that opened up at that time. But another culprit may be contributing, too: exposure to certain pesticides and other toxic chemicals. A new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Diabetes Care found a strong link between diabetes onset and blood levels of a group of harsh industrial chemicals charmingly known as "persistent organic pollutants" (POPs), most of which have been banned in the United States for years but still end up in our food (hence the "persistent" bit—they degrade very slowly).

The ones with the largest effect were PCBs, a class of highly toxic chemicals widely used as industrial coolants before being banished in 1979. Interestingly, the main US maker of PCBs, Monsanto, apparently knew about and tried to cover up their health-ruining effects long before the ban went into place.

Organochlorine pesticides, another once-ubiquitous, now largely banned chemical group, also showed a significant influence on diabetes rates.

The researchers identified a group of 725 diabetes-free elderly Swedes and tracked them for five years, studying the level of POPs in their blood. Thirty-six of them ended up contracting Type 2 diabetes—and the ones who did had significantly higher POP levels than the ones who didn't. The researchers stress that the study's sample size is small, but their findings build on other recent data suggesting a POP/diabetes connection. Evidence for such a link is "piling up," David Carpenter, head of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, told Reuters.

Decades after the banning of most POPs, are Americans still routinely exposed to them? Evidently, yes. Levels are declining, but they remain significant.  In a 2010 study published in Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers found traces of a range of them in food procured in Dallas supermarkets. In a long article pivoting off of the study, Scientific American's Emily Elert wrote:

Recent studies sketch a complex profile of legacy contaminants in U.S. food—a profusion of chemicals in trace amounts, pervasive but uneven across the food supply, occurring sometimes by themselves, but more often in combination with others. Included are DDT and several lesser-known organochlorine pesticides as well as industrial chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which were used until the late 1970s in electrical equipment.

How are these awful chemicals sticking around and still causing trouble decades after being banned? POPs accumulate in the fatty tissue of animals—and transfer to the animals that eat them, including humans who eat meat and fish. In industrial animal farming, livestock are often given feed that includes animal fat, which helps POPs hang around in the food chain. "We feed the cow fat to the pigs and the chickens, and we feed the pig and chicken fat to the cows," one expert told Elert. The widespread practice of feeding "poultry litter"—chicken feces mixed with feathers, dead chickens, and feed remnants, including beef products—to confined cows is another way these toxins keep cycling though the food chain. Why would the meat industry engage in such feeding practices? Simply put, because they're cheap. 

Farmed salmon, too, carry significant levels of these dodgy chemicals, especially PCBs. The Dallas supermarket study found farmed salmon to have the highest PCB levels of any food they tested. Earlier studies, too, have yielded similar findings. A 2004 Science paper found PCB levels in farmed salmon seven times higher than in wild, and advised consumers to limit their consumption of the farmed salmon.

Given these findings and the emerging link to diabetes, it seems smart to limit consumption of factory-farmed meat and fish. And '70s-era chemicals like PCBs are only part of the problem. A newer chemical class called polybrominated flame retardant (PBDEs) also appear to be entering our bodies through industrial meat, recent research published in Environmental Health Perspectives shows. These persistent toxins are only now being phased out, but they're ubiquitous in everything from furniture to textiles—and in the equipment used in factory-scale meat processing. PBDEs "accumulate in the liver, kidney and thyroid gland and are known endocrine disrupters," EHP reports, and they have also been linked to diabetes.

The USDA, which oversees the safety of the meat supply, seems incapable of addressing the problem. Twice since 2008, the USDA's inspector general has seen fit to rebuke the agency for failing to adequately test meat for traces of pesticides, antibiotics, heavy metals, and other toxins. Always under pressure from industry and now facing budget cuts, I doubt the USDA will ramp up testing anytime soon. Product tainted with toxic, possibility diabetes-causing residues may be just another hidden price we pay for the meat industry's cost-slashing business model. That's bad news in a nation where per capita average meat consumption approaches two-thirds of a pound a day.

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Is Your Meat Habit Giving You Diabetes?

Do you pick up dropped food?

The Health Advocate

In a recent study, researchers placed salmonella on wood, tile, and carpeting, and dropped a slice of bologna on the surfaces for 5, 30, or 60 seconds. With both wood and tile, more than 99 percent of the bacteria was transferred “nearly immediately.” Carpet transferred a smaller number of bacteria, still enough to cause serious illness.

So unless you can pick up the dropped food faster than “nearly immediately,” you might as well not pick it up at all.

I have a problem with that, because I hate to waste food. Why throw out a perfectly good strawberry or potato chip or malted milk ball solely because it fell on the floor? A few weeks ago, I dropped a Creamsicle® on the kitchen floor. It broke in two. I picked it up. Good as new. Tasted great, as an artificially sweetened iced confectionery treat should.

Lest you think anything goes, I have standards. I don’t worry too much about germs if food’s dropped in my kitchen. Or the floor of my cube. Or my grandmother’s house. (Her garage is more sterile than an operating room.) There are certain no-nos, including airports, convenient stores, bathrooms, convenient store bathrooms (can you imagine?), and my car mats. Also, if something’s stuck to it that won’t wash off, then, like a horse with a broken leg, I have to put it down.

Last summer, I was grilling hot dogs for a family gathering. As I was turning the hot dogs, I dropped one on the deck. No one was looking, so I picked up the dog, made sure nothing foreign was stuck to it, and set it back on the grill.

At least I thought no one was looking. Turns out my 6-year-old nephew saw it, and told the entire gathering of 20 people that “Uncle Nick Nick dwopped a hot dog.” My defense was that I knew which dog I dropped and that I planned to eat it myself. Truth is, all hot dogs look alike, and I lost track of it. But somebody ate it. Perhaps the 6-year-old tattletale.

Do you pick up dropped food?

Silly Putty Ingredient Found in Chicken McNuggets — The Golden Arches has been pumping petroleum-based ingredients into its McNuggets for years!

From: food.change

So here's a riddle for you: What do silly putty, McDonald's Chicken McNuggets, and cosmetics have in common? A gummy texture, unnatural colors, and off-putting smells would probably all be technically correct here, but it's not the answer I'm looking for. The shocking similarity amongst these three items is that they all contain dimethylpolysiloxane, a form of silicone.


The fact that silicone is in silly putty (a child's toy) and cosmetics (a substance most people cake on their faces every day) is disturbing enough. But put that chemical in a food item and I'm downright nauseated. According to a story on Grist, dimethylpolysiloxane is an anti-foaming agent. You know, to keep frying oil from getting too foamy when McDonald's employees drop the nuggets into that piping hot vat of grease.

Dimethylpolysiloxane isn't the only scary substance lurking in Happy Meals. According to CNN, Chicken McNuggets also contain tertiary butylhydroquinone (tBHQ), a petroleum-based preservative for vegetable oils and animal fats. Experts worry about oil making its way into Gulf seafood over the past couple months. Turns out the Golden Arches has been pumping petroleum-based goods into its McNuggets for years.

See Full Article

Silly Putty Ingredient Found in Chicken McNuggets — The Golden Arches has been pumping petroleum-based ingredients into its McNuggets for years!

Nutrition labels on poultry, meat in 2012 will help fight obesity

Nutritional labels will be mandatory on 40 popular cuts of meat and poultry products beginning in 2012, a measure the U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Wednesday will make it easier for consumers to understand the content of the foods they buy. USDA said the nutritional information will be required for major cuts of raw, single-ingredient meat and poultry products. These include whole or boneless chicken breasts, beef whole cuts such as brisket or tenderloin steak, and hamburger and ground turkey. See Article

Nutrition labels on poultry, meat in 2012 will help fight obesity