Food safety watchdog says poultry guidelines don't go far enough - PWW
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 Food Factory Field Trip Old Picture |
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Article: Food safety watchdog says poultry guidelines don't go far enough
Food safety watchdog says poultry guidelines don't go far enough - PWW
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Article: OJ Fungicide Results Come In, FDA Says 11 Samples Tested Positive For Carbendazim
OJ Fungicide Results Come In, FDA Says 11 Samples Tested Positive For Carbendazim - The Huffington Post
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Monday, January 30, 2012
Article: Foot-Long Subs Recalled For Possible Listeria Risk
Foot-Long Subs Recalled For Possible Listeria Risk - NewsInferno
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Article: Listeria a serious public health threat
Listeria a serious public health threat - Examiner
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Article: Bacteria colors your poop to diagnose what ails you
Bacteria colors your poop to diagnose what ails you - io9
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Saturday, January 28, 2012
Article: McDonald's drops use of 'pink slime' ammonium hydroxide in hamburger meat
McDonald's drops use of 'pink slime' ammonium hydroxide in hamburger meat - National Post
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Friday, January 27, 2012
Article: 68 Sickened In Salmonella Outbreak Linked To Unnamed Mexican Restaurant
68 Sickened In Salmonella Outbreak Linked To Unnamed Mexican Restaurant - NewsInferno
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Article: Why X-Rayed Food Isn't Radioactive, And Other Puzzles : The Salt : NPR
Why X-Rayed Food Isn't Radioactive, And Other Puzzles : The Salt : NPR - www.npr.org
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Article: The (Un)Usual Suspect: Why Organic Spices Aren't Always Safe
The (Un)Usual Suspect: Why Organic Spices Aren't Always Safe - NPR US
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Thursday, January 26, 2012
Article: Should the CDC Reveal the Source of Recent Salmonella Outbreaks?
Should the CDC Reveal the Source of Recent Salmonella Outbreaks? - The Atlantic
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Article: Why feeding oranges to cows and chickens could save lifes
Why feeding oranges to cows and chickens could save lifes - Examiner
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Article: The Latest Techno-Fix to Deal With Contaminated Meat Products
The Latest Techno-Fix to Deal With Contaminated Meat Products - The Atlantic
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Article: UNL Wins Grant For E. Coli Research
UNL Wins Grant For E. Coli Research - KETV.com
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Article: Iceland recall lamb mince in salmonella scare
Iceland recall lamb mince in salmonella scare - BitterWallet
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Article: MRSA contamination in US retail pork higher than known
MRSA contamination in US retail pork higher than known - Food & Beverage
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Article: Frisia Dairy Recalls Raw Milk Products Over E. Coli Contamination Threats
Frisia Dairy Recalls Raw Milk Products Over E. Coli Contamination Threats - JusticeNewsFlash.com
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Article: Advocacy group responds to poultry inspection proposal
Advocacy group responds to poultry inspection proposal - Food & Beverage
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Friday, January 20, 2012
Article: GM microbe breakthrough paves way for large-scale seaweed farming for biofuels
GM microbe breakthrough paves way for large-scale seaweed farming for biofuels - The Guardian
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Article: Manganese, Common Substance Found In Nuts And Whole Grains, May Fight E. Coli
Manganese, Common Substance Found In Nuts And Whole Grains, May Fight E. Coli - The Huffington Post
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Article: SHMEAT: The Lab-Grown Meat We May Get To Eat This Year
SHMEAT: The Lab-Grown Meat We May Get To Eat This Year - Webpronews
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Article: Intermec Technology Traces the Food Supply Chain - From Field to Fork
Intermec Technology Traces the Food Supply Chain - From Field to Fork - NewsBlaze
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Article: Recall: Leasa Living alfalfa sprouts-Salmonella contamination
Recall: Leasa Living alfalfa sprouts-Salmonella contamination - Consumer Reports
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Article: iBooks 2 brings textbooks to life
iBooks 2 brings textbooks to life - CNET
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Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Article: Allergen Alert: Vitamins Recalled Due to Undeclared Shellfish
Allergen Alert: Vitamins Recalled Due to Undeclared Shellfish - Webwire
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Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Article: Gut bacteria 'biome' differs in obese people
Gut bacteria 'biome' differs in obese people - Futurity.org
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Monday, January 16, 2012
Article: Health chiefs prepare campaign to prevent epidemic during Olympics
Health chiefs prepare campaign to prevent epidemic during Olympics - Guardian Sport
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Article: Andy Mannle: Life's Most Amazing Invisible Secrets
Andy Mannle: Life's Most Amazing Invisible Secrets - The Huffington Post
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Article: Outbreak of Drug-Resistant Salmonella Infections Linked to Ground Beef
Outbreak of Drug-Resistant Salmonella Infections Linked to Ground Beef - Webwire
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Article: Sick People Smell Bad: Why dogs sniff dogs, humans sniff humans, and dogs sometimes sniff humans
Sick People Smell Bad: Why dogs sniff dogs, humans sniff humans, and dogs sometimes sniff humans - Scientific American
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Article: Contaminated Orange Juice Scare Points To Food Safety Weakness
Contaminated Orange Juice Scare Points To Food Safety Weakness - NewsInferno
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Sunday, January 15, 2012
Dodgy Dining
Dodgy food's dirty secret aired - Heraldsun.com.au
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Article: Dodgy food's dirty secret aired
Dodgy food's dirty secret aired - Heraldsun.com.au
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Article: This Week in Microbiology (TWiM): The Top 10 Microbiology Stories of 2011
This Week in Microbiology (TWiM): The Top 10 Microbiology Stories of 2011 - Bio Job Blog
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Saturday, January 14, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
Article: Rise in salmonella outbreaks in Victoria
Rise in salmonella outbreaks in Victoria - The Age
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Article: Outbreak of Drug-Resistant Salmonella Infections Linked to Ground Beef
Outbreak of Drug-Resistant Salmonella Infections Linked to Ground Beef - Webwire
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Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Article: Bacteria in the gut of autistic children different from non-autistic children
Bacteria in the gut of autistic children different from non-autistic children - PhysOrg
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Article: Glowing bacteria biopixels: The sensor displays of the future
Glowing bacteria biopixels: The sensor displays of the future - ExtremeTech
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Article: #54: Attack of the Salad Sprouts
#54: Attack of the Salad Sprouts - Discover Magazine
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Article: 19 Sickened In Hannaford Salmonella Outbreak, Source Of Tainted Beef Unknown
19 Sickened In Hannaford Salmonella Outbreak, Source Of Tainted Beef Unknown - NewsInferno
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Monday, January 9, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Required Reading 2: Enteric pathogens in produce
Current Opinion in Biotechnology
Volume 20, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 166-171
Food biotechnology / Plant biotechnology
Human enteric pathogens in produce: un-answered ecological questions with direct implications for food safety
Max Teplitski1,
, Jeri D Barak2 and Keith R Schneider31Department of Soil and Water Science, University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), Gainesville, FL 32611, United States
2Department of Plant Pathology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, United States
3Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, University of Florida, IFAS, Gainesville, FL 32611, United States
Available online 6 April 2009.
Recent outbreaks of gastroenteritis linked to the consumption of fresh produce raise questions about the mechanisms by which human pathogens colonize plants and persist within marketable produce. Neither Salmonella nor Escherichia coli appear to produce enzymes that degrade plant cell walls, therefore it is not yet certain how these bacteria enter plant tissues and spread within them. Similar to plant-associated bacteria, enterics use cellulose and aggregative fimbriae for their attachment to plant surfaces. Salmonella can be an effective plant endophyte, even though it is capable of triggering plant defenses. Plant-associated microbiota contributes to the fitness and translocation of these human pathogens within plant hosts, although interactions and mechanisms of communication between plant-associated microbiota and enteric pathogens are not yet characterized.
Bacteria Tech Halts Big Stink - Discovery News
http://news.discovery.com/tech/big-stink-technology-farms-120105.html
Bacteria Tech Halts Big Stink |
5 January, 2012 7:51:00 PM
Every so often there is an obnoxious smelling stretch of road where even rolled up windows can't help. Driving through becomes an exercise in breath-holding. Now a group of Danish researchers is working on perfecting a bacteria-filled filter to stop stench at the source.
"Some bacteria are specialized in transforming a single compound," said Jeppe Lund Nielsen, an associate professor of biotechnology, chemistry and environmental engineering at Aalborg University in Denmark.
Nielsen and his colleagues are studying the microbiology inside a specialized odor-treating filter to improve its effectiveness.
NEWS: Humans Stink More Than Other Animals
"We're basically looking for the good guys and trying to promote them," he said.
Nielsen explained that sulfur compounds produced industrially are what we find most nauseating. These compounds can wrinkle human noses with their cabbage-like stench at less than a part per billion.
Along with a team that included Danish Technological Institute consultant Sabine Lindholst, Aarhus University associate professor Anders Feilberg, and University of Waterloo assistant professor Josh Neufeld, Nielsen focused on an advanced European biofilter.
The filter contains corrugated cardboard filled with bacteria that are placed inside machines. A large amount of air from the industrial site is then pumped through the machines hourly, and a water rinse provides optimal moist conditions. As the air flows through the machine, the bacteria process the smelliest -- and most toxic -- compounds.
SCIENCE CHANNEL: Quiz: Facts about Noses
"If the filter is designed correctly, they can take up 80 or 90 percent of all the compounds that are passing through," Nielsen said.
Although this type of biofilter has been commercially available for several years in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, Nielsen said that only a select group of farms have them. He added that the filters have been subject to periodic breakdowns and they can be costly.
"Farmers do not want to pay too much for cleaning the air," Nielsen said. "It's a tight business."
NEWS: What Does Anger Smell Like?
Like a business that has lazy workers, the bacteria don't all perform at the same level. By studying the physiology of these organisms, Nielsen and his colleagues want to help stabilize the filters. The group published their latest findings recently in the scientific journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, where they identify problem-causing microorganisms that need to be weeded out from the effective bacteria.
Nielsen said he expects the filters to become more widely used in the future. Danish pig farming operations, animal rendering plants, and fish processors have started using the filters. Already, with better efficiency and improved design, the filters are getting close to costing less than a dollar per pig to remove most odors it produces.
"It is a technology that can be transferred to many different industries," Nielsen said. "Even sewers can easily be relatively easily mounted with these air filters so they don't smell."
Duke University civil and environmental engineering professor Marc Deshusses specializes in using microorganisms to get rid of pollutants. He noted that the Danish group's journal article is one of numerous related articles in an active field. However, he did find their description of a vertical filter design compelling.
NEWS: Stink? Neanderthal Noses Didn't Notice
"The air passes horizontally through the active layers and you can have different treatment zones with different microorganisms, and that's interesting," he said.
The current body of knowledge to make such filtration systems more efficient is still lacking, but that's only one side of the picture, Deshusses said. In the United States, requiring all odor-producing industries to add filters would be a politically challenging, and potentially costly, prospect.
Deshusses agrees with Nielsen that research into making odor-treating biofilters cheaper and more efficient is crucial for a greater deployment of the technology. "In an industry like the pig industry where the margins of profit are extremely tiny, this is extremely important," he said.
Increasing population density means that residents are more likely than ever to live near odor-producing operations. Nielsen said several Danish rendering plants that process slaughterhouse waste were receiving frequent complaints from neighbors over the strong smell.
Then the plants installed bacteria-filled filters, Nielsen said. "They hardly get any complaints from the neighbors now."
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More Education May Mean More Food Allergies - Discovery News
http://news.discovery.com/human/food-allergies-010612.html
More Education May Mean More Food Allergies |
6 January, 2012 9:20:00 PM
If you have a college degree, you -- and your kids -- may have an elevated risk of developing food allergies. Being an immigrant, on the other hand, may lower your family's risk.
The study, which only showed associations and could not determine what makes certain groups more susceptible to reactions, may bring scientists one small step closer to understanding why food allergies have become steadily more common over the past few decades.
NEWS: Can Cat Fur Shape Human Allergies?
One explanation could be that people with more schooling may, in certain places, be more likely to visit doctors or they might have followed overly strict guidelines about when to introduce foods to their babies -- a strategy that can backfire.
"We don't think education by itself is a cause of food allergy, we think it is a marker of other things," said Moshe Ben-Shoshan, an allergist and immunologist at McGill University's The Montreal Children's Hospital. "The question is: What in the environment is affecting the rise in food allergies?"
From 1997 to 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of reported food allergies in kids under age 18 rose by 18 percent.
Today, according to various estimates, between 4 and 8 percent of American kids have some kind of food allergy. Peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish cause the most serious reactions. Milk, eggs, soy and wheat are also common allergy triggers. And allergies are more common in kids than in adults.
To understand which groups might be most vulnerable, Ben-Shoshan and colleagues called more than 10,000 households across Canada in an attempt to get a representative cross-section of society. When people answered the phone and agreed to participate, they answered questions about whether anyone in their household had food allergies.
Then, they offered demographic information. The study accumulated answers from about 3,600 homes, though low-income and immigrant populations were proportionately underrepresented.
Compared to households with a high-school degree or less, the researchers reported in the Journal of Allergy, Canadian families that included someone with at least a college degree were about twice as likely to report allergies to tree nuts, such as cashews, pecans, walnuts and hazelnuts.
Women were more likely than men to suffer from tree-nut and shellfish allergies, the study also found, possibly because estrogen and other hormones can affect the activity of cells involved in allergic reactions. And immigrants were half as likely as Canadian-born families to report shellfish allergies. Income level did not make a difference in allergy rates.
One possible explanation for the results is that both non-immigrants and people with more schooling might have greater access to doctors and be more likely to acquire accurate diagnoses.
But it's also possible that lifestyle choices make a difference.
A theory called the hygiene hypothesis, for example, proposes that cleaner, less crowded households that regularly use antibiotics and vaccines end up with lower rates of exposure to bacteria and other pathogens. Our immune systems, in turn, may fail to get enough practice fending off legitimate infections, making them more likely to overreact to benign triggers, like food.
Doctors are not suggesting that people avoid vaccines or antibiotics when they are needed, Ben-Shoshan said. But one choice that might matter is the timing of when parents expose babies to potentially risky foods.
Until a few years ago, parents were advised to wait until their babies were a year or older before introducing peanuts, eggs, dairy and other common food allergy triggers.
Now, based on research suggesting that this strategy might actually make allergies more likely to develop, the American Academy of Pediatrics no longer recommends delaying the introduction of foods, unless babies are considered high risk because of a family history or other reasons. Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding should also continue to eat their usual diet, Ben-Shoshan said.
NEWS: Got Allergies? Take a Worm
Despite the new findings, many mysteries continue to surround food allergies and what causes them, said Andy Liu, a pediatric allergist at National Jewish Health in Denver. And risk factors may vary from place to place.
In a study that he and colleagues published last year, for example, allergy testing showed no effect of education or income on rates of food allergies in American patients. Instead, age, race and ethnicity mattered most.
The discrepancy might be explained by differences in how the studies were conducted. Or, there might be differences between Canada and the United States in access to health care or other environmental factors.
The finding that immigrants had lower rates of food allergies, on the other hand, is consistent with an accumulating body of research, Liu said, and might offer some important clues about what makes people vulnerable to allergies.
"That's been seen with immigrants again and again and seems tied more to people in rural and developing areas," Liu said. "Whether or how that's being reported in food allergies is just coming into view."
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Are Gut Bacteria In Charge? - Discovery News
http://news.discovery.com/human/gut-bacteria-obesity-111026.html
Are Gut Bacteria In Charge? |
27 October, 2011 4:07:00 AM
The bacteria in our gut may be controlling our lives more than we ever realized.
In the latest findings, published today in Nature, researchers report a link between gut bacteria and the development of multiple sclerosis in mice. Studies in mice have also examined gut bacteria in relation to obesity, depression and much more.
More human studies are emerging hinting at the role the bacteria in our guts may play well beyond helping us to digest our food.
"What has been observed in humans with regard to obesity is that there seems to be a difference in the number of kinds of bacteria in the gut," said Rob Knight of the University of Colorado, Boulder. "That number is much lower in obese people than in healthy people."
Researchers have also seen differences in bacteria between mice bred to be obese versus those of normal weight. In one experiment, researchers found that an obese mouse's gut microbes extracted more of the calories from a given parcel of food than did those of non-obese mice.
This caused the obese mice to gain more body fat than the non-obese mice did.
But even stranger, in a type of mouse with a different mutation that leads to obesity, transferring gut microbes from the obese mice into other mice led the non-obese mice to eat more.
"They're not any better at extracting energy from the food. They're just hungrier apparently," Knight said. "There are more microbial cells in your body than there are brain cells. They may be outvoting you when it comes time to order (at the restaurant)."
If gut microbes can tell mouse brains to eat more, could they have other effects on the brain? Researchers are finding that the answer is yes.
"We're now starting to see direct impacts of the gut microbial community on host behavior," Knight said.
Experiments have shown that mice with no gut microbes show differences in how much they move and in their anxiety-like behavior than mice with normal gut bacteria. Mice treated with "probiotic" Lactobacillus bacteria showed a different gene expression in the brain, reduced anxiety behavior and stress hormone levels than untreated mice.
The effects may extend to diseases that are seemingly unrelated to the digestive system. In the work published today, researchers studied mice bred to develop a disease similar to multiple sclerosis.
Those raised in an environment with no bacteria never developed symptoms. Once typical gut bacteria were introduced, the mice began to show signs of the disease.
"I think what our study really shows is the importance of the gut microbiota in the initial phase of the disease," said Gurumoorthy Krishnamoorthy of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany who led the study with colleague Hartmut Wekerle.
Of course, it's impossible for humans to live a microbe-free lifestyle, but the findings suggest the microbial community may play a role in human multiple sclerosis. The team will now look for specific microbes that may be responsible for triggering symptoms.
NEWS: Animals Getting Fatter, Too
If a healthy gut microbial community proves important for different aspects of our health, what could we do to encourage the bacteria that would prevent obesity or disease?
One option might be to take probiotics, eat a particular diet, or minimize antibiotic use, Krishnamoorthy said.
But others are investigating transferring gut bacteria from the other end-through "fecal transplants" from healthy people to those with illness. "The potential is very high, but the actual amount of research is relatively low," Knight said.
In trials of patients with Clostridium difficile infections -- a gut-wrenching intestinal problem -- more than 90 percent of patients have been cured, and their microbial communities restored to normal.
In preliminary work with huge public health implications, a study last year showed improved insulin sensitivity among patients with metabolic syndrome who received stool transfers from lean individuals.
"Then the question is which other conditions are there that could also benefit from stool transplants," Knight said.
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Article: Drug-Resistant Salmonella Sickens 19 Ground Beef Eaters
Drug-Resistant Salmonella Sickens 19 Ground Beef Eaters - The Huffington Post
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Saturday, January 7, 2012
Article: The Worst Food Safety Disasters Of 2011
The Worst Food Safety Disasters Of 2011 - The Huffington Post
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