Horsemeat has been seized in raids on slaughterhouses in Ireland as part of a huge international operation targeting food fraud.
Live animals and more than 17t of horsemeat were seized from several slaughterhouses in Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.
Inspections of the slaughterhouses found that about 20% of the foreign passports used for these horses showed signs of forgery.
Competition horses with forged documents were also sent to slaughterhouses.
Europol supported national authorities in the clampdown on the “dangerous criminal trend” of illegal horsemeat, which was led by Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The raids were part of Opson 2020, a six-month operation by Europol and Interpol which targeted trafficking of counterfeit and substandard food and drink.
The New Zealand Herald reports Toi Te Ora Public Health and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) are reminding the public of the recommended food safety measures to reduce any risk from the bacteria.
“Listeria is a bacteria that can occasionally contaminate food and cause illness which can be serious for those with poor immunity and also pregnant women,” Toi Te Ora Public Health medical officer of health Dr Neil de Wet said.
“Our investigations include determining what the cases may have eaten in order to identify any common risk factors or food that may be the source of infection.”
MPI compliance director Gary Orr said if there was a link identified between these cases and the food supply chain, immediate action would be taken to ensure public safety.
People who are at risk of more serious illness from listeria include pregnant women and their unborn babies, newborn babies, people with weakened immune systems and elderly people, especially if they have poor health.
While detailed investigations are underway and a source of infection for these recently notified cases is not yet clear, and often a source is not able to be identified for individual cases, it is a timely reminder that people who are in an at-risk group should avoid certain foods.
These foods include: uncooked, smoked or ready-to-eat fish or seafood, including oysters, prawns, sashimi or sushi. paté, hummus and tahini-based dips and spreads. cold pre-cooked chicken. processed meats including ham and all other chilled pre-cooked meat products including chicken, salami and other fermented or dried sausages. pre-prepared, pre-packaged or stored salads (including fruit salads) and coleslaw raw (unpasteurised) milk and any food that contains unpasteurised milk. soft-serve ice creams. soft, semi-soft or surface-ripened soft cheese (for example, brie, camembert, feta, ricotta, roquefort).
A Tesco shopper has claimed she became physically sick for several hours after she found a dead mouse in an Italian chicken tray bake.
Cath McCall Smith, from Durham, said she felt unwell after she bit into the £3.75 teatime treat and claimed she found the rodent’s body inside.
The 57-year-old at first thought she had gnawed a piece of bone – but soon learned it was, in fact, the corpse of a dead mouse.
Ms Smith told The Sun: “I thought I had hit a bit of bone. I moved the chicken around and was horrified when she looked down and found the mouse.
“I’ve been sick for 12 hours. I’m still a bit unwell.”
A spokesman for Tesco told the publication: “We take all customer complaints very seriously and are carrying out a full investigation into what happened here.”
Daily Star Online has approached Tesco for comment.
Blog TO reports Pizza Hut Canada has confirmed they have dealt with the situation of unsanitary food practices at a specific restaurant location in Scarborough.
A customer at the pizza chain witnessed an employee refilling a tray of cheese in an unsanitary way and happened to capture the act on video.
Facebook user Corina Somers was at the Pizza Hut in Parkway mall on Ellesmere Road in Scarborough weeks ago, and noticed an employee refilling the cheese container without gloves on.
She posted the video on Facebook with the caption, “Pizza Hut Parkway mall on Victoria Park and Ellesmere. Share The sh*t out of it so people are aware of it.”
“She has the container right on the floor and dumping the cheese and touching the bag and then touching the cheese with her hand,” Somers wrote in the comments of her video. “The containers shouldn’t be on the floor, (they) should be on the counter.”
Her video has since been flooded with comments and has nearly 700 shares and Somers wrote in the comments that she reported the incident and also spoke to a public health inspector.
I’m still troubled the world lost such a gifted and incisive songwriter as John Prine to coronavirus.
And I’m lonely, because I live downstairs.
Social distancing and “stay-at-home” orders are essential to contain the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19), but there is concern that these measures will increase feelings of loneliness, particularly in vulnerable groups. The present study examined change in loneliness in response to the social restriction measures taken to control the coronavirus spread.
A nationwide sample of American adults (N 1,545; 45% women; ages 18 to 98, M 53.68, SD 15.63) was assessed on three occasions: in late January/early February 2020 (before the outbreak), in late March (during the President’s initial “15 Days to Slow the Spread” campaign), and in late April (during the “stay-at-home” policies of most states). Contrary to expectations, there were no significant mean-level changes in loneliness across the three assessments (d .04, p .05). In fact, respondents perceived increased support from others over the follow-up period (d .19, p .01). Older adults reported less loneliness overall compared to younger age groups but had an increase in loneliness during the acute phase of the outbreak (d .14, p.05). Their loneliness, however, leveled off after the issuance of stay
Trajectory of loneliness in response to COVID-19, 2020
American Psychological Association
Martina Luchetti, Ji Hyun Lee, Damaris Aschwanden, Amanda Sesker, Jason E. Strickhouser, Antonio Terracciano, and Angelina R. Sutin
The formation of four-stranded DNA has been tracked in living human cells, allowing scientists to see how it works, and its possible role in cancer.
DNA usually forms the classic double helix shape discovered in 1953 – two strands wound around each other. Several other structures have been formed in test tubes, but this does not necessarily mean they form within living cells.
Quadruple helix structures, called DNA G-quadruplexes (G4s), have previously been detected in cells. However, the technique used required either killing the cells or using high concentrations of chemical probes to visualize G4 formation, so their actual presence within living cells under normal conditions has not been tracked, until now.
A research team from the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London and Leeds University have invented a fluorescent marker that is able to attach to G4s in living human cells, allowing them to see for the first time how the structure forms and what role it plays in cells.
The study is published today in Nature Chemistry.
Rachel Gross of the New York Times writes, the first sign is the smell: smoky, like a campfire, with a hint of urine. The second is the koala’s rear end: If it is damp and inflamed, with streaks of brown, you know the animal is in trouble. Jo, lying curled and unconscious on the examination table, had both.
Jo is a wild koala under the purview of Endeavour Veterinary Ecology, a wildlife consulting company that specializes in bringing sick koala populations back from the brink of disease. Vets noticed on their last two field visits that she was sporting “a suspect bum,” as the veterinarian Pip McKay put it. So they brought her and her 1-year-old joey into the main veterinary clinic, which sits in a remote forest clearing in Toorbul, north of Brisbane, for a full health check.
Ms. McKay already had an inkling of what the trouble might be. “Looking at her, she probably has chlamydia,” she said.
Humans don’t have a monopoly on sexually transmitted infections. Oysters get herpes, rabbits get syphilis, dolphins get genital warts. But chlamydia — a pared-down, single-celled bacterium that acts like a virus — has been especially successful, infecting everything from frogs to fish to parakeets. You might say chlamydia connects us all.
This shared susceptibility has led some scientists to argue that studying, and saving, koalas may be the key to developing a long-lasting cure for humans. “They’re out there, they’ve got chlamydia, and we can give them a vaccine, we can observe what the vaccine does under real conditions,” said Peter Timms, a microbiologist at the University of Sunshine Coast in Queensland. He has spent the past decade developing a chlamydia vaccine for koalas, and is now conducting trials on wild koalas, in the hopes that his formula will soon be ready for wider release. “We can do something in koalas you could never do in humans,” Dr. Timms said.
In koalas, chlamydia’s ravages are extreme, leading to severe inflammation, massive cysts and scarring of the reproductive tract. In the worst cases, animals are left yelping in pain when they urinate, and they develop the telltale smell. But the bacteria responsible is still remarkably similar to the human one, thanks to chlamydia’s tiny, highly conserved genome: It has just 900 active genes, far fewer than most infectious bacteria.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to send my 5 daughters to summer camp.
They’re over that now but Missouri leaders knew the risk of convening thousands of kids at summer camps across the state during a pandemic, the state’s top health official said, and insisted that camp organizers have plans in place to keep an outbreak from happening.
The outbreak happened anyway.
An overnight summer camp in rural southwestern Missouri has seen scores of campers, counselors and staff infected with the coronavirus, the local health department revealed this week, raising questions about the ability to keep kids safe at what is a rite of childhood for many.
Missouri is one of several states to report outbreaks at summer camps. The Kanakuk camp near Branson ended up sending its teenage campers home. On Friday, the local health department announced 49 positive cases of the COVID-19 virus at the camp. By Monday, the number had jumped to 82.
Some states, like Oregon, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, closed summer camps this year, and many camps elsewhere have voluntarily canceled programs. But other camps are plowing ahead, hoping that precautions like social distancing, masks and requiring children to quarantine before coming to camp will quell the risk. Other states where outbreaks have been reported have included Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.
Burger King has apologised to customers in China after state media reported that two of the US fast food chain’s outlets sold expired food in the country, causing an uproar on social media.
Food safety issues have long been a concern in China, where quality-control scandals have fuelled fears over the safety of food and anger at regulatory lapses.
The problems at the two restaurants were highlighted on Thursday (July 16) in an influential consumer affairs programme on state television CCTV that previously shamed McDonald’s in China.
A Burger King in Nanchang, in central Jiangxi province, had used expired ingredients to make its burgers, according to the programme.
I tell people that spices like cilantro are a significant source of dangerous E. coli and they look at me like I just fell off the turnip truck.
This study sought to model the growth and die-off of Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157:H7 along the cilantro supply chain from farm-to-fork to investigate its risk to public health. Contributing factors included in the model were on farm contamination from irrigation water and soil, solar radiation, harvesting, and transportation and storage times and temperatures.
The developed risk model estimated the microbiological risks associated with E. coli O157:H7 in cilantro and determined parameters with the most effect on the final concentration per serving for future mitigation strategies. Results showed a similar decrease in the E. coli O157:H7 (median values) concentrations along the supply chain for cilantro grown in both winter and summer weather conditions. With an estimated 0.1% prevalence of E. coli O157:H7 contamination for cilantro post-harvest used for illustration, the model predicted the probability of illness from consuming fresh cilantro as very low with fewer than two illnesses per every one billion servings of cilantro (1.6 x 10-9; 95th percentile). Although rare, 3.7% and 1.6% of scenarios run in this model for summer and winter grown cilantro, respectively, result in over 10 cases per year in the United States.
This is reflected in real life where illnesses from cilantro are seen rarely but outbreaks have occurred. Sensitivity analysis and scenario testing demonstrated that ensuring clean and high quality irrigation water and preventing temperature abuse during transportation from farm to retail, are key to reducing overall risk of illness.
Evaluation of public health risk for Escherichia coli O157:H7 in cilantro, 16 July 2020
Live animals and more than 17t of horsemeat were seized from several slaughterhouses in Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.
