News Az reports the poisoning cases were reported in the town of Sisian in the southern province of Syunik and in Vanadzor and Stepanavan in the northern province of Lori. According to the ministry, all the patients had symptoms of diarrhea, fever, and vomiting. A preliminary diagnosis said the cause of poisoning was an intestinal infection.
The National Center for Disease Control and Prevention said 41 patients were traced in Lori, and 8 in Syunik. Currently, 33 patients are still being treated in Lori and 8 in Syunik. Doctors assess the patients’ condition as satisfactory. According to the press service of the Food Safety Inspectorate, laboratory studies found salmonella in éclairs.
It said the Zeytun Sweet company was inspected but no violations of sanitary standards were found, but it turned out that the éclairs did not have a conformity assessment and did not have a safety certificate. Zeytun Sweet Company was ordered to ban the sale of the product and recall éclairs from the market and destroy them.
In addition, samples of eggs, oil, spread, as well as finished products used for the production of éclairs were taken for further examination.
Officers at a San Francisco Bay Area jail confiscated an enormous stash of homebrew alcohol concocted by prisoners for a Super Bowl blowout party, sheriff’s officials told Don Sweeney of The Sacramento Bee.
“There will be no super bowl party at Santa Rita Jail tomorrow,” the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department wrote on an Instagram post Saturday showing officers posing with trash bags of green-, yellow-, blue- and orange-colored alcohol.
The concoction, called pruno, is commonly produced in prisons and jails by fermenting “fruit, sugar, water, and other common ingredients for several days in a sealed plastic bag,” reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But it’s also a recipe for botulism, particularly since the process isn’t exactly sanitary, the CDC warns.
WMC 5 reports a Texas man has successfully had a tapeworm removed from his brain in what doctors are calling a miracle.
Doctors think the tapeworm had been growing slowly ever since the man, identified only as Gerardo, contracted it from eating undercooked pork in Mexico more than a decade ago.
Gerardo says he got an MRI after fainting last year while playing soccer. He says he had been having headaches and “feeling off” for months prior to the fall.
“It’s very intense, very strong because it made me sweat too, sweat from the pain, pain in the head, and then, I would vomit from the pain,” said Gerardo in Spanish.
Even so, Gerardo was shocked when the MRI revealed a tapeworm in his brain.
After a complex surgery to remove the tapeworm, Gerardo says he’s back to his normal self. He has even returned to work.
Dr. Jordan Amadio, neurosurgeon at Ascension Seton, says the man’s case was “rare and truly extraordinary.” Interestingly, a tapeworm had also been found in Gerardo’s sister’s brain years earlier.
“In certain regions of the country, like Texas and California, this can be more common. So, there’s definitely something, I think, for every medical professional to be aware of. It is not commonly seen and can actually masquerade as different things,” Amadio said.
Several kinds of tapeworms, which are found worldwide, cause the parasitic infection taeniasis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Eating raw or undercooked beef or pork is the primary risk factor for becoming infected.
The Hindustan Times reports at least 50 people from Odisha’s coastal Kendrapara district, most of them women and children, were taken ill after they consumed food from a container that had a dead snake in it, said an official on Thursday.
The incident happened during a community feast at Maa Shankatatarini temple in Chandan Nagar Deuli village under Pattamundai block of Kendrapara district where 30 families were having their meal. Many of the people were hospitalised after they started to vomit, said the official.
“They showed signs of food poisoning. However, many of them were discharged after administration of intravenous fluid,” said the medical officer of Pattamundai Sub Divisional Hospital, Chandra Sekhar Das. The community feast was organised by a women self help group of the area.
The presence of the dead snake was detected during the washing of the utensils.
And this is the only U2 song I can tolerate, largely because it’s rooted in a Tom Robbins novel. Otherwise, U2 is bloated and overrated.
We conducted a recent investigation in Quebec, Canada, concerning Canadian deer hunters who went to the United States to hunt deer and returned with symptoms of fever, severe headache, myalgia, and articular pain of undetermined etiology. Further investigation identified that a group of 10 hunters from Quebec attended a hunting retreat in Illinois (USA) during November 22–December 4, 2018.
Six of the 10 hunters had similar symptoms and illness onset dates. Serologic tests indicated a recent toxoplasmosis infection for all symptomatic hunters, and the risk factor identified was consumption of undercooked deer meat. Among asymptomatic hunters, 2 were already immune to toxoplasmosis, 1 was not immune, and the immune status of 1 remains unknown. Outbreaks of acute toxoplasmosis infection are rare in North America, but physicians should be aware that such outbreaks could become more common.
Acute toxoplasmosis among Canadian deer hunters associated with consumption of undercooked deer meat hunted in the U.S.
The girls are off in the French territory of New Caledonia doing Amy-directed French biz and yesterday they went to Lifou, Island, part of the Loyalty Islands which the French decided would be useful way back when.
I look forward to their tales.
I spoke at an Australian food safety conference in 2004 on the Gold Coast and mentioned something about grocery trolleys in an interview and that segment made it to the national news.
Not my intent.
I was trying to point out possible short cummings of food safety for shoppers, and subsequently spent four hours going through my local Coles – biggest supermarket in Australia – with the vp of food safety, pointing out their vulnerabilities, like:
if you’re going to cut a melon in half, please ensure it is kept at 4C (better not to cut it in half)
label frozen meat products properly i.e. is it needle tenderized, are those frozen dished raw frozen or cooked frozen
what criteria do you have for produce on shelves.
The objective of this study was to identify food safety risk factors associated with supermarket trolleys (grills and handles) and handheld baskets. Indicator microorganisms evaluated were those detected by aerobic plate count (APC), yeast and molds (YM), Enterobacteriaceae (EB). Environmental listeria (EL), coliforms (CF), and E. coli (EC). In addition, listeria monocytogenes, staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli O157 and salmonella sp. Were tested for. Trolley grills (n=36) had 2.7 x 102 CFU/cm2. Trolley handles (n=36) had 2.7 x 106 of CF and 5.2 CFU/cm2 of YM. The bottom of handheld baskets (n=25) had 3.5 x 105 CFU/cm2 of CF and 5.07 CFU/cm2 of EC. S. aureus was found on 96% of the baskets, 50% of the trolley handles (18 out of 36 samples), and 42% of the trolleys’ grills. E. coli O157 was identified on 17% of baskets, 3% on trolley grills, and 3% on handles. Salmonella sp. was detected on 16% of baskets and 8% of trolley grills. L. monocytogenes was detected on 17% of the bottoms of handheld baskets but on none of the other samples. These results suggest the need for implementation of sanitation programs to regularly clean trolleys and baskets, as well as for consumer education.
Microbial contamination of grocery shopping trolleys and baskets in west Texas, 2020
Food Protection Trends vol. 40 no. 1
Alexandra Calle, Breyan Montoya, Andrea English, and Mindy Brashears
The bacterial pathogen Shigella, often spread through contaminated food or water, is a leading cause of mortality in both children and older adults in the developing world. Although scientists have been studying Shigella for decades, no effective vaccine has been developed, and the pathogen has acquired resistance to many antibiotics. The recent discovery of an early adherence step in the infection cycle by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) could provide a new therapeutic target or even a new method for vaccine development.
As it moves through the digestive system, Shigella traverses the small intestine and subsequently infects the large intestine, causing cramping, diarrhea and dehydration in the disease called shigellosis.
“We wanted to determine how Shigella makes its first contact with epithelial cells in the early stages of disease development,” says Dr. Christina Faherty, senior author on the study published in mSphere. “Because of certain gene sequence annotations, and the way that Shigella appeared following growth in standard laboratory media, it was believed that Shigella strains do not produce fimbriae or other adherence factors.” Fimbriae are short hair-like fibers that bacterial cells use to adhere to individual epithelial cells to instigate infection.
The work of Faherty and the research team has uncovered evidence of fimbriae that aid adherence to epithelial cells, an important step in the start of a shigellosis infection. “We mimicked the conditions that Shigella would face in its journey through the small intestine by adding bile salts and glucose to laboratory media,” says Faherty. “With this method, we discovered what had been hidden in plain sight before–the gene expression profiles that enabled Shigella to initiate this early step in infection by attaching to the epithelial tissue of the host.”
More consumers are developing a taste for goat cheese, milk, and meat as they become aware of the high protein and great taste of these products. While U.S. goat producers are enjoying this steady trend, they remain focused on keeping their animals healthy, especially from scrapie—a fatal brain disease that affects goats and sheep.
“The goat industry is one of the fastest growing animal industries in agriculture,” says Stephen White, an Agricultural Research Service (ARS) geneticist. “Not too many years ago, there were only a few hundred thousand goats in the country.” But in January 2018, goats and kids totaled 2.62 million head.
Meat and dairy are the biggest markets, followed by mohair, but goats serve in other unique capacities, says ARS veterinary medical officer David Schneider. Goats are being used to manage weedy areas along highways, get rid of kudzu in the Southeast, and even mow lawns. They’re also used as pack animals to carry supplies through rugged areas.
For any of these businesses, a single outbreak of scrapie could be devastating.
There is no cure or treatment for scrapie, which is in the same family—transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) or prion diseases—as mad cow disease. TSEs are rare degenerative brain disorders characterized by tiny holes that give the brain a “spongy” appearance.
Most often scrapie is transmitted through birth fluids to other goats and sheep, and it can remain infectious in the environment for many years. It was first recognized in sheep in Great Britain and other European countries more than 250 years ago and was first diagnosed in U.S. sheep in 1947 in a Michigan flock.
All animals that get scrapie die. But there is good news from ARS. White and Schneider, who both work at ARS’s Animal Disease Research Unit in Pullman, Washington, are the first to demonstrate by infectious disease challenge that goats with the S146 allele (a different form of a gene) are less susceptible to scrapie over a usual goat lifetime. They also tested the K222 allele in goats. Their research shows that goats with one copy of either the S146 or K222 allele did not develop scrapie after being challenged with infection at birth. The study was published in The Veterinary Journal in 2018.
“Commercial goats raised for either meat or milk age out of herd participation as milkers, dams of commercial offspring, or as sires by around 6 years of age,” White says. In this ongoing ARS research, goats with the resistance alleles have lived beyond this commercial lifetime—up to 7½ years—with no clinical disease and without getting sick.
The only countries considered to be scrapie free are Australia and New Zealand. Currently, if one goat is diagnosed with scrapie on a U.S. farm, all goats are quarantined for life or euthanized. “You couldn’t restock your operation with any susceptible animal,” White says. “The farmer’s operation would be over.”
This research is good news for both goat and sheep producers because it could help with eradication efforts. Before U.S. producers can take advantage of import and export markets, scrapie must be eradicated from the United States and meet the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) criteria for disease freedom.
Aristos Georgiou of News Week reports an international team of scientists has said that they may have identified the origin of mad cow disease. Known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the neurodegenerative disease destroys the brain and spinal cord in cattle, causing death.
Since BSE first appeared in the 1980s in the United Kingdom, scientists have tried to identify how the disease emerged, however, no one hypothesis has been confirmed.
For a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team of scientists investigated the origins of BSE by injecting a particular variant of scrapie disease into mice which have been genetically modified with bovine DNA.
The researchers say that, unexpectedly, the injection of the scrapie strain into the genetically modified mice resulted in the propagation of classical mad cow disease prions. These prions are present in natural form in the scrapie variant.
This observation indicates that the illness could be transmitted between different species and that the modified mice could develop mad cow disease, according to the study.
Olivier Andreoletti, an author of the paper from the French National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA,) told AFP that the modified mice are “a very good model, which works well in terms of knowing what would happen if one exposed cows to those prions.”
He noted that the results provide, for the first time, and “experimentally underpinned explanation” for the appearance of mad cow disease in the U.K. in the 1980s.
After emerging, the disease spread in cattle across Europe, North America and other regions of the globe. This process was exacerbated by the fact that cows were being given feed which contained tissue from other cows infected with the disease.
An aged care home criticised for its handling of an influenza outbreak which killed 10 people has suffered a gastro outbreak.
A staff member, who asked to remain anonymous, raised concerns about the way the situation had been handled.
A Department of Health and Human Services spokesman said the first case was identified last Thursday with eight residents and three staff affected, with the department notified on Tuesday (that in early Dec.).
Respect Aged Care chief operating officer Brett Menzie said it wasn’t a major outbreak.
The dates and number of infected people differed to those provided to DHHS, with Mr Menzie stating five residents and three staff members were infected.
Mr McKenzie said a resident first showed signs of gastro on Sunday, with an outbreak – which occurs when three people show symptoms – declared on Monday.
He said the Health Department had been notified and infection control procedures enacted.
“St John’s Retirement Village Nursing Home did not implement a coordinated and timely infection control program that was effective in identifying and containing infection during the influenza and respiratory outbreak of August and September 2017,” a report found.
The National Center for Disease Control and Prevention said 41 patients were traced in Lori, and 8 in Syunik. Currently, 33 patients are still being treated in Lori and 8 in Syunik. Doctors assess the patients’ condition as satisfactory. According to the press service of the Food Safety Inspectorate, laboratory studies found salmonella in éclairs.
