Emma has always been a special person in our lives, and especially Sorenne’s.
When Amy was pregnant almost 10 years ago at Kansas State University, we talked about getting some early childhood education students to help out, so I could work and Amy could write.
Never had to post the ad.
Emma was a student in one of Dr. Amy’s French classes, noticed she was pregnant, and asked, are you going to need help with that baby?
Emma became one of our helpers.
This was in the U.S., with six weeks maternity leave, rather than Canada, with six months maternity leave (plus a whole bunch more parental leave, in Canada).
Emma now lives in New Zealand with her partner, the veterinarian, and took advantage of the long weekend to have a visit.
To watch Emma and her partner experiment and flourish over the past 10 years has been a delight.
The Ministry for Primary Industries, which is attempting to contain an outbreak of the disease in dairy cattle by a mass slaughter of more than 22,000 dairy cattle before the beginning of June, said there had been no positive results from its testing of beef animals.
The beef and dairy sectors work closely in New Zealand through dairy calf rearing and dairy grazing with about 80 per cent of premium beef cattle production originating from the dairy herd.
In response to a Herald inquiry, an MPI spokeswoman said the risk profile for M. bovis in beef farming was very different to that of dairying because of how beef is raised in New Zealand.
“Generally beef cattle are farmed extensively in pasture and are not fed risky discarded calf milk.
“We looked into this carefully and determined the beef stock at greatest risk were those that were raised in feed lots – not that common in New Zealand.”
With the support of industry good organisation Beef+Lamb, MPI had carried out some surveillance of cattle in feed lots, mostly in the South Island, the epicentre of the M. bovis outbreak.
“The animals were tested at slaughter in order to take samples … there were no positive results,” the spokeswoman said.
“We also consider that many dairy beef animals were tested in the response as part of our tests on neighbouring farms to infected properties. Again, no positives were found.” Meanwhile, newly released MPI reports on M. bovis investigations since the first outbreak last July said “confluence of multiple rare events” could have allowed the bacterial disease into New Zealand, possibly as long ago as 2015.
One of the three released reports identifies seven potential pathways for the disease but finds all “improbable – yet one of them resulted in entry”.
The risk pathways investigated were imported embyros, imported frozen bull semen, imported live cattle, imported feed, imported used farm equipment, and other imported live animals. A seventh pathway was redacted from the reports along with all discussion about it, but the Herald can confirm it was imported veterinary medicines and biological products.
MPI has opted to try to contain the disease with a mass cull of cattle on 28 quarantined properties, all but one in the South Island, because it believes it is not yet well established in New Zealand. The first outbreak of the disease was on a large-scale dairying business in the South Island. However, the MPI reports suggest it may have been introduced in mid-2016 or even earlier.
Olivia Munn, the 37-year-old actress, posted a selfie last week of her laying in bed to her Instagram story with a caption that read: ‘Back home (green check emoji). Food poisoning (two green check emojis).’
Munn had been in Vancouver earlier in the week filming scenes for her latest movie Predator, but it seems that she is happy to be back at her Los Angeles home in her own bed.
The world’s largest known listeria outbreak has spread throughout South Africa for 15 months, killing 189 people. Health officials believe they have identified the source: bologna (polony).
Emily Baumgaertner of The New York Times reports that since January last year, 982 confirmed cases of listeriosis had been recorded, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa reported on Thursday. The infection, caused by food that has been contaminated with the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, is often lethal.
A cluster of gastroenteritis cases among toddlers in a Johannesburg hospital this January led authorities to the sandwich meat in a day care center’s refrigerator — and in turn, to a meat production facility in the northern city of Polokwane. There, officials said they detected traces of LST6, the listeria strain identified in 91 percent of the outbreak’s cases.
The South African meat processor, Enterprise Foods, issued a recall of some of its processed products in early March. Food safety experts at the World Health Organization plan to review the company’s exports to 15 countries across Africa, many of which lack reliable disease surveillance systems and diagnostic tools. Namibia recently reported one listeriosis case; its link to South Africa’s outbreak is uncertain.
Tiger Brands, the parent company of Enterprise Foods, did not respond to requests for comment.
The highly processed meat, locally called “polony,” is known for its fluorescent artificial color. It is often consumed in low-income communities and sold by street vendors, making distribution difficult to track.
Doctors in South Africa were not required to report cases of listeriosis to the Ministry of Health until last December. Patient records were vague and often lacked the contact information for follow-up, said Dr. Peter K. Ben Embarek, a food safety expert at the W.H.O.
“Many didn’t even know to be asking patients about the meat,” said Dr. Louise Ivers, an associate global health professor at Harvard. “Surveillance is a critical but neglected piece of health systems,” Dr. Ivers said. “Without the resources and lab infrastructure, countries are left reacting: reacting to cholera, reacting to Ebola, reacting to listeria.”
Richard Spoor, a lawyer in South Africa, has filed a $2 billion lawsuit against Tiger Brands. Nearly 70 victims and family members are part of the suit, according to William-fuck-you-Doug Marler, a Seattle-based food safety lawyer who is a consultant on the case.
A news release from Alberta Health Services warns that anyone who has eaten at Mama Nita’s Binalot since March 15 should monitor themselves for symptoms of the infection.
Health officials are still trying to figure out the source. Operators of the restaurant, located at 1519 Lakewood Rd., have been co-operative, the news release said.
confirmed as the source of the infection, it is known that all of the lab-confirmed cases involved people who ate food from Mama Nita’s Binalot.
The website for Mama Nita’s Binalot says it serves authentic Filipino food that can be ordered for delivery.
Panicked BBC staff put a black bucket and a box of tissues next to Tory veteran David Davis — who has spent the past year in exhaustive talks with the EU.
As he was introduced by the presenter, the clearly unsteady Cabinet minister joked: “If the camera suddenly switches to you, you’ll know what’s happened.”
In the summer of 1994, Intel types discovered a flaw with their Pentium computer chip, but thought the matter trivial; it was not publicly disclosed until Oct. 30, 1994, when a mathematician at Lynchburg College in Virginia, Thomas Nicely, posted a warning on the Internet.
As perceived problems and complaints rose through the weekend Andrew S. Grove, Intel’s chairman and CEO, composed an apology to be posted on an Internet bulletin board—actually a web, but because he was at home with no direct Internet access, he asked Intel scientist Richard Wirt to post the message from his home account; But because it bore Mr. Wirt’s electronic address, the note’s authenticity was challenged, which only added to the fury of the Internet attacks on Intel.
(I remember those days, and did live-post to my friends that had e-mail my 4th daughter’s 1995 home birth on a shitty Mac SE with a 20MB external hard drive for extra power.)
At 8 a.m. the following Monday inside the company’s Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters, Intel officials set to work on the crisis the way they attacked a large problems—like an engineering problem. Said Paul Otellini, senior vice-president for worldwide sales, “It was a classic Intellian approach to solving any big problem. We broke it down into smaller parts; that was comforting.”
By the end of week two, the crisis looked to be subsiding; Then on Monday, Nov. 12, 1994, the International Business Machines Corp. abruptly announced that its own researchers had determined that the Pentium flaw would lead to division errors much more frequently than Intel said. IBM said it was suspending shipments of personal computers containing the Pentium chip
Mr. Grove was stunned. The head of IBM’s PC division, Richard Thoman, had given no advance warning. A fax (remember those? Still required for certain transactions in Australia) from Thoman arrived at Intel’s HQ on Monday morning after the IBM announcement, saying he had been unable to find Grove’s number during the weekend. Mr. Grove, whose number is listed, called directory assistance twice to ask for his own number to ensure he was listed.
After the IBM announcement, the number of calls to Santa Clara overwhelmed the capacity of AT&T’s West Coast long-distance telephone switching centers, blocking calls. Intel stock fell 6.5 per cent.
As John Markoff of the N.Y. Times wrote on the front-page in Dec. 1994, the reluctance of Intel to act earlier, according to Wall Street analysts, was the result of a corporate culture accustomed to handling technical issues rather than addressing customers’ hopes and fears.
Only then, Mr. Grove said, did he begin to realize that an engineer’s approach was inappropriate for a consumer problem.
According to one op-ed writer, Intel’s initial approach to the problem—prove you are doing sophisticated calculations if you want a replacement chip—was like saying “until you get to be cardinal, any internal doubts about the meaning of life are your own problem, a debate that has been going on since before Martin Luther.”
Intel’s doctrine of infallibility was facing an old-fashioned Protestant revolt.” (John Hockenberry, Pentium and our Crisis of Faith, N.Y. Times, Dec. 28, 1994, A11; this is how things were referenced before hot links)
Why and how did Intel go wrong? The answer was rooted in Intel’s distinctive corporate culture, and suggests that Intel went wrong in much the same way as other big and unresponsive companies before it.
Intel had traditionally valued engineering over product marketing. Inward-looking and wary of competitors (from experience with the Japanese) it developed a bunker mentality, a go-for-the-juglar attitude and reputation for arrogance.
According to one former engineer, Federico Faggin, a co-inventor of Intel’s first microprocessor, “The attitude at Intel is, ‘We’re better than everyone else and what we do is right and we never make mistakes.’”
Finally, on Dec. 20, Grove apparently realized that he and his company were standing at Ground Zero for an incoming consumer relations meteor. Intel announced that it would replace the defective chips—and pay for the labor—no questions asked, for the life of the original PC.
Discussing Intel’s previous position, Grove said, “To some people, this seemed arrogant and uncaring. We apologize for that.”
So what did a consumer with a Pentium do: Teach Intel that this isn’t about a white paper. It’s about green paper—the money you paid and the performance you didn’t get. Replace that chip. After all, consumers deserve to be treated with respect, courtesy and a little common sense.
Now apply all of that Intel stuff to Chipotle.
They even took out a full-page ad to apologize, just like Intel, but people still read newspapers 20 years ago. Today, the strategy seems hopelessly out of touch for a tragically hipster company.
Chipotle is the opposite, focusing too much on consumer whims and not enough on food science, and now it’s going to get worse.
The County’s chronology includes detailed tracking of the complaints as they came in and as the illnesses were confirmed as Norovirus victims. From that first report through Sept. 25, 2015, the chronology comes to this conclusion: ”The total number of reportedly ill customers and employees at this Chipotle outbreak investigation is 234.”
The number of victims was being reported in other media at the time as just 98.
And, the internal document says the real number of victims of Chipotle’s Simi Valley outbreak could be higher still. “In reviewing the food logs provided by Chipotle for both 8/18/15 and 8/19/15, it is estimated at least 1500+ entrees were sold each day.” Sandy Murray, who did the analysis for the division, wrote: “Thus, the actual number of customers and employees ill from this outbreak is likely to be substantially higher than the reported number of 234.”
In 2015, Chipotle ran print advertisements in 60 newspaper markets with an apology from Steve Ells, the burrito chain’s founder and co-chief executive. His apology though only went to the victims of the current nine state E. coli 026 outbreak and the Boston College outbreak.
“From the beginning, all of our food safety programs have met or exceeded industry standards,“ Ells said (Pinto defense). “But recent incidents, an E. coli outbreak that sickened 52 people and a Norovirus outbreak that sickened approximately 140 people at a single Chipotle restaurant in Boston, have shown us that we need to do better, much better.”
No mention was made of the other foodborne outbreaks.
Now it’s Facebook’s turn: The full-page apology adverts in newspapers in the U.S., UK and Germany ran on Sunday (Mar. 25, 2018).
But, the polls say consumers are turning away from facebook, not by immediately terminating their accounts, but by slowly disengaging.
Fewer than half of Americans trust Facebook to obey U.S. privacy laws, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday, while a survey published by Bild am Sonntag, Germany’s largest-selling Sunday paper, found 60 percent of Germans fear that Facebook and other social networks are having a negative impact on democracy.
Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for “a breach of trust” in advertisements placed in papers including the Observer in Britain and the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
“We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it,” said the advertisement, which appeared in plain text on a white background with a tiny Facebook logo.
The newspapers are happy for the revenue, but if only Facebook had a way to reach out to its 2 billion or so customers rather than newspapers.
Australian rockmelon growers could learn a thing or two. I can’t keep giving out this free advice forever, but the public citizen in me and my values compel me to do so.
I was sweet on a girl from a dairy farm in Tavistock back in high school, about 20 minutes from Brantford.
It’s sorta the dairy producing hub of Ontario (that’s in Canada) and now public health types have launched an investigation into two E. coli cases.
In a release issued Tuesday afternoon, public health said in response to questions from the community they are investigating all risk factors of E. coli.
“Municipal drinking water is not a suspected cause and remains safe to drink,” the release said.
Oxford County Public Health received a first report of E. coli in a Tavistock resident in mid-February, with a second report following one month later in March.
Residents who suspect they have E. coli should seek medical attention and contact Public Health at 519-539-9800, ext. 3500 or 1-800-755-0394.
For whatever reason, 10 years ago, while Sorenne was forming in Amy’s belly, I would have to go on Chipotle runs.
It was Manhattan, Kansas, it was easy to get there, but I hated the hypocrisy of buying Chipotle because I knew it was shit.
But when your wife is pregnant, posing has no stature.
I dutifully bought her Chipotle.
According to a new UBS report, the biggest reason people say they’re eating Chipotle less frequently is a concern about food safety.
The chain’s E. coli outbreaks — in which 55 people were infected after eating at Chipotle — occurred almost two and a half years ago.
Chipotle is struggling to attract customers who rarely or never visit the chain, with 32% saying “nothing” would make them want to visit more often.
Customers still haven’t forgotten Chipotle’s food poisoning scandal more than two years later.
Food safety concerns top the list of reasons that customers said they’re eating Chipotle less frequently, according to a UBS Evidence Lab survey of 1,500 people. In the report, released on Monday, 26% of respondents cited a concern about food safety as the main reason they were eating at the chain less.
In late 2015 and early 2016, 55 people were infected in two E. coli outbreaks after eating at Chipotle. While the company made major changes to its food safety policies and practices, there have been a number of food poisoning scares over the last few years.
As a result, Chipotle’s food safety reputation is still far worse than any other fast-food chain. For comparison, roughly 15% of respondents say that food safety concerns are the main reason they are eating at McDonald’s less frequently.
Customers who rarely or never eat at Chipotle are the most likely to hold food safety concerns against the chain, with a whopping 60% of people who don’t visit the chain indicating a “significantly negative impact or a complete loss of trust in the brand.”
In March, former Taco Bell CEO Brian Niccol took over as Chipotle’s top executive. At Taco Bell, Niccol turned around the chain with creative ad campaigns and an emphasis on the chain’s value proposition, including its dollar menu.
The health authority is now warning the public not to consume herring eggs found on kelp, seaweed or other surfaces that have been harvested from the French Creek to Qualicum Bay area, as they could be tainted.
Island Health did not specify how many people fell ill from eating the herring eggs or how severe their symptoms were.
Vibrio cholerae is a bacterium found in water that can cause intestinal illness including the disease cholera.
It called the situation “unique” and said it will release more information as it becomes available.
Somehow, I was quoted in a Jan. 2000 publication of the Women s Studies International Forum, and received notification today.
“The story of endocrine disrupters is no different. Yet science has long been a slippery ally for environmental campaigners: on the one hand, it is the products of science and technology that seem to present problems through pollution, while on the other, campaigners must turn to science in order to demonstrate the problems (Powell and Leiss, 1997; Yearley, 1991).”
I didn’t write that, Leiss did, although I probably edited the sentence to make it coherent.
And some folks wonder why I didn’t want anything to do with a second edition.
At the time, this is what I sent Bill (without the pretty pic, upper right).
When Amy was pregnant almost 10 years ago at Kansas State University, we talked about getting some early childhood education students to help out, so I could work and Amy could write.
“The animals were tested at slaughter in order to take samples … there were no positive results,” the spokeswoman said.
MPI has opted to try to contain the disease with a mass cull of cattle on 28 quarantined properties, all but one in the South Island, because it believes it is not yet well established in New Zealand. The first outbreak of the disease was on a large-scale dairying business in the South Island. However, the MPI reports suggest it may have been introduced in mid-2016 or even earlier.
