Fox News is not the, uh, most reliable source, but they report North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has commanded every citizen to turn over an impossible 200 pounds of human manure a day for fertilizer in an effort to revitalize the communist country’s struggling agriculture.
The country’s leader first made agriculture the forefront of the economic recovery during the New Year’s address.
This led to the mass mobilization of the population to fulfill the government’s wishes and ensure the human manure quotas are met. If the people don’t meet their daily quota, they have to supply over 600 pounds of compost or livestock manure, according to Radio Free Asia.
“The entire population has been mobilized to produce manure as the first major task of the year,” a source told the outlet. “The authorities in each local region task factories, institutions and citizens groups with assigning production quotas to each individual.”
“They are demanding that each person produce 100kg of human feces per day, or about 3 tons per month,” the person added. “But how on earth can it be possible for one person to make 3 tons of human feces and deliver it?”
The absurdly-high quotas are forcing the people to either collect the human manure in cold or pay cash to others for the manure.
“Most people can’t [make or collect] 100kg per day, so they end up giving what they think is sufficient. The quota is therefore meaningless,” the source told the outlet.
The New Zealand Herald reports that sausage-maker Hellers has been fined almost $40,000 and ordered to pay $15,000 to three children after they suffered allergic reactions to mispackaged sausages.
The children became sick after an incident in September 2017 when staff at Hellers’ Wiri, New Zealand factory did not follow procedures, resulting in Cheese Sizzlers being packaged as Original Sizzlers.
One child ended up in hospital due to an anaphylactic reaction.
The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) prosecuted the company following an investigation.
Manager of food compliance Melinda Sando said the incident could have been prevented if staff had cross-checked labels and the product itself before packing.
“Cheese Sizzlers were sent to market packaged as Original Sizzlers, which did not have cheese included in the ingredient list. They were distributed to various outlets, including supermarkets,” she said.
“Three children who were allergic to milk complained of allergic reactions after consuming the mispackaged sausages.
“One had a moderate reaction, one a moderate to severe reaction and one a severe anaphylactic reaction that required hospital treatment.”
Following these reports from the public, Hellers initiated a recall of the affected product.
Prior to sentencing, Hellers pleaded guilty to one Food Act 2014 charge of failing to ensure food is safe and suitable.
A reserved judgment by District Court Judge J Bergseng was released late yesterday.
The company was fined $39,375 and ordered to pay $5000 to each of the three victims together with court costs of $130.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports that an outbreak of Listeria monocytogenes infections linked to pork products produced by Long Phung Food Products appears to be over.
On November 20, 2018, 165368 C. Corporation of Houston, Texas, doing business as Long Phung Food Products, recalled ready-to-eat pork products because they might have been contaminated with Listeria bacteria.
Do not eat, sell, or serve recalled products from Long Phung Food Products.
The full list of recalled ready-to-eat pork patty rolls is on the USDA-FSIS website.
Recalled products are labeled with establishment number “EST. 13561” inside the USDA mark of inspection.
Recalled pork patty rolls were produced on various dates from May 21, 2018, through November 16, 2018. These items were shipped to distributors and retail locations nationwide.
Recalled pork products should no longer be available in stores, but may still be in home freezers.
Wash and sanitize drawers or shelves in refrigerators and freezers where recalled pork products were stored. Follow these five steps to clean your refrigerator.
Retailers should clean and sanitize deli slicers and other areas where recalled pork products were prepared, stored, or served. Follow the manufacturer’s recommendations for sanitizer strength and application to ensure it is effective.
If you develop symptoms of a Listeria infection after eating recalled pork products, contact a healthcare provider and tell them you ate recalled pork products. This is especially important if you are pregnant, age 65 or older, or have a weakened immune system.
As of January 29, 2019, this outbreak appears to be over.
Four people infected with the outbreak strain of Listeria monocytogenes were reported from four states.
Listeria specimens from ill people were collected from July 1, 2017, to October 24, 2018.
Four people were hospitalized. No deaths were reported.
Epidemiologic and laboratory evidence indicated that pork products from 165368 C. Corporation, doing business as Long Phung Food Products, were the likely source of the outbreak.
Outbreak News Today reports that health officials in France are reporting four Salmonella Poona cases in infants whose strains are genetically linked.
The babies, two months to ten months in age, were sickened between the end of August 2018 and the end of December 2018. Three babies were hospitalized for their salmonellosis and all have been released.
Early investigations reveal a common food source with the four infants–powdered milk of the same brand produced by the same factory in Spain.
Investigations are currently being conducted with the Spanish authorities and the manufacturer to define the management measures to be put in place.
I have been known to tell my partner, your attempts at help are futile, please stay away.
Ruslan Sangadji of The Jakarta Post reports that dozens of people from Kabonena and Tipo subdistricts in Palu, Central Sulawesi, who were displaced by a recent earthquake, have been hospitalized for reported food poisoning after consuming donated food on Saturday.
Badrun, one of the food poisoning victims, said the food was distributed to the shelter at around 11 a.m. local time. The displaced people did not feel anything strange as they ate the food but an hour later they started to feel dizzy and nauseous, he said.
The victims – mostly children – were rushed to Anutapura Palu Hospital.
Anutapura Palu Hospital deputy director for medical services Herry Mulyadi said his office had recorded that at least 38 people had been admitted to the hospital, while others were taken to other hospitals.
“Every single one of them complained about feeling dizzy and nauseous,” Herry said.
By Sunday, more than half of the food poisoning victims had been discharged.
Central Sulawesi Governor Longki Djanggola, who visited the victims at the hospital on Saturday evening, said that everyone should ensure that the food and drinks they donated were safe for consumption.
“I thank everyone who took part in helping the displaced people through their donations; but people, at the same time, have to remain vigilant before consuming [the food],” he said.
Samples of the food had been taken to Central Palu’s medical laboratory for examination, Longki said.
It remains unclear who sent the food to the shelter.
Thepaper.cn (via the South China Morning Post) reports that local authorities in eastern China have tapped artificial intelligence (AI) to clamp down on unsanitary cooks in kitchens — and to reward those who adhere to best practices.
According to the report, a camera-based system currently being piloted in the Zhejiang city of Shaoxing automatically recognizes “poor [sanitation] habits” and alerts managers to offending workers via a mobile app. It’s reportedly the fruit of a six-year project — Sunshine Kitchen — that seeks to bring transparency to food preparation in catering, hotels, school cafeterias, and restaurants.
Zhou Feng, director of the Food Service Supervision Department in Shaoxing, told Thepaper.cn that the system can identify 18 different “risk management” areas, including smoking and using a smartphone. On the flip side, it recognizes four positive habits, like disinfecting surfaces and hand washing, and monitors kitchen conditions that might impact food safety, such as temperature and humidity.
So far, the local Xianheng Hotel and over 87 catering companies are said to have trialed the system, and authorities reportedly plan to expand the number to over 1,000 this year.
It’s not the first time AI has been applied to food safety.
In November 2018, a study led by researchers at Google and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health described a machine learning model — FINDER (Foodborne IllNess DEtector in Real time) — that leveraged search and location data to highlight “potentially unsafe” restaurants. FINDER took in anonymous logs from users who opted to share their location data, and it identified search queries indicative of food poisoning (e.g., “how to relieve stomach pain”) while looking up restaurants visited by the users who performed those searches.
In the end, FINDER not only outperformed complaint-based inspections and routine inspections concerning precision, scale, and latency (the time that passed between people becoming sick and the outbreak being identified), it managed to better attribute the location of foodborne illness to a specific venue than did customers.
San Francisco-based startup ImpactVision, meanwhile, leverages machine learning and hyperspectral imaging — a technique that combines spectroscopy and computer vision — to assess the quality of food in factories and elsewhere automatically. It’s now working with avocado distributors to replace their current systems, and with large berry distributors to potentially automate manual processes, such as counting strawberries.
Cornell University scientists have developed a computer program, Environmental Monitoring With an Agent-Based Model of Listeria (EnABLe), to simulate the most likely locations in a processing facility where the foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes might be found. Food safety managers may then test those areas for the bacteria’s presence, adding an important tool to prevent food contamination and human exposure to the pathogen through tainted food.
The computer model, which is described in the Jan. 24 issue of Scientific Reports, has the potential to be modified for a wide range of microbes and locations.
“The goal is to build a decision-support tool for control of any pathogen in any complex environment,” said Renata Ivanek, associate professor in the Department of Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences and senior author of the paper. The study was funded by the Frozen Food Foundation through a grant to Martin Wiedmann, professor of food science, who is also a co-author of the paper.
The researchers, including first author Claire Zoellner, a postdoctoral research associate in Ivanek’s lab, want to eventually apply the framework to identifying contamination from pathogens that cause hospital-acquired infections in veterinary hospitals or E. coli bacteria in fruit and vegetable processing plants.
Food safety professionals at processing facilities keep regular schedules for pathogen testing. They rely on their own expertise and knowledge of the building to determine where to swab for samples.
“Whenever we have an environment that is complex, we always have to rely on expert opinion and general rules for this system, or this company, but what we’re trying to offer is a way to make this more quantitative and systematic by creating this digital reality,” Ivanek said.
For the system to work, Zoellner, Ivanek and colleagues entered all relevant data into the model – including historical perspectives, expert feedback, details of the equipment used and its cleaning schedule, the jobs people do, and materials and people who enter from outside the facility.
“A computer model like EnABLe connects those data to help answer questions related to changes in contamination risks, potential sources of contamination and approaches for risk mitigation and management,” Zoellner said.
“A single person could never keep track of all that information, but if we run this model on a computer, we can have in one iteration a distribution of Listeria across equipment after one week. And every time you run it, it will be different and collectively predict a range of possible outcomes,” Ivanek said.
The paper describes a model system that traces Listeria species on equipment and surfaces in a cold-smoked salmon facility. Simulations revealed contamination dynamics and risks for Listeria contamination on equipment surfaces. Furthermore, the insights gained from seeing patterns in the areas where Listeria is predicted can inform the design of food processing plants and Listeria-monitoring programs. In the future, the model will be applied to frozen food facilities.
According to a UK military news outlet, Forces Network, a consultant in infectious diseases and tropical medicine told the Central London Country Court on Tuesday that 90 confirmed cases of Q Fever had been recorded among British soldiers who had served in Helmand.
Lieutenant Colonel Mark Bailey’s testimony was heard in the case of Wayne Bass, a private with 2nd Battalion the Mercian Regiment, who said his life has been ruined after he contracted the disease while in Helmand in 2011/2012.
Humans can catch Q fever by breathing in dust from the feces of infected farm animals such as sheep, cattle and goats.
During his tour, his lawyers said Bass was in contact with goats and sheep and “was often required to take cover and jump through ditches and crawl along the ground – coming into contact with animal products and excrement”.
Bass, 34, was medically discharged from the Army in 2014 because of his Q fever and chronic fatigue symptoms.
Bailey, who specializes in infectious diseases and tropical medicine, and a national expert in Q fever, gave evidence during the second day of the trial.
Under questioning from Theo Huckle QC for Bass, Bailey said he has 90 military and 10 civilian cases in his care after they were referred to him.
He confirmed the 90 had served in Helmand and said the number of military cases “built up from 2008”, Forces Network reported.
Bailey told the court: “We have seen no new cases since 2014 from Afghanistan. Occasionally we get other military cases from other locations. Cyprus most recently.”
Bailey said he had seen “one British soldier who very, very nearly died” as a result of Q fever and subsequent complications, but there have been no UK deaths in his group.
In court documents setting out the case, it is argued that the MoD should have considered using Doxycycline, an antibiotic used to treat Q fever, as an anti-malarial drug, Forces Network reported.
The MoD however denies failing in its duty of care – pointing out that a vaccine used by some countries is not licensed in the UK.
The recalled product was sold in 5-pound plastic containers labeled “Woody’s Pet Food Deli Raw Free Range Turkey” and can be identified by the white date sticker on the cover of the pet food container, the state health and agriculture departments said in a statement Monday.
The product was sold at Woody’s Pet Food Deli locations in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Woodbury. The lots recalled have these use-by dates:
– Jan. 10, 2020
– Jan. 12, 2020
– Jan. 15, 2020
No other lots of Woody’s Pet Food Deli products are affected by the recall, the agencies said.
Consumers with the recalled product at home are being told to throw it out or return it to a Woody’s Pet Food Deli for a full refund and not feed the contaminated product to pets, state officials said.
Consumers with questions can contact the Woody’s Pet Food Deli stores directly or email the company at info@woodyspetdeli.com .
Sampling began after the state health department identified a human case of salmonella linked to the pet food as part of the agency’s ongoing, multistate investigation of salmonella infections coordinated by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
During summer 2016, Norway observed an increase in Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Chester cases among travellers to Greece.
Our aim was to investigate genetic relatedness of S. Chester for surveillance and outbreak detection by core genome multilocus sequence typing (cgMLST) and compare the results to genome mapping.
We included S. Chester isolates from 51 cases of salmonellosis between 2000 and 2016. Paired-end sequencing (2 × 250 bp) was performed on Illumina MiSeq. Genetic relatedness by cgMLST for Salmonellaenterica subsp. enterica, including 3,002 genes and seven housekeeping genes, was compared by reference genome mapping with CSI Phylogeny version 1.4 and conventional MLST.
Confirmed travel history was available for 80% of included cases, to Europe (n = 13), Asia (n = 12) and Africa (n = 16). Isolates were distributed into four phylogenetic clusters corresponding to geographical regions. Sequence type (ST) ST411 and a single-locus variant ST5260 (n = 17) were primarily acquired in southern Europe, ST1954 (n = 15) in Africa, ST343 (n = 11) and ST2063 (n = 8) primarily in Asia. Part of the European cluster was further divided into a Greek (n = 10) and a Cypriot (n = 4) cluster. All isolates in the African cluster displayed resistance to ≥ 1 class of antimicrobials, while resistance was rare in the other clusters.
Whole genome sequencing of S. Chester in Norway showed four geographically distinct clusters, with a possible outbreak occurring during summer 2016 related to Greece. We recommend public health institutes to implement cgMLST-based real-time Salmonella enterica surveillance for early and accurate detection of future outbreaks and further development of cluster cut-offs.
Whole genome sequencing of Salmonella Chester reveals geographically distinct clusters, Norway, 2000 to 2016
Siira Lotta, Naseer Umaer, Alfsnes Kristian, Hermansen Nils Olav, Lange Heidi, Brandal Lin T. Whole genome sequencing of Salmonella Chester reveals geographically distinct clusters, Norway, 2000 to 2016. Euro Surveill. 2019;24(4):pii=1800186. https://doi.org/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2019.24.4.1800186
The country’s leader first made agriculture the forefront of the economic recovery during the New Year’s address.
