Fun with fermentations: Drunk raccoons

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Douglas Powell

My 10-year-old daughter asked me today, what are yeast?

I started into one of my typical speeches about the difference between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the role of the nucleus and fun with fermentations.

We have some basic microbiological work to do, and the French professor reminded me I was talking to a 10-year-old.

I reminded the French professor she should stick to French.

But if I’m going to teach her hockey basics, I guess I can teach her some micro, and she can teach me about art (she’s really talented; and that applies to both mother and daughter).

Hockey player and veterinarian, Scott Weese of the Worms and Germs blog, writes that rabies and distemper are the two things that come to mind first when a raccoon is acting strangely. Rabies is a big concern because it can also be transmitted to people. Distemper is also a viral infection, caused by canine distemper virus, and is transmissible to dogs and some wildlife species, but is not zoonotic. Raccoons are very susceptible to distemper and infections and outbreaks are common. If raccoon rabies is present in the area, we need to err on the side of caution and treat an abnormal raccoon as potentially rabid until proven otherwise. If raccoon rabies isn’t in the area, an abnormal raccoon is generally assumed to have distemper (but rabid raccoons can hitch rides on vehicles, so we can’t rule out rabies completely without testing).

But there is one other possible cause for a raccoon to be acting somewhat drunk… alcohol.

A story from last fall (yes, I’m a bit slow) in the Washington Post describes a rabies scare in West Virginia, where the raccoons were ultimately determined to have been intoxicated by alcohol. No, they hadn’t raided a liquor store – it turns out they’d been eating fermented crab apples.

Surprisingly (and good to hear), they weren’t euthanized right away because of their abnormal behavior. Just like we do for any other drunken mammalian species, the raccoons were held until they sobered up, and were then sent on their way. A picture of one of the young offenders was released by the Milton (W. Va) Police Department. It’s much cuter than the typical mug shot.

Drunk or not, it’s still a good idea to stay away from raccoons, especially in southern Ontario.

In an industry rife with substance abuse, restaurant workers help their own

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Douglas Powell

The manager of a Little Caesars Pizza in Shelbyville, Indiana, and her boyfriend have been arrested for allegedly using and buying drugs during work. According to police, Sasha Fletcher and Joshua Parson were taken into custody after an anonymous source told the feds the couple was regularly using heroin in the restaurant and preparing food with open sores.

The arrest underscores the well-known problem of drug and alcohol use and abuse in American restaurants.

Tove Danovich of NPR reports that while alcohol is eschewed in most places of employment, it’s a constant in restaurants. And the late night culture means that most socializing happens at bars after work hours. “We’re an industry that’s a little bit different,” says Mickey Bakst, general manager of Charleston Grill in South Carolina. But this also means restaurant employees are at serious risk for problems with substance abuse.

In 2016, after Charleston chef Ben Murray committed suicide after struggling with addiction and depression, Bakst and restaurateur Steve Palmer decided to start a support group of sorts to keep it from happening again.

Ben’s Friends, as the organization is called, now has Sunday meetings in three cities in South Carolina and Georgia. Bakst describes the meetings as “open-ended, gut wrenching at times, discussions about the difficulties of working in the industry.” They might talk about what to do when you’re in recovery and at work in the kitchen and the restaurant is packed, your chef is screaming. “You’re doing everything you can to stay sober but the stress level is through the roof.”

It’s kind of like AA, but tailored to the restaurant business — their only requirement is that attendees have a desire to overcome their addiction.

“You need someone who gets that, and understands the specific pressure of being surrounded by alcohol and revelry and drugs all the time,” says Kat Kinsman, senior food and drinks editor for Extra Crispy. In 2016, Kinsman also founded Chefs with Issues, a resource dedicated to de-stigmatizing mental health issues in the industry by providing a safe space for restaurant workers to share information and discuss their problems.

She has been open about her own experiences with depression and anxiety and wrote a book called Hi, Anxiety. She frequently had chefs confide in her about their own struggles and wanted to create a forum to publicize how rampant addiction, mental illness, and other issues are for people in the restaurant industry.

According to a 2015 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the food service and hospitality industry has the highest rates of substance use disorders and third-highest rates of heavy-alcohol use of all employment sectors.

Is writing still #1?

Food fraud: Mexican alcohol edition

Posted on July 22, 2017 by Douglas Powell

To my four Canadian daughters: Pay attention.

Tourists to all-inclusive resorts in Mexico suspect they were given tainted alcohol.

Raquel Rutledge of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writes the scene at the swim-up bar at the Mexican resort where Abbey Conner was pulled listless from the pool in January was full of young tourists last month when an attorney hired by Conner’s family showed up.

It wasn’t surprising. It was a typical scene at an all-inclusive five-star resort where foreigners from both sides of the equator flock to escape their cold winters.

But as he watched, the attorney noticed something disturbing.

“They serve alcoholic drinks with alcohol of bad quality and in great amounts, mixing different types of drinks,” he wrote in his native Spanish.

That single paragraph, buried near the end of a four-page report summarizing how 20-year-old Conner drowned within a couple hours of arriving at the Iberostar Hotel & Resorts’ Paraiso del Mar, offers a possible lead in the investigation into her death.

And it could shed light on the circumstances surrounding numerous reports from others who have told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel they experienced sickness, blackouts and injuries after drinking at Iberostar and other resorts around Cancun and Playa del Carmen in recent months.

A Pewaukee family traveled to an all-inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen in January. Their two college kids wound up unconscious, face down in the pool within two hours. Twenty-year-old Abbey died.

They told the Journal Sentinel they believe they were drugged or the alcohol may have been tainted. They questioned how they could fall into a stupor so quickly. And whether they had been targeted.

From the duh files: Slow lorises and aye-aye lemurs prefer alcohol over water

Posted on July 21, 2016 by Douglas Powell

Biologists at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire discovered that when faced with the choice of various sugary substances laced with different alcohol concentrations, the loris and aye-ayes repeatedly chose the most alcoholic solution.

In fact the researchers report in the Royal Society Open Science, the aye-ayes loved the concoction so much they enthusiastically searched for more, while the slow loris displayed “a relative aversion to tap water”.

Interestingly, the alcohol did not seem to affect the creatures.

Samuel Gochman, a biology student at Dartmouth, said: “No signs of inebriation were observed,” reports The Guardian.

The aye-aye’s tolerance to alcohol may be explained by a genetic mutation, which speeds up the rate alcohol is broken down.

“The results indicate that the mutation might (have) a preference for alcohol,” Gochman said.

Blame kiwis: US teens drink hand sanitizer, may be worse in Sweden

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Douglas Powell

With laws prohibiting minors from legally purchasing alcoholic beverages, many teens are finding creative ways to get a buzz from products they can find right at home. In fact, since 2010, U.S. poison control centers have seen a nearly four-fold increase in calls related to minors ingesting hand sanitizer as a way to get drunk. And according to Vice, this may be an even bigger problem in Sweden.

Vice reported that this disturbing trend has forced Swedish pharmacists to remove hand sanitizers from store shelves and “restrict it to behind-the-counter sales.” Apparently, police officers first asked pharmacists in the Värmland region to do so after they noticed an uptick in teens getting sick from alcohol-based products. Several emergency calls made on New Years Eve involved people under the age of 20 — the legal age to purchase alcohol in Sweden — who said that they had drunk “alcogels,” a police spokesman told The Local.

The trend originated in neither the U.S. nor Sweden but in New Zealand, with the help of social broadcasting channels like YouTube, CNN reported. Swedish police officials told public broadcaster Swedish Radio that there are videos of teens are mixing hand sanitizers with orange juice to essentially make knock-off screwdrivers.

It’s commonly known that alcohol can kill germs, which is why it’s present in many popular hygiene and cleaning products; beyond hand sanitizer, a product that contains 60 percent alcohol, it can be found in mouthwash and even Windex.

Alcohol fraud: bottles sold to tourists contained urine, feces for color

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Ben Chapman

I’m not much of a hard liquor drinker but I’m sure there’s a cheap-whiskey-tastes-like-piss joke in here somewhere.

According to DailyMail.com a fraudster in the tourist town of Blackpool, UK has been arrested after selling bottles filled with flat cola or water colored with urine and feces. Awesome.

A conman was branded a danger to public health after he was caught selling bottles filled with urine as whisky to tourists.

Nicholas Stewart was arrested after he was seen trying to sell the one and a half litre bottles of fake whisky and vodka to holidaymakers for £10, a court heard.

Scientific analysis revealed some drinks merely contained flat cola but in others they found evidence of human waste.

Blackpool Council prosecutor Victoria Cartmell said the drinks had probably been laced with faeces and urine to give the colour of whisky.

The 35-year-old, from Blackpool, was spared jail for the sickening offence and was handed a 70 day jail term suspended for 12 months after he admitted fraud.

The bottles were seized by security staff when Stewart was seen approaching customers in the massive Coral Island slot machine complex.

NZ childcare centers warned on hand sanitizers

Posted on December 25, 2014 by Douglas Powell

The Ministry of Education will warn all early childhood centers in New Zealand about the risks of alcohol-based hand sanitizer in the wake of an Invercargill 4-year-old girl becoming grossly intoxicated at her preschool.

The ministry has completed a two-week investigation into an incident at the Woodhouse Early Learning Centre that resulted in the girl being admitted to hospital with a blood alcohol level of 188mg, nearly four times the new legal driving limit.

The preschool owner, Jackie Woodward, believed the girl got intoxicated from drinking hand sanitizer at the premises without the knowledge of staff.

Her assertion has been backed up by the ministry, which has found it was “most likely” the child drank hand sanitiser.

“We’ve completed the investigation into the incident at Woodhouse Early Learning Centre, where a child was admitted to hospital due to a suspected alcohol intake,” ministry spokeswoman Katrina Casey said.

“Our investigation has shown that it was most likely the child ingested hand sanitizers at the center. We found no alcohol on the premises and the center manager has formally stated that there was no other form of alcohol on the premises.”

Say Anything lead singer pukes on stage on unluckiest security guard ever

Posted on December 24, 2014 by Douglas Powell

TMZ reports that the Lead singer of Say Anything hurled on stage Monday night … soaking a security guard in vomit.

Lead singer Max Bemis was towards the end of the set at the House of Blues in West Hollywood when he projectile vomited without warning. It’s unclear why … but there was alcohol on stage so it ain’t that hard to read between the lines.

Bemis didn’t miss a beat, and continued singing “I Want to Know Your Plans.” As for the security guard … well it definitely ruined his night.

Sometimes being close to the stage is overrated (There was this one time at a Who concert in Toronto in 1979, when me and my friend Dave decided we were too close to the stage by all the idiots around us, and the only way to get out was for me to roll my eyes into the back of my head, and Dave dragged me out, yelling, OD, OD. It worked.)

NZ preschool blames hand sanitizer for child’s drunkenness

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Douglas Powell

The owner of an early childhood centre in Invercargill, New Zealand, where a 4-year-old became grossly intoxicated says the girl consumed alcohol-based hand sanitizer and the center would not be using the product again.

Jackie Woodward, owner of the Woodhouse Early Learning Centre, has spoken of the “horrific” few days she and her staff have endured after the girl was hospitalized in a drunken stupor shortly after leaving the childhood premises.

The girl was picked up by her mother from the center at 5.30pm on Monday.

But the mother soon became alarmed at her behavior and rushed her to hospital, where she collapsed into a nurse’s arms and was later diagnosed as being intoxicated. Her alcohol reading was 188mg, nearly four times over the legal driving limit.

Woodward said they believed the girl had climbed onto a bookshelf and reached the hand sanitzser connected to the wall above while the on-duty staff member was putting on a load of washing in another room.

The mother has criticized Woodward’s staff for failing to pick up that her daughter was drunk.

Woodward, who has removed the hand sanitizer from its position and put it in a locked room, said she would not be using the product again, instead sourcing non-alcoholic hand cleaning products.

“I had no idea it was 60 to 70 per cent alcohol content.”

She was relieved the child was okay.

Sanitizers or handwashing? Or both?

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Douglas Powell

Installing alcohol-based hand sanitizer dispensers in classrooms may not mean fewer sick days for kids, a New Zealand study has suggested.

The study, published today in the journal PLOS Medicine, found absence rates at schools that installed dispensers in classrooms as part of the survey were similar at those “control” schools which did not.

The research, led by Associate Professor Patricia Priest and University of Otago colleagues, involved 68 schools in Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill and nearly 2,500 pupils.

In schools randomly assigned to the “intervention” group, alcohol-based hand sanitizer dispensers were installed in the classrooms over two winter terms and the children were asked to use the dispensers after coughing or sneezing and on the way out of the classroom for breaks.

Dr Priest emphasizes that the study’s findings were not relevant to the importance of hand hygiene in general, nor did it change the message of cleaning hands before eating or after using the toilet, coughing or touching pets.

In a related story, the USA Today reports that alcohol-based hand sanitizers are better at killing germs and that soap and water is generally the best option but, hand sanitizers come in handy when you aren’t close to a sink.

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