A woman was filmed using a beach for a bathroom in broad daylight while a CNN reporter broadcast just feet away from her. The unidentified woman relieved herself on Santa Monica beach in Los Angeles on Monday afternoon as journalist Sarah Seigner discussed the ongoing coronavirus crisis with her colleagues in New York City.
The woman, who appeared to be homeless, wandered into the camera shot as Seigner told her colleagues how the area had broken a one-day Covid-19 diagnosis record on Friday, with more than 3,000 cases confirmed. The video-bomber could be seen dumping a black trash bag on the sand, before pulling down her pants as she prepared to go to the bathroom. Seigner appeared to have been warned over her ear-piece about what was going on behind her, and shuffled slightly to the right to block the woman from view and spare viewers’ blushes. Her colleague in New York managed to keep a straight face throughout. Seigner spoke as California saw a surge in coronavirus cases in recent weeks, with the Golden State experiencing a 41% rise in Covid-19 hospitals since mid-June.
California broke its single-day coronavirus diagnosis on July 5, with 11,529 new cases confirmed. Daily death figures have been hovering around 100, and have yet to beat the all-time high of 115 Covid-19 deaths recorded towards the start of the outbreak on April 22. The worrying numbers have prompted multiple California counties to pass or begin reversing reopening measures.
An award-winning Fishguard restaurant and its two directors have been ordered to pay more than £15,200 for food safety offences, with one of them prohibited from operating a food business.
Both directors of JT3 Restaurant in Fishguard, Daniel Wynne Jones and Lois Thomas, along with their company Me‘n’u1 Ltd, pleaded guilty to all offences at Haverfordwest Magistrates Court on Friday, 3 July.
They were fined a total of £10,700 with more than £4,500 costs, and Daniel Wynne Jones was also banned from operating a food business.
In a prosecution brought by Pembrokeshire County Council, the court heard that the premises was issued a Food Hygiene Rating of 0 following an inspection in March 2019 by an officer from the authority’s Public Protection Division.
During the inspection the officer found the basement kitchen to be in a poor state of cleanliness and repair, with no disinfecting cleaning products or soap available, an inadequate water supply and flies present. There was no evidence of any food safety management system in use and the business scored a 0 food hygiene rating.
Two revisits were made to check for improvements, which were made, but the business failed to display their food hygiene rating sticker and had to be supplied with a new one, along with a warning.
Subsequent visits saw the sticker being hidden behind doors and then behind an umbrella hanging from a hook above it. A fixed penalty fine for the offence of failing to display the sticker went unpaid.
On 13 December 2019 another inspection was carried out at the restaurant. On arrival officers were told that the business was closed, but once in the kitchen, they found that a substantial amount of food preparation was going on and were dismayed to find that conditions had deteriorated again, including the ongoing poor structural condition and complete lack of any implemented food safety controls in relation to the safe production of food. Again, the business scored a 0 Food Hygiene rating.
By 19 December the situation had worsened to the point that two visits had to be made that day and a Remedial Action Notice served to prevent the manufacture of chicken liver parfait and duck. Improvement notices were also served to try to address the level of training and ensure that food safety procedures were introduced and sustained.
Unfortunately these improvement notices were not complied with and the food hygiene rating sticker remained deliberately hidden.
As well as the fine, costs of £4571.11 were awarded to the county council, with victim surcharges of £240.
And, on the 50th anniversary of Workingman’s Dead, one of my favorite albums, enjoy.
In this study, the persistence of toxigenic Escherichia coli (E. coli ) on dried chamomile, peppermint, ginger, cinnamon, black and green teas stored under 4, 10, and 25°C was determined.
The E. coli survival rate in ginger and cinnamon teas decreased below 0 on Day 5. In the other tested teas, E. coli survivability showed a downward trend over time, but never dropped to 0. Chamomile tea retained the greatest population of viable E. coli . Meanwhile, die‐off of E. coli was higher at 25°C compared to lower temperatures. Additionally, fate of E. coli during brewing at 60, 70 and 80°C was evaluated.
The E. coli population was reduced to below 2 Log colony forming units (CFU)/g after 1 min at 80°C, At the same time, the E. coli survival at 60°C was higher than that at 70°C in all tested teas. The data indicated that if E. coli survives after storage of prepared teas, it may also survive and grow after the brewing process, especially if performed using temperatures <80°C. Finally, we analyzed the correlations between temperature, time, tea varieties and E. coli survival, and successfully constructed a random forest regression model. The results of this study can be used to predict changes in E. coli during storage and fate during the brewing process. Results will form the basis of undertaking a risk assessment.
Survival of toxigenic Escherichia coli on chamomile, peppermint, green, black, ginger, and cinnamon teas during storage and brewing, 23 June 2020
For those who care about how risk information is provided – I despise the words educate and communicate – welcome to the world of the European Food Safety Authority.
How hard is it to tell a story, one that is backed with credible information?
That’s how people learn.
A key feature of risk analysis is that risk assessment and risk management should be functionally separated (bullshit). However, the usefulness of a risk assessment may be limited if the output is not designed to help with risk management decisions. The COMRISK project investigated the communication between risk assessors and risk managers. The overall goal of the project was to identify current practices and challenges in communication between risk assessors and risk managers during the risk analysis process, and thus increase and improve the understanding and the quality of the communication between them.
Specific actions to achieve this aim included reviewing of historical food safety cases, analysing risk assessment requests, identifying communication guiding documents, including legislation and agreements, conducting semi‐structured interviews with risk assessors and risk managers, and identifying tools for facilitating the communication between risk assessors and risk managers.
It was concluded that the usefulness of a risk assessment is strongly dependent on well‐defined and mutually recognised risk questions and that scarce or poor communication between risk assessors and risk managers is one of the major reasons when an output from risk assessment fails to support risk management. The communication between risk assessors and risk managers preceding the onset of the risk assessment, when the risk assessment requests with its risk questions are defined, is especially identified as one of the critical points to ensure a risk assessment that is fit for purpose. However, difficulties in understanding were also reported for the communication between risk assessors and risk managers during and after the risk assessment. Lack of communication is seldom a result of formal constraints or agreements nor can it be explained by a wish of the risk assessors or risk managers. Instead, perceived constraints or traditions appear to be possible underlying factors leading to scarce or poor communication between risk assessors and risk managers. It is essential that both risk assessors and risk managers acknowledge the crucial importance of communication between them while at the same time respect their different roles in a risk analysis.
According to respondents, the best solution to facilitate the framing of the risk assessment questions is an open dialogue between risk assessors and risk managers to agree on the goal of the assessment and to build trust. Further, the interview results indicate that a formal systematic process may facilitate communication during the risk analysis. Where there is uncertainty, e.g due to data gaps or issues related to the methodology and models, it should be acknowledged and described properly by risk assessors to risk managers. Training of risk assessors and risk managers may improve the possibility of a timely and fit‐for‐purpose output. Such a training should give a deeper insight in the risk management process, give a better understanding of the risk managers role, and especially raise the awareness of the importance of the communication between risk assessors and risk managers.
To improve the risk analysis process, it is also important that the risk assessor gets feedback regarding how risk assessments have met the needs of the risk managers. The present study also found that aspects of risk communication studied in this project are not extensively discussed in the guidance documents for risk analysis. More research is needed to identify the barriers for a fit for purpose communication.
As the co-author of Mad Cows and Mother’s Milk (1997) I couldn’t let this slide.
A lab accident in 2010 likely led to a woman’s untimely death nearly a decade later, according to doctors in France. In a recent case study, they describe how a woman in her early 30s developed a universally fatal brain disorder years after she had pierced her skin with equipment used to handle infectious rogue proteins called prions.
Prions are a type of protein that exist naturally in our brains. Ordinarily, they’re thought to be harmless, though their exact function remains a mystery. But rarely, they can transform into a misfolded version that compels normal prions to change shape, too. Over years or even decades, this cascade of misfolded prions destroys the brain from the inside out, leaving behind signature sponge-like holes under a microscope. Because of these holes, prion diseases are also medically known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.
Prion diseases often happen with no clear rhyme or reason — native prions just seem to spontaneously pull a heel turn. Other times, a person’s inherited genetics are to blame. But what makes prions even scarier is that they can be also infectious, spreading from one person to another or across different species of animals.
In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists noticed outbreaks of cows that were developing their own prion disease, which became popularly known as mad cow disease. Years later, we began seeing people develop a never-before-seen sort of prion disease, which was eventually traced to them eating contaminated beef (meanwhile, the cows were being infected from eating animal feed that contained brain matter from other infected cows and possibly sheep). Medically, this infectious type of prion disease became known as variant-Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), to distinguish it from the classic version that’s the most common but still very rare prion disease in humans.
The young woman had been a lab technician in a research facility studying prions in 2010, according to a case study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this month. One day in May, she was using a pair of curved forceps to handle frozen, prion-infected brain samples taken from mice genetically engineered to develop human prions, when the forceps slipped and stabbed into her thumb. Though she was wearing two pairs of protective gloves, the sharp ends pierced her skin and drew blood. She was only 24 at the time.
About seven and a half years later, in November 2017, she began experiencing a burning pain down her right shoulder and neck. Her condition worsened over the next year, to the point of memory impairment, visual hallucinations, and muscle stiffness along her right side by January 2019. Eventually, 19 months after the onset of symptoms, she died. Tests before her death strongly suggested she had vCJD, which was confirmed post-mortem.
It’s possible that the woman might have caught vCJD through eating tainted beef made before sharp shifts in the meat processing industry came along that seemed to end the threat of mad cow disease in the 1990s. But that would be very unlikely, according to the authors, because vCJD isn’t thought to take longer than a decade to show up after exposure in people with the woman’s genetic makeup. Nearly all known cases of vCJD have been in people who share a specific but relatively common genetic variation of their prion gene, called MM, which the women also carried. But the timing does work out if you assume she caught vCJD through the lab accident.
Prion diseases remain incredibly rare, and even in cases where they are infectious, genetics seem to strongly influence the risk of actually becoming sick (only a few hundred cases of vCJD have ever been reported worldwide). But this isn’t the first time that a case of vCJD has been linked to exposure in a lab, according to the authors, suggesting that more could be done to keep scientists and technicians safe during the valuable work they do to understand these utterly mysterious things. Prions are notoriously very hard to “kill” using traditional decontamination methods, which provides an added source of concern for medical procedures involving the brain.
“This is an unexpected medical event and of course unexpected timing. However the doctor’s advice on having surgery needs to be followed,” Peters, who is also the foreign minister, said in a statement.
I have several friends with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Bacterial blood infection, computer illustration.
My grandfather died of Alzheimer’s 35 years ago, and I was there when his wife took her own life rather than face another winter with someone who didn’t know who she was.
Much respect.
These science stories may inevitably turn out to be down the rabbit hole, but I present them so folks know what is being discussed, BS or not.
Salmonella is a bacteria that causes an intestinal tract infection from contaminated food or water. It was recently discovered that salmonella in the gut is linked to neurological diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
A collaboration between Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization-International Vaccine Centre (VIDO-InterVac) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) and Temple University (Philadelphia, U.S.) analyzed the effect of Salmonella biofilm protein on animals. They observed that bacteria can cause arthritis and autoimmune responses.
Salmonella biofilms typically form in the environment such as surfaces where raw meat is prepared. Biofilms are bacteria that densely stuck together in response to harmful conditions like disinfectants and antibiotics.
Dr. Aaron White, an expert on salmonella biofilms and curli amyloids, alongside his team found Salmonella biofilms forming on the intestines of infected mice models. The biofilm protein ‘curli’ appeared as the scientists replicated the food-borne illness associated with the bacteria.
Within four to six weeks, curli formed in the colon and cecum, or the beginning of the large intestine, of the mice. The scientists also ruled out that curli was produced solely by Salmonella and not by other bacterial species.
Chris Koger of The Packer reports that cases of Cyclospora infection linked to Fresh Express salads continue to rise, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Canada is reporting its first cases.
Lab-confirmed cases thought to be linked to iceberg lettuce, carrots or red cabbage in garden salads were 509 in the U.S, as of July 9, according to the CDC. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency on July 8 reported 37 cases in Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador.
The salads, including private-label bagged garden salads, were processed at Fresh Express’ Streamwood, Ill., facility, according to the FDA.
Fresh Express has recalled salads from the plant containing the three ingredients under investigation, along with Aldi, Giant Eagle, Hy-Vee, Jewel-Osco, ShopRite and Walmart issuing recalls of private label salads.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency reported on June 28 Fresh Express had recalled products in Canada. They were distributed nationwide by Crescent Multi-Foods, Federated Co-Operatives Ltd., Fresh Express and Walmart Canada Corp., according to the Canadian Agency.
An edited version of the latest CDC update is below:
On June 27, 2020, Fresh Express recalled Fresh Express brand and private label brand salad products produced at its Streamwood, IL facility that contain iceberg lettuce, red cabbage, and/or carrots due to possible Cyclospora contamination.
509 people with laboratory-confirmed Cyclospora infections and who reported eating bagged salad mix before getting sick have been reported from 8 Midwestern states (Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wisconsin).
Illnesses started on dates ranging from May 11, 2020 to July 1, 2020.
33 people have been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.
The Public Health Agency of Canada is investigating an outbreak of Cyclospora infections occurring in three Canadian provinces. Exposure to certain Fresh Express brand salad products containing iceberg lettuce, carrots and red cabbage, has been identified as a likely source of the outbreak.
Epidemiologic and traceback evidence indicates that bagged salad mix containing iceberg lettuce, carrots, and red cabbage produced by Fresh Express is a likely source of this outbreak.
CDC and FDA continue to investigate to determine which ingredient or ingredients in the salad mix was contaminated and whether other products are a source of illnesses. CDC will provide updates when more information is available.
Since the last case count update on June 26, 2020, 303 new laboratory-confirmed Cyclospora infections have been reported.
As of July 8, 2020, a total of 509 people with laboratory-confirmed Cyclospora infections associated with this outbreak have been reported from 8 states: Illinois (151), Iowa (160), Kansas (5), Minnesota (63), Missouri (46) Nebraska (48), North Dakota (6), and Wisconsin (30).
Illnesses started on dates ranging from May 11, 2020 to July 1, 2020. Ill people range in age from 11 to 92 years with a median age of 60 and 53% are female. Of 506 people with available information, 33 people (7%) have been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.
Illnesses might not yet be reported due to the time it takes between when a person becomes ill and when the illness is reported. This takes an average of 4 to 6 weeks. If the number of cases reported by CDC is different from the number reported by state or local health officials, data reported by local jurisdictions should be considered the most up to date. Any differences may be due to the timing of reporting and website updates.
Additionally, the Public Health Agency of Canada is investigating an outbreak of Cyclospora infections occurring in three Canadian provinces where exposure to certain Fresh Express brand salad products containing iceberg lettuce, carrots and red cabbage, has been identified as a likely source of the outbreak.
Eric Chang of Taiwan News reports that Taiwan recorded 6,944 instances of food poisoning last year, which marked a 23-year high, according to numbers released by the Taiwan Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
In 2019, there were 503 food poisoning incidents, leading to 6,944 people becoming ill, compared to 2018 when 398 cases caused 4,616 people to get sick, according to government figures cited by Liberty Times. Last year’s number of cases was also the second-highest since the country started keeping food poisoning records in 1981.
The highest number occurred in 1997. when 7,235 people were affected by food poisoning.
Among last year’s cases, 4,000 people came down with food poisoning while at school. Most of these were linked to the large group meals served during lunchtime.
The FDA also noted that two cases last year resulted in death: the first resulted from accidentally using a poisonous toad to make frog soup, while the second was caused by ingesting a poisonous mushroom. Prior to that, the last time someone in the country had died from food poisoning was in 2011.
This resulted in a spectacular display over the Han River on Saturday.
The drones formed a white face mask and red circles were used to symbolize coronavirus particles, which has claimed the lives of almost 300 people in the country.
Messages of support and images of medical workers also appeared in the 10-minute display that was organized by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport.
One of the displays said “ThanksToChallenge”, which made reference to a South Korean social media campaign that was created to show thanks to healthcare workers in the county.
There were no crowds watching the event because it was not advertised ahead of time.
The government captioned a video of the event on YouTube: “Thank you for the efforts of the people and medical staff.
“We express our gratitude and respect to all who suffer from Covid-19.”
This display comes after South Korea was praised for its response to the virus, quickly containing the initial outbreak, although the country has experienced sporadic cases since – caused by small gatherings and door-to-door sales practices.
According to the Mirror, South Korea has reported just 68 cases of coronavirus today and 33 of them are imported.
However, the country is preparing itself for a potential second wave of infections and this drone display was undoubtedly a timely reminder to its citizens that they are not out of the woods yet.
The woman, who appeared to be homeless, wandered into the camera shot as Seigner told her colleagues how the area had broken a one-day Covid-19 diagnosis record on Friday, with more than 3,000 cases confirmed. The video-bomber could be seen dumping a black trash bag on the sand, before pulling down her pants as she prepared to go to the bathroom. Seigner appeared to have been warned over her ear-piece about what was going on behind her, and shuffled slightly to the right to block the woman from view and spare viewers’ blushes. Her colleague in New York managed to keep a straight face throughout. Seigner spoke as California saw a surge in coronavirus cases in recent weeks, with the Golden State experiencing a 41% rise in Covid-19 hospitals since mid-June.
