Tag Archives: Poop

Don’t eat cow poop

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But apparently that’s exactly what 11 boys and one staff member at the Mount Carmel Youth Ranch in Wyoming did earlier this year and got a whopping dose of campylobacter.

The Billings Gazette reported that Kelly Weidenbach, a Wyoming Department of Health epidemiologist, said that the outbreak was probably caused by residents unknowingly ingesting feces from a sick calf.

Weidenbach also said that stool samples from some residents and one calf from the ranch tested positive for the same strain of campylobacter, making it likely that a calf with a diarrheal illness was the source of the outbreak, and that tracking the source of the outbreak was "complicated by the fact that boys help prepare food for one another, and they were also working with cattle."

She said there was no evidence that the bacteria was food-borne, and water tests came back negative.

Don’t eat poop.

Tiffany Eversley, guest barfblogger: Dry lips? Try some Chicken Poop

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While skimming through the pages of People magazine, discovering the latest in style and fashion, I came across chicken poop lip chap.

The label reads “100% free range chicken poop lip junk “ however despite the name, there is no fecal matter listed in the ingredients. In fact, the natural ingredients include all natural 100% pure non-GMO soy, jojoba, sweet orange, lavender, and bees wax.

I was relieved to find out that consumers weren’t actually putting shit on their lips. Chicken feces are often a vector of salmonella- a serious bacteria that can cause sever diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps.

Chicken poop lip junk originated when its creator, Jamie Faith Tabor Schmidt, heard her grandfather say, "I know how to fix those chapped lips, I’ll rub some chicken poop on `em so you won’t be lickin` ’em."

Along with the ambiguous Chicken poop lip chap, The Simone Chickenbone™ Natural Put-Ons™ line also includes  “Good gravy”, a moisturizing hair pomade, and “Kill It Dead”, a natural vegan spray deodorant- great stocking stuffers for the 2007 holiday season.
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Tiffany Eversley is an fourth year food science student at the University of Guelph

Is vomiting a symptom of bird flu?

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Apparently that’s what a flight crew on a Korean Air flight to Auckland thought when they alerted police on the ground that a passenger was vomiting, or "displaying bird flu symptoms".  According to an AP report in the New York Times today:

Crew on the flight, from South Korea via Australia, alerted airport authorities when the woman began vomiting and showing other possible bird flu symptoms, sparking a lockdown on the tarmac as the plane landed, said Norman Upjohn, an ambulance duty manager.
The 223 people aboard the Boeing 747 were held for about an hour under ”full quarantine procedure” while a paramedic in protective clothing examined the woman, Upjohn said.

South Korea declared itself bird flu free in June, after reporting no new cases of the H5N1 strain of bird flu — in birds or humans — for three months.

I sure hope that no one with a bit of vomit or diarrhea flies to NZ from the UK this week.

‘Mr. Toilet’ and his latest creation

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Today’s the, The USA Today, reports that in South Korea, Sim Jae-duck has earned the moniker "Mr. Toilet" for his work in beautifying public restrooms.

Now, though, he’s taken his work to a whole new level.

Jae-duck is building a toilet-shaped house (complete with a luxury lavatory) just in time for the World Toilet Association conference this month in Seoul, South Korea.

Poop in the field

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Monterey County, California’s, Agricultural Field Toilet Inspection Program requires clean toilets, hand-washing stations and drinking water for Monterey County’s workers, enforcing long-standing state laws with new resolve.

The increased inspections are meant to encourage good hygiene among workers and to prevent crops from being contaminated.

Lourdes Bosquez, Salinas office supervisor of Consumer Health Protection Services, said,

"We used to do this in the ’80s and ’90s. Now, with the E. coli outbreaks, we thought it was important that we brought the program back."

Farmers will need Health Department permits for their field toilets by Jan. 1.

Our video for Poop in the Field is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL8iXUbTqgI.

Poop is sometimes OK?

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The Scotsman is reporting that trials in a Scottish hospital have shown patients suffering from Clostridium difficile infections can be cured using human faeces — a ‘donor stool’ administered via a tube through the nose into their stomach.

Clostridium difficile is a particular problem among patients who have been prescribed strong antibiotics as they also wipe out the so-called ‘friendly’ disease-fighting bacteria in the intestine. Faecal ‘transplants’, as they are known, are believed to restore the bacteria to levels at which they help the recovery process.

Doctors involved in the trials admit there are "obvious aesthetic problems" in the treatment, which involves patients ingesting a liquidised sample of faeces from a partner or close relative.

Despite the positive results, doctors stress that they still regard the faecal transplant as a "last resort" because it is cumbersome and the idea of is unpleasant.

How much poop can humans safely eat?

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Kent Sepkowitz, a physician in New York City who writes about medicine, writes in Slate.com that,

"… one year ago, the now-famous E. coli outbreak arising from contaminated spinach rattled the natural-food industry and gave carnivores a moment of schadenfreude. The story had the heartbreaking elements we have come to dread: A young child eats something mundane and dies a horrid death. Boom, gone. I have (unsuccessfully) treated one such case and rate it as perhaps the most chilling moment of my career.

"With every outbreak, the same question sounds: Why can’t we keep the food chain clean? … The best response to E. coli and the other pathogens that cause food poisoning is to recognize, humbly, that we can get the food supply almost perfectly clean, but never completely. There’s just too much crap out there: human crap, horse crap, cow crap, pig crap. In the feces of these and other animals are trillions of infectious agents (bacteria, viruses, fungi, worms, and everything else that upsets the stomach). Try as we may to contain the mess, we can never win. Pig dung fouls rivers; cow crap seeps into water tables; human shit kicks back every time heavy rains overwhelm a sewage system’s filtration capacity. …

"Rather than frantically throwing money at new ways to eradicate the pathogens that reside in shit, we should fund the boring scientists who focus on untangling the intricacies of the gut’s immune system. Labs, answer this: How much shit can we safely eat and, as importantly, how much must we eat to remain healthy?"

While there is some truth in the doctor’s comments, humans just aren’t smart enough to figure out who is genetically susceptible to the various nasties out there. Maybe the population’s immunity can be increased by exposure to some cryptosporidium or salmonella or whatever, but individuals are gonna die. We’re gonna lose a few. And we don’t know who those few are.

So while we’re figuring that out, we have a responsibility to use the science we know to reduce the number of people who get sick from the food and water they consume. And don’t eat poop.

Vanilla made from cow poop: demand slow

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Mayu Yamamoto, exactly as shown, left, accepts her Ig Nobel prize for research that "cannot or should not be reproduced," Thursday night.

Ms. Yamamoto, of the International Medical Centre of Japan, won the chemistry prize in the annual spoofs of the real Nobel awards for discovering that vanillin, the main ingredient of vanilla essence, can be synthesized from a wide variety of herbivore animal dung — from cows, goats, horses and even pandas. It cannot be made, however, from tiger excrement.

Although the production cost using dung is less than a half of making vanillin out of vanilla beans,  Yamamoto found that her work was ignored by multinational corporations.

Fine for making unpasteurized cider below bird nests

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While some may argue that bird poop is natural, others may argue that bird poop is an excellent source of salmonella, campylobacter and others.

On September 4, 2007, Dennis Wasylyszyn, an employee of Aberdeen Farm Market in Coldstream, B.C., pled guilty in provincial court to one count of violating s.4(e) of the Food and Drugs Act by selling an article of food which was manufactured or prepared under unsanitary conditions. Mr. Wasylyszyn was fined $2000 for this violation.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency explains that Mr. Wasylyszyn was preparing fresh, unpasteurized apple juice with a machine that was protected only by an open-raftered roof supported by four beams. The processing area was open to the air and there were indications birds were roosting in the rafters above the machine.

There was no evidence of illness related to consumption of the juice.

Goat poop bingo

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I really can’t come up with a better title.

Boring, Oregon’s cousin town of Boreing, Ky. is known for its goat poop bingo.

The story says that guessing where Buckwheat the Goat will leave his droppings in order to win prizes (including a $50 gift certificate from Bi-Mart) is a popular pastime at the daylong event, but there’s more to this celebration than just animal dung.

“This is a family event showcasing our community,” said Deby Olson, another organizer, who says in its third year, the celebration will be “bigger and better than ever.”