We’re staying at an Airbnb and Amy is worried about poop.
Dog poop.
We’ve been in Sawtell, NSW, Australia, since Sunday, near the ocean, with Sorenne in a 4-day, full-day hockey camp, leading up to the annual Coffs Harbour Big Banana 3-on-3 Ice Skirmish.
The poop isn’t that serious, it’s just with Ted the wonder dog running around the yard, the excitement of hanging out with the kids at the arena and other dog-type burdens, Amy worries we won’t find all the poop, leading to a bad guest rating.
It’s not nearly as severe as the Mad Pooper runner, who has repeatedly defecated on the sidewalk in front of a family’s Colorado Springs house.
“They came in screaming, ‘You’re not going to believe this!’ ” Budde tells KKTV. “They’re like, ‘There’s a lady taking a poop!’ So I come outside and I was like, ‘Are you serious? Are you really taking a poop in front of my kids?’ and she’s like, ‘Yeah. Sorry.’ ”
Other people in town have since reached out to Budde, and said that they’ve seen the runner defecating outside of a Walgreens and in their backyards.
Budde has also posted a sign outside her house asking the woman to stop, but it hasn’t made a difference.
“I put a sign on the wall that’s like ‘please, I’m begging you, please stop.’ … She ran by it like 15 times yesterday, and she still pooped,” Budde says.
No one’s poop issue came up during a couple of local news segments leading into the tournament this weekend.
The Big Banana tourney started as a two-club match between Newcastle North Stars and Southern Stars from Brisbane with Coffs Harbour as the halfway meeting point for the 3-on-3 ice hockey weekend.
The tournament, now in its seventh year, includes seven clubs represented by 23 teams from NSW, QLD and ACT. Players ranging in age from 5-to 15-years-old in four different age divisions will play from the evening of Friday 29 September until Monday 2 October in the afternoon, totalling around 75 games (they’re 20-minute games). Some 150 players and their families are expected.
Amy had the bright idea to start a facebook page for the tournament
And I helped with some media. The two local TV stations ran bits this evening (one below, both on the facebook page), and I did a radio interview which will be on ABC tomorrow a.m.
Hate is a strong word, but when it comes to food poisoning outbreaks that kill little kids and others, it’s not a scare, it’s real.
A scare implies former scream-queen Jamie-Lee Curtis flogging yoghurt that makes people poop.
That’s a food scare.
See how many times the N.Y. Times can use the word scare in its opening paragraphs:
The European Union on Monday notified the food safety authorities in Britain, France, Sweden and Switzerland to be on the lookout for contamination in eggs after a food scare in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.
Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, a European Commission spokeswoman, said, “We do not know if the eggs are contaminated or not, but because of these notifications, it’s now up to the national authorities to check.”
The scare over contaminated eggs, which began in Belgium, has led supermarkets there and in Germany and the Netherlands to clear shelves of the product as the crisis entered its third week.
The removal of eggs from shops was prompted by the discovery of the insecticide fipronil in some shipments. The contamination is thought to have been caused by the mixing of the insecticide with a cleaning agent used at chicken farms. The scare began July 19 when the government of Belgium said that fipronil had been found in eggs produced there.
Major supermarket chains in Belgium, including Delhaize and Colruyt, have stopped selling eggs from affected farms. In the Netherlands, one poultry producer declared bankruptcy on Friday as a result of the insecticide scare, according to an industry group.
The Dutch consumer safety authority has published a guide on identifying the tainted eggs through a 10-digit serial number stamped on the shells. The country’s biggest supermarket chain, Albert Heijn, stopped selling many eggs last week, but the company said that eggs were back on sale as normal on Monday. In the Netherlands, an estimated nine million chickens from about 180 farms have been affected.
In Germany, the supermarket chain Aldi withdrew all eggs from sale after the authorities said that about three million eggs imported from the Netherlands had been affected. Since then, fipronil contamination has been found at four farms in the German state of Lower Saxony.
Fipronil is toxic in large quantities and can damage kidneys, liver and lymph glands. The Belgian and Dutch authorities are investigating how the contamination happened.
The Dutch poultry association said that farmers had no idea that cleaners were using the substance. Aalt den Herder, the group’s secretary, said the risk had been overstated.
“It was never an issue of human health, it was an issue of consumer confidence,” he said.
Belgian authorities have now admitted they began investigating pesticide contamination in eggs in early June – several weeks before the public was made aware of a food safety scare affecting several European countries.
Kathy Brison, of the Belgian food safety agency, said on Sunday that a Belgian farm alerted authorities to a possible contamination in June, and they began investigating and alerted Belgian prosecutors.
German authorities are frustrated by the apparent delay in informing European neighbours.
German Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt plans to speak to his Belgian counterpart about the issue on Monday.
And where would a risk communication failure be without the UK Food Standards Agency, who today reported, “We have no evidence that eggs laid in the UK are contaminated or that Fipronil has been used inappropriately in the UK. 85% of the eggs we consume in the UK are laid here.
“The number of eggs involved represents about 0.0001% of the eggs imported into the UK each year. Our risk assessment, based on all the information available, indicates that as part of a normal healthy diet this low level of potential exposure is unlikely to be a risk to public health and there is no need for consumers to be concerned. Our advice is that there is no need for people to change the way they consume or cook eggs or products containing eggs.”
Sounds good if they’re all getting “laid here.”
Once again:
Going public: Early disclosure of food risks for the benefit of public health
Mar.17
NEHA, Volume 79.7, Pages 8-14
Benjamin Chapman, Maria Sol Erdozaim, Douglas Powell
http://www.neha.org/node/58904
Often during an outbreak of foodborne illness, there are health officials who have data indicating that there is a risk prior to notifying the public. During the lag period between the first public health signal and some release of public information, there are decision makers who are weighing evidence with the impacts of going public.
Multiple agencies and analysts have lamented that there is not a common playbook or decision tree for how public health agencies determine what information to release and when. Regularly, health authorities suggest that how and when public information is released is evaluated on a case-by-case basis without sharing the steps and criteria used to make decisions. Information provision on its own is not enough.
Risk communication, to be effective and grounded in behavior theory, should provide control measure options for risk management decisions.
There is no indication in the literature that consumers benefit from paternalistic protection decisions to guard against information overload. A review of the risk communication literature related to outbreaks, as well as case studies of actual incidents, are explored and a blueprint for health authorities to follow is provided.
We conducted a study in rural Bangladesh to (1) quantify domestic fecal contamination in settings with high on-site sanitation coverage; (2) determine how domestic animals affect fecal contamination; and (3) assess how each environmental pathway affects others. We collected water, hand rinse, food, soil and fly samples from 608 households. We analyzed samples with IDEXX Quantitray for the most probable number (MPN) of E. coli.
We detected E. coli in source water (25%), stored water (77%), child hands (43%), food (58%), flies (50%), ponds (97%) and soil (95%). Soil had >120,000 mean MPN E. coli per gram. In compounds with vs. without animals, E. coli was higher by 0.54 log10 in soil, 0.40 log10 in stored water and 0.61 log10 in food (p<0.05). E. coli in stored water and food increased with increasing E. coli in soil, ponds, source water and hands.
We provide empirical evidence of fecal transmission in the domestic environment despite on-site sanitation. Animal feces contribute to fecal contamination, and fecal indicator bacteria do not strictly indicate human fecal contamination when animals are present.
Animal feces contribute to domestic fecal contamination: Evidence from E. coli measured in water, hands, food, flies, and soil in Bangladesh
Researchers at the BC Centre for Disease Control report in the British Medical Journal that between November 2016 and March 2017 more than 400 individuals across Canada developed norovirus gastroenteritis associated with the consumption of BC oysters. Over 100 cases occurred mid-November in participants at a Tofino oyster festival. Six cases occurred in persons attending a December oyster barbecue in Victoria. By March over 300 additional cases of norovirus linked to cultivated BC oysters harvested from multiple sites on both the east and west coasts of Vancouver Island were identified in BC, Alberta, and Ontario consumers.
Norovirus is a highly infectious cause of gastroenteritis typically spread from person to person and is associated with regular community outbreaks in schools, hospitals, day cares, and care facilities. Foodborne outbreaks of norovirus are often linked to ill food handlers. In this recent outbreak, oysters were contaminated in the marine environment where they were farmed. The trace-back of oysters consumed by infected individuals led to the closure of 13 geographically dispersed marine farms in BC and to extensive public outreach.
Genotypic analysis of norovirus isolated from the cases included several variants of genogroup I (GI) early in the outbreak and both genogroups GI and GII later in the outbreak.
Both GI and GII norovirus were detected in oysters from shellfish farms. This suggests that oysters bind and act as a reservoir for community outbreak strains and disseminate those strains to consumers.[1]
Although sewage is often the cause of oyster contamination it remains unclear whether one or many sewage sources contributed to the contamination of shellfish farms. The 2016–17 outbreak was preceded by a wet fall and accompanied an unseasonably cold winter. Wet, cold, and dark winters enhance norovirus survival, allowing for longer retention in ocean sediments and in oysters.[2,3] The infective dose of norovirus is estimated as few as 18 particles.[2] Given the low infective dose and the viability of norovirus in cold water, we postulate that sewage spread by ocean currents may have contaminated geographically dispersed farms. Among potential sources under investigation are sewer overflows, metropolitan and local wastewater treatment plants, municipal raw sewage discharge, and commercial fishing vessels. The BCCDC is leading a collaborative group reviewing pollution sources discharging to BC marine environments that may have contaminated BC oysters.
In this outbreak, both raw and cooked oysters led to illness; oysters were likely insufficiently cooked to inactivate norovirus. In addition to norovirus, pathogens like Vibrio sp., Salmonella sp., and hepatitis A can be transmitted to oyster consumers; cooking oysters to an internal temperature of 90 °C for at least 90 seconds will reduce this risk. The “rule” that shellfish is safe to eat in months with an “r” (September to April) is false. First, bacteria and viruses persist in cold seawater. Second, marine biotoxins (saxitoxin and domoic acid that cause paralytic and amnesic shellfish poisoning) occur year round.
Physicians and laboratories play an important role in controlling foodborne disease. In this outbreak, trace-back of oysters linked to cases was used to close shellfish farms. If you see patients with acute gastroenteritis who recently consumed shellfish, inform your local public health office and submit stool samples for testing.[4]
BC oysters and norovirus: Hundreds of cases in months with an “r”
BCMJ, Vol. 59, No. 6, July, August 2017, page(s) 326,327
Maya Rajamani of DNA Info reports the basement of the Stage Door Deli & Restaurant was deluged with “sewage and fecal matter” after the building’s owner failed to inspect and maintain the eatery’s pipes, a new lawsuit charges.
The restaurant at 360 Ninth Ave., between West 30th and 31st streets, was no longer able to use its basement after the pipes connecting to the city’s main utility lines broke on July 30, 2016, the suit filed against the landlord Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court claims.
Building owner 30th Street and 9th Avenue Enterprises LLC was supposed to inspect and maintain the pipes but failed to do so, the suit notes.
The diner, known for the corned beef and pastrami sandwiches it has served for the past 17 years, moved into the Ninth Avenue space after a rent hike forced it out of its longtime home across from Penn Station in 2015.
When the pipes broke last year, “sewage and fecal matter” seeped into the basement, “causing both substantial health concerns and damage to food products, food supplies and food preparation areas,” the complaint says.
It’s a question that has perplexed scientists: does diarrhea have a purpose?
That is, is diarrhea is a symptom of disease, or does diarrhea actually help clear the bacteria causing an infection.
Cecile Borkhataria of the Daily Mail reports that scientists have found in sick mice, proteins caused microscopic leaks in the intestinal wall that let water in, making the mouse poop looser and limiting disease severity.
The study, conducted by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), looked at the immune mechanisms that drive diarrhea.
Diarrhea can have many different causes, including infections, certain types of medications, too much caffeine or alcohol and many more.
It happens when there’s an excess of water in the intestines, which is normally re-absorbed by the body.
The intestinal wall is lined with cells, and some water can pass through the cells, holes in the lining or via junctions between the cells.
‘The hypothesis that diarrhea clears intestinal pathogens has been debated for centuries,’ said corresponding author of the study Dr Jerrold Turner of the BWH Departments of Pathology and Medicine.
‘Its impact on the progression of intestinal infections remains poorly understood.
‘We sought to define the role of diarrhea and to see if preventing it might actually delay pathogen clearance and prolong disease.’
To conduct the study, the researchers used a mouse infected with a bacteria called Citrobacter rodentium – the mouse equivalent of an E. coli infection.
Within two days of the mouse being infected, the researchers saw an increase in the permeability of the mouse’s intestinal barrier – leading to water entering the intestines, causing diarrhea.
This occurred well before inflammation cellular damage of the intestines.
The researchers discovered two new proteins involved in causing diarrhea – interleukin-22 and claudin-2, which humans possess too.
They found that when the mouse was infected, immune cells travelled to the intestinal wall and produced interleukin-22.
Interleukin-22 binds to cells on the intestinal wall, causing the release of another protein called claudin-2.
It’s claudin-2 that causes the leak in cellular junction in the intestinal wall, allowing water to enter it and cause diarrhea.
The researchers tested three different kinds of mice – regular mice, genetically modified mice that produce large amount of claudin-2, and mice that didn’t make any claudin-2.
The regular mice had diarrhea when they got sick, and the mice that made more claudin-2 always had diarrhea.
The mice that didn’t make any claudin-2 had more e injuries to their intestinal lining, and they still had diarrhea because it seemed as though their immune system attacked the cells help make some diarrhea.
In related poop news, Rob Knight, one of the founding fathers of gut microbiome research, in 2012, used the crowdfunding platform FundRazr to coax more than 9,000 volunteers into first donating money, and then sending samples of their poop through the mail. A team of researchers probed these samples for bacterial DNA to create the first census of the 40 trillion or so bacteria that call our guts their home.
Kyle Frischkorn of the Smithsonian quotes Knight, who directs of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at the University of California at San Diego, as saying, “You get an ongoing input of microbes from your environment—microbes you eat on food itself.”
One of the mysteries sparked by the American Gut Project was why two people who claimed to follow the same diet could have such different communities of gut microbes. For the study, volunteers had self-reported their diets, with the vast majority following omnivorous diets, and less than 3 percent each identifying as “vegetarian” or “vegan.” When researchers crunched the numbers, however, they found no discernible correlations between gut communities and those with seemingly similar diets.
“Diet categories were completely useless and didn’t correlate with the microbiome communities at all,” says Knight.
In other words, the bacteria in poop were telling a different dietary story than the people making that poop. “You can be a vegan who mostly eats kale, or you can be a vegan who mostly eats fries,” Knight explains. “Those have totally different consequences for your microbiome.” Anyone can claim to be a die-hard adherent to the Paleo Diet, it seems, but the data suggested that the microbiome remembers all those midnight ice cream transgressions.
Knight realized that the results of the American Gut Project were missing something crucial: A deeper dive into the food we eat. Filling that gap would mean analyzing all the food going in, and seeing how it correlated with the patterns in what comes out. But while collecting poop was, in some sense, straightforward—each person “submits a sample” in the same way—tallying up all the many foods people eat would be a lot more ambitious.
Every time you ingest, you change the interior landscape of you. Because the bulk of bacteria in the microbiome live in the gut, when we feed ourselves, we feed them too. The chemistry of what we eat, be it fries or kale, alters the chemical landscape of the gut, making it more cozy for some and less hospitable for others.
It gets livelier. Because microbes are everywhere—on the table, in the air, on the surface of the muffin you left out on the counter—you’re also adding new microbes to the mix. Some stroll through your body like polite tourists. Others stick around and interact with the locals. Every bite has the potential to alter the microbiome, and subsequently human health. But researchers have yet to figure out how.
That’s because, until now, we didn’t have the platform to embark on the massive endeavor of collecting and analyzing food samples from around the world. Thanks to the American Gut Project, Knight and his team aren’t starting from scratch. Initially, the researchers plan to collect 1,000 samples from every brick of the familiar food pyramid, and then they’ll open it for the public to submit whatever foods they’re curious about.
“We know about calorie count, and about different food groups, but the whole world of the molecules and the microbes in our food is a black box,” says Julia Gauglitz, a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Microbiome Innovation who will direct a new project. As the old adage goes, “we are what we eat,” she says. And yet, when you get down to the microscopic level, “we know very little about what we’re consuming.”
Everything we eat is the cumulative product of the chemistry and microbes in the soil where it was grown, the factory where it was processed, and whatever you touched right before you ate it. Why is that important? Ultimately, the team hopes, demystifying the microbial patterns in our food will help us better engineer our diets to improve our health and ward off disease.
Knight draws a historical parallel to the discovery of essential nutrients. In the last century, researchers figured out that industrially processed foods had become nutrient-depleted. By artificially adding vitamins and minerals back in, deficiency diseases like rickets and beriberi were largely eliminated from the Western world. Similarly, understanding the health effects of the microbiome could allow us to engineer those missing microbes back into our meals.
“It’s fairly likely that our modern lifestyles are stripping out a whole lot of live microbes that we need to maintain health,” says Knight. “Getting an understanding of that could be as important as the understanding that vitamin C is necessary and making sure that everyone got enough of it.”
Julie Cross of The Daily Telegraph reports a playground on the northern beaches has been closed after two children became sick with salmonella after playing in the sandpit.
The children caught the infection, believed to be spread through contact with bandicoot droppings, after playing at Warriewood Valley Rocket Park in Casuarina Drive.
Now Northern Beaches Council says it is considering replacing the sand with rubber to prevent the problem recurring.
The former Pittwater Council spent $285,000 replacing playground sand contaminated by the nasty bug with a soft rubber surface.
As well as spreading salmonella java, the protected bandicoot is a known tick host, which can cause mammalian meat and tick allergies and other diseases.
Northern Sydney Local Health District public health director Michael Staff said as the peninsula was a stronghold of the bandicoot, most cases of the salmonella java bug was linked to the area.
There have been 12 reported cases linked to the peninsula this year.
“We hope that the closure of the park will prevent further cases,” Dr Staff said.
The health district said a sand sample taken from the playground was tested after two confirmed salmonella java cases were reported to the public health unit, one in April and another in May.
Northern Sydney Local Health District director of public health Dr Michael Staff said parents of young children should try and stop them putting their hands in their mouths when they’re playing outside and get them to wash their hands after they have been outside.
In grade 10, I would race home on my bicycle at lunch to take in 30 minutes of animated joy that was a predecessor to all the satire 40 years later of pompous American superheros, and I was convinced the writers were all stoned.
Greatest TV cartoon ever (read the start of the wiki entry to get of how deepl weird the show was and how we are living it today).
Today’s weirdest non-political animation is the pooping unicorn, which has reached its demographic epoch in the same way that 7-year-olds hang posters of Michael Jackson or Katy Perry, when a friend of daughter Sorenne asked, “Do you know what the colorful unicorn is?
But is the unicorn effect spreading like diarrhea?
As Caroline Bologna of Huffington Post writes, when a Missouri mom named Rebecca asked her daughter, Audrey, how she’d like to celebrate her third birthday, the toddler had only one theme in mind: “poop.”
“For months, every time we mentioned her party, Audrey requested ‘poop balloons and a poop cake,’” Rebecca told The Huffington Post. “I tried suggesting other themes, but she always insisted on poop.”
Ultimately, she and her husband decided to “embrace the weird” and give Audrey the party she wanted.
The unconventional party took place in October at the family’s home in St. Louis.
The guests played “pin the poop,” enjoyed a poop emoji-shaped piñata filled with Tootsie Rolls and Hershey’s Kisses, and received whoopee cushion favors. Rebecca even dressed in a poop costume.
The mom said everyone loved the party and thought it was hilarious. “I expected the grandparents to question it, but they all just laughed when I told them,” she added.
Rebecca believes the birthday party embodied her daughter in many ways. “Audrey is definitely her own person,” she explained. “I hope she always has the confidence she has now. She is so funny and the best big sister.”
Rebecca hopes Audrey’s party can inspire other parents in the throes of birthday planning.
Who says the space program hasn’t led to great inventions: Tang, Teflon, and GPS to track down taxi drivers in a public poo pandemic that’s leaving a group of business owners flushed with anger.
The situation has become so bad real estate agent Tim Simpson is considering relocating the business he’s run in the suburb for 40 years.
He said the final straw was catching a taxi driver “in the act” last weekend.
“I understand drivers are expected to work 24/7 but surely there’s better options than this,” he said.
“We’re the ones who are having to clean it up. It’s like living in the Third World.”
National taxi firm 13 CABS is investigating the claims by matching complaints against data from GPS devices fitted in taxis.
Head of client services Simon Purssey said he was “shocked and horrified” to hear the reports.
“I understand ‘when a man’s gotta go, a man’s gotta go’ but if you’ve eaten a bad souvlaki and all of a sudden have to pull over you don’t do it in someone’s property,” he said.
And I thought Australia had great access to public shit depositories, compared to the rest of the world.
Dog poop.
Budde has also posted a sign outside her house asking the woman to stop, but it hasn’t made a difference.
