Gisborne District Council this week confirmed the duck pond at the gardens contained E.coli, Giardia and Cryptosporidium.
Although a statement from GDC said someone would have to drink “a good amount” of water to get sick, medical officer of health Dr Margot McLean pointed out that was not the case.
“You don’t have to enter the pond or drink the pond water to pick up the bugs that can make you sick. You could also pick up the bugs by putting hands in the water or touching areas where there is duck poo.
“This shouldn’t put people off visiting the ducks, as long as extra care is taken with hand hygiene.
“Antibacterial wipes could be used immediately after leaving the area, however parents should supervise children washing their hands and use the 20/20 rule; 20 seconds to wash/20 seconds to dry on the return home.
“Any duck poo should be removed from shoes so that the poo doesn’t contaminate surfaces like floors, or hands.”
The current approach in the U.S. water industry for monitoring Cryptosporidium and Giardia has weaknesses that have contributed to the difficulty of interpreting resulting data. This often leads to potentially significant and dangerous misinterpretation. The purpose of this paper is to summarize information on which the conflicting conclusions on the occurrence and distribution of Cryptosporidium and Giardia have been based.
Effort is made to determine the most plausible and supportable interpretation. The objective is to provide a basis for rethinking the current approach to monitoring and management of Cryptosporidium and Giardia in water.
The importance of measuring recovery efficiency and reporting measurements of these organisms in terms of concentration to any quantitative application is emphasized. Data presentation to illustrate critical features of organism concentration levels and variation is reviewed. Analysis of major data sets resulting from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Information Collection Rule Supplemental Survey (USEPA ICR SS) and the Long-Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule (LT2) monitoring and other previously published relevant data sets is presented to illustrate key features of Cryptosporidium and Giardia occurrence in surface water and their universal geographic distribution. Current thinking emphatically requires revision.
Cryptosporidium and Giardia in water: reassessment of occurrence and significance
This isn’t a new observation but one that food hucksters continue to enforce with ever more audacious claims – and all for a price.
Never underestimate the ability of the food biz – big or small, organic or conventional, raw or paleo — to make a buck.
And universities, with all their pomposity, especially Haaarrrvvvard, can suck.
Retailers promote scientific nonsense by exploiting consumer fears. Hence G Organic, a version of Gatorade that will be made with sugar from organically farmed sugarcane and carry a label whose largest word is a sprawling “ORGANIC.”
James Hamblin of The Atlantic notes the market for products labeled “organic” has exploded in recent years, to $43.3 billion in the U.S. alone in 2015. Marketing to capitalize on that demand sometimes confuses consumers into thinking that organically-produced products are healthier for us, a hope that has not born out. As dietician Lisa Cimperman told NPR, “I think it’s a marketing ploy to apply this organic health halo to this product.”
Executives from PepsiCo have implied as much. According to PepsiCo executives in Ad Age, the approach is an attempt to reach the growing market of consumers who seek out the term. The company is responding to pressure from challengers like coconut water, “as consumers are focused more than ever on ingredients.”
A socially conscious cerebral cortex may be drawn to organically farmed sugar over inorganically farmed sugar, but a pancreas makes no such distinction. It releases insulin in both cases, spreading word throughout the body that this is a time of fantastic abundance. The insulin signals the body to save and pack these calories away in fat cells, for use when food is scarce. For most Americans, that scarcity never arrives. All that does is more food.
For serious athletes doing prolonged exercise—the sort that drains their blood sugar, and depletes their sodium stores as they soak themselves in sweat—adding some sugar and sodium back into the mix does help to keep a person moving. This is why Gatorade was useful to the University of Florida’s football players, who were succumbing to heat exhaustion after hours of summer practice, when the product came into existence in 1965.
Still, the sugar content in Gatorade Thirst Quencher today is much too high, and the sodium content much too low, to re-hydrate a truly dehydrated person. Properly balanced oral rehydration solutions do exist, but they don’t taste as good to most people as the much sweeter concoctions.
Most of Gatorade’s $3.3 billion in annual sales come from consumers in much less extreme circumstances, where it is simply empty calories. The product is positioned as an optimal approach to hydration—to quenching thirst. This is purportedly because of the “electrolytes” (meaning a bit of sodium and potassium), but for people who eat food, these additives are moot. A serving of Gatorade Thirst Quencher has about as much sodium as a slice of bread.
But Gatorade Organic (G Organic sounds too much like a sexual act) is only the latest.
Anahad O’Connor of The New York Times reports the sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.
The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease — including many of today’s dietary recommendations — may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.
“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the new JAMA paper.
The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of sugar, fat and heart research. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive. One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines. Another scientist was Fredrick J. Stare, the chairman of Harvard’s nutrition department.
In a statement responding to the JAMA report, the Sugar Association said that the 1967 review was published at a time when medical journals didn’t typically require researchers to disclose funding sources or potential financial conflicts of interest. The New England Journal of Medicine did not begin to require financial disclosures until 1984.
Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, wrote an editorial accompanying the new paper that said the documents provided “compelling evidence” that the sugar industry initiated research “expressly to exonerate sugar as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease.”
“I think it’s appalling,” she said. “You just never see examples that are this blatant. The amount of money they were paid to do this is staggering.”
Actually, $50,000 is nothing.
Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that academic conflict-of-interest rules have changed significantly since the 1960s, but the industry papers are a reminder of “why research should be supported by public funding rather than depending on industry funding.”
Nope.
Full transparency is much better: why ding taxpayers for the cost of proving something.
And most nutritional research is bullshit anyway.
The JAMA paper relied on thousands of pages of correspondence and other documents that Cristin E. Kearns, a postdoctoral fellow at U.C.S.F., discovered in archives at Harvard, the University of Illinois and other libraries.
The documents show that in 1964, John Hickson, a top sugar industry executive, discussed a plan with others in the industry to shift public opinion “through our research and information and legislative programs.”
At the time, studies had begun pointing to a relationship between high-sugar diets and the country’s high rates of heart disease. At the same time, other scientists, including the prominent Minnesota physiologist Ancel Keys, were investigating a competing theory that it was saturated fat and dietary cholesterol that posed the biggest risk for heart disease.
Mr. Hickson proposed countering the alarming findings on sugar with industry-funded research. “Then we can publish the data and refute our detractors,” he wrote.
In 1965, Mr. Hickson enlisted the Harvard researchers to write a review that would debunk the anti-sugar studies. He paid them a total of $6,500 – the equivalent of $49,000 today. Mr. Hickson selected the papers for them to review and made it clear he wanted the result to favor sugar.
I’m proud to have taken industry money: and to tell them how fucking wrong they were, when it was the right, evidence-based conclusion.
Attorney-General Chris Finlayson has also revealed the members of the inquiry, who have to report back with their findings by March next year.
Last month, the Government announced an inquiry into the Havelock North campylobacter outbreak, which has affected thousands of residents and been linked to the deaths of two elderly people.
Finlayson said the inquiry would be chaired by retired Court of Appeal judge Lyn Stevens QC.
“The members of the inquiry panel have the extensive legal, public health, local government and water management expertise required to conduct an inquiry of this nature,” Finlayson said.
The inquiry would start this week, but had until March 31 next year to report back.
It would focus on how the Havelock North water supply became contaminated and how it was dealt with, how local and central government agencies responded to the public health outbreak, and how to reduce the risk of a similar outbreak happening in future.
The latest outbreak made 5200 people sick and hospitalised 22. Two elderly women who died were found to have contracted campylobacter, but both had other health issues.
An investigation is under way to find how the bug made its way into the water. Evidence to date indicates it came from sheep or cattle and may have originated from near the bores.
So how is Wellington’s water made safe: chlorinated, fluoridated, then delivered to your glass.
Rachel Thomas of The Dominion reports that Kaitoke and Wainuiomata are home to Wellington’s two river-based water sources.
Greater Wellington Regional Council chairman Chris Laidlaw says the catchments of both the river sources in Kaitoke and Wainuiomata are in protected forest parks where there is virtually no human activity.
“There’s no agriculture up there and very little intrusions with the water. It’s pure water we get from the hills.”
That said, all water sourced from rivers is at permanent risk of contamination from faecal or other organic matter.
That is why it is chlorinated, says Lower Hutt Deputy Mayor David Bassett, who is also chairman of Wellington Water’s governance committee.
“It’s better to err on the side of caution, and we are very risk averse when it comes to Wellington’s river water supply.”
Most of the residents in Lower Hutt, Upper Hutt, Porirua and Wellington get either chlorinated river water, or a mix of chlorinated river water and aquifer water.
The region’s confined aquifer can be found at Waiwhetu in Lower Hutt. It is the only source of unchlorinated, unfluoridated water in the region, and supplies drinking water to more than 70,000 Hutt City residents.
Water from the aquifer is free of bacteria and other contaminants, Bassett says.
That is because it is at least a year old and goes through a natural filtration process as it makes its way through the aquifer layers.
“It doesn’t need to be chlorinated, and so long as the network [of pipes] is secure, it is safe to drink at the tap – and we test the water throughout the network to make sure that it remains safe.”
Over the past year, there have been four positive E.coli tests at reservoirs in the unchlorinated network, Bassett says.
When that happens, Wellington Water notifies regional health authorities, shuts off the system, chlorinates the relevant reservoir, and re-tests the water until it is all-clear.
PT Farm, LLC, a North Haverhill, N.H. establishment, is recalling approximately 15 pounds of lamb products that may be contaminated with E. coli, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.
The lamb products, a neck and one leg, were derived from a carcass produced on Sept. 6, 2016 and were shipped to a retail store in Somerville, Massachusetts and sold at their retail counter on Sept. 7, 2016.
The problem was discovered on Sept. 7, 2016 when the establishment was notified of an E. coli positive water supply sample result and resulting ‘water boil’ notice initiated by the North Haverhill Municipality Water Department located in North Haverhill, New Hampshire.
FSIS and the company are concerned that some product may be frozen and in consumers’ freezers.
Consumers who have purchased these products are urged not to consume them. These products should be thrown away or returned to the place of purchase.
About 5200 people – a third of the New Zealand town’s population – have been affected since a campylobacter contamination was found in its water supply last month.
Since August 12, residents have been asked to boil drinking water, but on Saturday the Hastings District Council said tests had revealed the water was again safe to drink straight form the tap.
“The third clear [daily] water test in a row came back today, allowing the boil water notice to be lifted,” chief executive Ross McLeod said.
The water in the area will continue to be chlorinated for at least three months.
The government has launched an independent inquiry into the contamination.
The Hastings District Council’s Finance Committee is expected to sign off on the expenditure at its meeting tomorrow.
The money is needed to cover the remission of water rates for each household in Havelock North, which is costing the council $300,000 in total.
It will also be used to fund the $110,000 recovery package for struggling businesses.
An extra $300,000 will also be put aside for additional costs arising from the water contamination, including extra water testing, engineering and technical investigations, water supply planning and enquiry costs.
That’s more than a third of the town’s 14,000 population.
At least 500 cases of those cases have been confirmed as due to campylobacter.
The DHB said there were no patients currently in hospital with a campylobacter infection.
A spokesperson said a medical officer of health and infectious diseases expert would present further data, and talk about people’s health concerns, at a public meeting in Havelock North tonight.
Meanwhile a Hawke’s Bay residents group is calling for a freeze on all regional council decisions affecting aquifer and river water quality, until the government’s inquiry into the water disaster has reported back.
“We needed to find what the microorganism causing diarrhea was and the source of it. In light of the samples we took from the patients, we determined that what caused their diarrhea was a norovirus, which means bacteria and viruses together,” Health Ministry Health Services Department General Manager İrfan Şencan told journalists at a press briefing on Aug. 29, adding it can spread very easily.
“It’s a type of virus that can cause stomach ache, nausea, vomiting, fever and diarrhea. It can spread very easily and affects a lot of people. I need to stress that in addition to the infection occurring through drinking water directly, one can be infected through several other ways including kissing, washing hands, preparing meals, shaking hands and so on,” he added.
Şencan noted there was no issue concerning the chemical quality of the water.
Janet Hughes of Gloucestershire Live writes that scientists are checking to see if summer holiday visits to animal attractions are behind a massive spike in the number of toddlers with cryptosporidium.
Public health chiefs are asking affected families to fill in questionnaires about where they have been and what they have eaten in an effort to trace the source of the outbreak which is particularly bad in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire.
Children aged between one and five years are most at risk from the parasite cryptosporidium which is three or four times more prevalent than normal this summer.
Doctors believe a small number of cases could be linked Oasis leisure centre in Swindon, which has been closed as a precautionary measure, and say swimming in contaminated lakes, rivers or swimming pools can cause the disease to strike.
But many of those struck down are young toddlers so other possible theories include the prospect that children might not have washed their hands after petting animals at attractions during the summer holidays.
The Hawke’s Bay District Health Board states the woman in her nineties was admitted to Hawke’s Bay Hospital during the contamination crisis, which has affected more than 4,700 people.
The DHB say while the woman had campylobacter, she died from an unrelated medical condition yesterday evening.
This comes as the coroner investigates the death of 89 year old Jean Sparksman (right) who died on August 13th while also suffering campylobacter.
The coroner won’t be holding a formal investigation into the recent death of the woman in her nineties, as there is not direct link to the gastro bug.
Gisborne District Council this week confirmed the duck pond at the gardens contained E.coli, Giardia and Cryptosporidium.
