Consumers
revere | July 20, 2008The US FDA is lifting the warning on eating tomatoes it issued on June 7 because of the country's largest produce-associated foodborne Salmonella outbreak. The source of the Salmonella infections, all said to be "genetically identical" isolates of an uncommon serovar is still to be discovered, although epidemiological evidence associated it with salsa containing fresh tomatoes. Later the possibility that other salsa ingredients such as jalapeno peppers or cilantro might be the culprit has been raised. So far no one seems to know how that thousand plus cases became infected with the Salmonella…
revere | July 19, 2008About a year and half ago, in a post entitled "One donut, black", I noted the claim of a food company that it would soon be able to sell donuts spiked with caffeine. I wasn't sure I would ever see such a thing, but I was too skeptical. Not only is that company still on track with its product, but another company has now announced its intention to put caffeine into bakery goods. All for our benefit, of course:
After announcing the development of a proprietary way to encapsulate caffeine for foods using vegetable-derived lipids last year, the company has worked in collaboration with bakery…
revere | May 22, 2008Over the years I've seen more than enough of the murderous destruction "the magic mineral, "asbestos, has caused in the lives of workers and their families. Exposure to asbestos causes a serious, often fatal, scarring of the lungs called asbestosis and also two different kinds of cancer of the respiratory tract: lung cancer and mesothelioma. Both cancers are usually fatal, but while lung cancer can be caused by other agents like cigarettes and various occupational chemicals, mesothelioma is mostly a result of exposure to asbestos. "Meso," as it is often called, is a horrific disease. It…
revere | April 30, 2008Every day seems to bring a new story about the crap we are leaving strewn around our environment. Not just trash but chemical trash, the kind of stuff we eat, pop as pills or dispose of and which winds up as molecules in our air, water and food. You may think you know more than you want to about this but in fact you know very little about it because no one knows much about it. For example, there are no systematic measurements of the stuff in the raw water that goes into our water treatment plants, facilities designed to handle micro-organisms and not chemicals. The EPA has a program called…
revere | April 28, 2008On a couple of occasions (here, here) we've taken note of the scientific controversy regarding the plasticizer, bisphenol-A (BPA). I shouldn't really put it this way, because as the leading BPA researcher, Fred vom Saal of the Univeristy of Missouri said in the Washington Post over the weekend, there is no meaningful controversy any longer. Now that NIH's National Toxicology Program has finally presented its draft report on BPA expressing concern over possible carcinogenic and developmental effects, vom Saal's statement seems pertinent:
"The scientific community basically said, 'This argument…
revere | April 20, 2008The National Post recently had an interesting article on "disease mongering," an article I largely agreed with. The major point was that fostering a fear of "germs," promoting the idea that following medical advice, especially advice involving "taking your pills," and the very definition of who is diseased and who is not has a suspiciously commercial aspect.
Consider the marketing of hand sanitizers, a subject of interest to the flu obsessed:
The slogan of Purell -- a hand sanitizer manufactured by Pfizer -- is "Imagine a Touchable World." It's hard to miss the implication that the world in…
revere | April 16, 2008Thanks to a local health officer in Colorado I get word that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has begun an investigation of claims made by my favorite infomercial quacks, the Kinoki Foot Bad folks (see my howl of pain in the post The TV ad that DRIVES ME CRAZY). Here's some of the AP story:
Late night television infomercials seem to have a cheap fix for anything: lose weight, banish cellulite or improve conditions like diabetes, arthritis and insomnia.
Or, all of the above.
Ads for Kinoki Foot Pads made exactly that bold claim, saying the pads use secrets of ancient Japanese medicine…
revere | April 9, 2008The first time I can remember flying on a commercial airplane was in August of 1955. It was a DC3 or DC7 or something like that. Before that the family traveled by train or car. In the years following I always enjoyed air travel. I flew the Atlantic on a prop plane once (refueled in the Azores, I think), went to Europe on Icelandic Airways, then the cheapest way to get there, flew everywhere. Now I hate flying.
Air travel has become just another form of mass transit, and thanks to the TSA and the airlines themselves, a monumentally unpleasant and stressful one. At least on other kinds of mass…
revere | April 4, 2008The Global War on Terror is claiming yet another victim: the reputation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey as a principled guardian of the Rule of Law. Even before joining the Bush administration Mukasey was forgetting the meaning of the word "torture," and since being confirmed is equally benighted regarding privacy. Now he is peddling shoddy goods linking terrorism and software piracy. Does this former judge have no shame? Via Preston Gralla at Computer World Blogs:
In a talk last week before at the Tech Museum of Innovation, Mukasey used his best fearmongering tactics to link software…
revere | March 18, 2008Ex-Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer made a critical mistake in his relations with a prostitute: he had sex with her. Sex is bad, at least in America. You'd think a politician would know better than almost anyone. You don't have sex with prostitutes. You take campaign money from them:
The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents food, beverage and consumer products companies, spent nearly $1.6 million in 2007 to lobby on food safety and other issues.
The trade group spent a little more than $1 million in the second half of 2007 to lobby the federal government, according to a…
revere | March 1, 2008Full disclosure: I know the toxicologist who is the subject of this post. Not well. But I know her and I know her work and she is, as the story from the LA Times says, a highly respected scientist. And no shrinking violet, which accounts for the fact that the Bush EPA has dismissed her from an expert panel on brominated flame retardants widely used in consumer products like upholstery and electronic equipment. Your body is also full of them. Well, at least that's true for some 90% of Americans. Maybe you are the one in ten. Back to the one in 300,000,000, the President of this country (for…
revere | February 28, 2008There are so many hot button issues today it's not possible to pick "the" biggest one. But certainly in the top five (unfrtunately there are 100 things in the top 5) must be "net neutrality." Essentially it is whether commercial internet service providers (like Comcast or RCN) should be allowed to give preference to certain kinds of traffic over others, in effect controlling which websites we can see and which ones we can't. Net neutrality, which is in theory what we have now, would make it mandatory that service providers be neutral in how they treat traffic. Data packets are data packets,…
revere | February 20, 2008The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn't want Americans to buy legal pharmaceutical products from Canada where the identical drug is considerably cheaper because the imported drug might not be safe. Those unreliable Canadians. Better to pay top dollar for heparin from the American subsidiary of a Big Pharma multinational, Baxter Healthcare. Except that the active ingredient in Baxter's intravenous heparin came from China. From an uninspected plant. And there was indeed a safety problem:
More than 350 adverse reactions to the drug have been reported to the FDA since the end of 2007,…
revere | February 16, 2008It's official. Living in one of the 120,000 trailers FEMA supplied after Hurrican Katrina is bad for you:
Federal health officials on Thursday urged hurricane victims to move out of trailers supplied by FEMA after tests showed dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes.
Tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on more than 500 trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi showed formaldehyde levels that were five times higher than levels in a normal house. The levels in some trailers were nearly 40 times what is normal.
The CDC said people should move out quickly -- especially children,…
revere | February 16, 2008A lot of things that seem on first glance to be "news" are really just reprints or slight edits of press releases written to tout a commercial product. This is also true of "Newsletters" that charge money for inside news.
Datamonitor is a company that claims to be "the world's leading provider of online data, analytic and forecasting platforms for key vertical sectors. We help 5,000 of the world's largest companies profit from better, more timely decisions" (Datamonitor website). Some of the stuff they give away, since I see it and I don't subscribe to anything they sell. But based on its…
revere | February 2, 2008Last week we brought you the Kinoki Footpad and the TV ad that drives me crazy. Not all infomercials are so stupid. Some sell products with genuine health benefits. I spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer (like at this moment) so I don't get enough exercise. And my abs? Forget it (bad visual).
But as Mike Huckabee (or was it Bill Clinton) might say, Hope is a Chair called Hawaii:
revere | February 2, 2008There's a world out there I hardly know, although apparently I am part of it. The sandwich world:
High saturation in the US sandwich market will force manufacturers to focus on niche age and ethnic markets in order to boost market share, predicts a new Mintel report.
According to estimations made by Mintel at the end of 2007, the US sandwich industry is now worth more than $121bn - a massive market for product historically created to use up old meat and stale bread.
However, Mintel predicts that the market will experience slow growth of 13 per cent over the 2007 to 2009 period - only half of…
revere | January 11, 2008The Consumer Product Safety Commission is supposed to make sure toys and other consumer products are safe. They recalled 472 products last year. That's a pretty good record for a Lilliputian agency that has a staff of only 400. This is George Bush's dream -- shrinking the size of the government. CPSC started out life with 800 staff. If Bush's budget recommendations had been adopted by Congress it would have had to cut another 19 positions -- 5%. For once Congress didn't go along. They increased CPSC budget from $63 million to $80 million. The agency's head, former industry lawyer Nancy Nord,…
revere | December 26, 2007There's a lot of stuff about tainted food in the news, whether it is toxins in imports or questionable additives in US products (e.g., bisphenol A in hard plastics). This stuff is not on any food label, of course, but there is a lot of detailed stuff that is on labels and increased concern about food seems to have made label reading more common. I've always wondered if the detail was encouraging or discouraging people from reading labels. How many people read labels really? Quite a few, it turns out, at least if you believe a new report, Label Reading from a Consumer Perspective, by the…
revere | December 24, 2007We've discussed the scandal over the use of Avastin and Lucentis for wet macular degeneration several times (here, here, here). If you've missed it, here's the gist. Avastin is a drug approved to treat colon cancer. It works by choking off blood vessels to the tumor. It turns out, however, that a tiny dose of the same drug, when injected into the eye can also stop the uncontrolled growth of blood vessels behind the retina that produces a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, macular degeneration. The good news is a compounding pharmacy can take the large dose in the Avastin package and…