salmonella
kkrisberg | March 18, 2016In another example of the value of investing in public health, a recent study finds that PulseNet, a national foodborne illness outbreak network, prevents about 276,000 illnesses every year, which translates into savings of $507 million in medical costs and lost productivity. That’s a pretty big return on investment for a system that costs just $7.3 million annually to operate.
Created 20 years ago and coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PulseNet includes 83 state and federal laboratories and identifies about 1,750 disease clusters every year. It works by linking…
dr. dolittle | November 28, 2014 Image from www.chow.com
Did you know that the typical Thanksgiving day broad-breasted white turkey develops in as little as 136 days (on average)? This remarkably quick development is a result of years of selective breeding. The average turkey in 1929 was only about 13 pounds, whereas modern turkeys average around 30 pounds with much of the weight centered in the breast muscles.
The Poultry Science Association claims that this breeding program has resulted in skeletal problems as muscle growth outpaces bone growth, heart problems, and a lower ability to mount immune responses to certain…
kkrisberg | August 1, 2014For 17 years, Salvadora Roman deboned chickens on the processing line at Wayne Farms in Decatur, Alabama. In particular, she deboned the left side of the chicken — a task she was expected to perform on three chickens each minute during her eight-hour shift. Because of the repetitive movement and speed of the processing line, Roman developed a chronic and painful hand injury that affects her ability to do even the most basic household chores. About three years ago, she was fired from the plant for taking time off work to visit a doctor for the injury she sustained on the line.
“My hand started…
tsmith | April 26, 2013It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Fourth one this round is by Kristen Coleman.
If you are anything like me, you have been told countless reasons over the years why we must watch what we eat, keep our cholesterol intake down, and try to work out. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise then that I, since I am a public health student after all, aim to convince you of yet another reason why a healthy diet and exercise are valuable. What is this huge reason to avoid Big Macs and think about taking the stairs…
lborkowski | October 5, 2011The Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News has put together an excellent - and alarming - story on salmonella in chicken. Jeffrey Benzing, Esther French and Judah Ari Gross outline the problem this way:
Salmonella is found in a range of food products, including meat, produce and eggs. Chicken is the single biggest source of infection among cases where a food has been identified, causing about 220,000 illnesses, 4,000 hospital stays and at least 80 deaths annually in the U.S., according to an analysis of CDC data by the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida.
But gaps in…
lborkowski | August 4, 2011A strain of salmonella, Salmonella Heidelberg, has sickened at least 77 people in 26 states and killed one in California. The outbreak has been linked to ground turkey produced at an Arkansas plant, and Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation has announced a recall of about 36 million pounds of the meat. The meat is sold under the Honeysuckle brand and bear the establishment number P-963 inside the USDA inspection mark. USDA has a list of affected products on its website.
This strain of salmonella is resistant to several commonly prescribed antibiotics. As William Neuman notes in the New York…
tsmith | May 30, 2011In the United States, we tend to take our clean drinking water for granted. Even though there are periodic concerns which bubble up about pharmaceuticals or other chemicals in our water supply, we typically believe--with good reason--that we have little to fear when it comes to contamination from microbes. Our drinking water, while far from perfect, is heads and shoulders above what it once was--something many of us forget or have never realized. There have been notable breakdowns, such as the 1993 outbreak of Cryptosporidium in Milwaukee that sickened over 400,000 individuals, but these days…
lborkowski | February 24, 2011We're hearing a lot of rhetoric about the need to slash government spending, so it's a good time to remind everyone that there's no such thing as a free lunch - and if you think you're getting a free lunch, it might be loaded with pathogens.
Maryn McKenna, writing at Superbug about a New England Journal of Medicine study, has an illustrative example: the Great Tomato Scare of 2008. Between May and August of 2008, 1,499 people (and probably many more) fell ill from the Saintpaul strain of Salmonella, and two people died. The Food and Drug Administration initially thought tomatoes were to…
sa smith | August 27, 2010Me: HAI GUYS! U NEED TO EAT GUD FUDS LIKE EGGS! EGGS ARE GUD AND CHEEP! LOL! YAY EAT EGGS U GET ABS LIKE ABS LOL!
News: Salmonella outbreak in eggs, Massive recalls
Me: FUUUUUUUUUU......
News: lol.
But thats not the only reason I bring this up. SciBlogs 'special' friend, HuffPo, scavenged an article from AP, which noted that one of the reasons why this salmonella-in-eggs recall is so epic, is because the US government doesnt require hens be vaccinated against salmonella. I thought this was neat info, and it turns out the eggs I normally buy do vaccinate their hens ($2.35 a dozen -0.35…
lborkowski | August 24, 2010The Iowa-based company Wright County Egg is recalling 380 million eggs, which were sold to distributors and wholesalers in 22 states and Mexico, due to concerns about salmonella contamination. The eggs have been sold under several different brand names, so if you've got eggs in your fridge you can check FDA's page for info. Salmonella-infected eggs traceable to this producer may have caused as many as 1,200 cases of intestinal illness in at least 10 states over the past several weeks. A second producer, Hillandale Farms, has also issued a recall 170 million eggs that have been shipped to 14…
sb admin | June 29, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes:
Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…
lborkowski | June 29, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes:
Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
terrasig | November 27, 2009The region of southern Colorado on either side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is quite special to the Pharmboy family. The high plains to the east and San Luis Valley to the west are sparsely populated, stunningly beautiful with a veritable mine of geological treasures, and are unlikely to be built up in the PharmKid's lifetime. In fact, most counties down there have fewer people now than they did in 1900.
It is also rugged and you can easily die out there. Which gets you in touch with what matters.
Bighorn sheep and West Spanish Peak outside of La Veta, Colorado, about 60 miles east…
mikethemadbiologist | June 12, 2009It's never made much sense to me why the pathogenic bacteria Salmonella and Shigella (which is really E. coli) have lost the ability to use lactose (milk sugar). In Shigella, we know that when we restore some lost functions through genetic manipulation (e.g., cadaverine production), they actually prevent these altered Shigella from causing disease. But lactose seems to be a good sugar to be able to grow on--they're exposed to it from time to time (in infants).
The genus Salmonella contains two species: S. enteriditis, which causes disease* and can't use lactose as a carbon source, and S.…
mikethemadbiologist | April 17, 2009A recent article in MMWR Weekly with the unassuming title of "Preliminary FoodNet Data on the Incidence of Infection with Pathogens Transmitted Commonly Through Food --- 10 States, 2008" is incredibly disturbing.
The incidence of reported (more about that in a bit) Salmonella was 16.20 cases per 100,000 people. If we use a population size of 300 million, that means (Mad Biologist takes off shoes to do big number arithmetic) roughly 48,600 people had food associated Salmonella infections.
But it's probably higher than that, although I have no idea how much higher. For a Salmonella infection…
palmd | January 19, 2009You've probably read about the current Salmonella outbreak. It's a fine example of what can happen when food is produced and distributed on an industrial scale---even one small contamination event can spread widely in the food supply, and there isn't much of a system in place to follow the trail of contaminants. Others have covered the public health implications of this outbreak, so I'd like to examine some other facts that make this outbreak disturbing.
Salmonella likes non-human animals
Some species of Salmonella cause typhoid fever. Typhoid fever, a nasty epidemic disease of humans, is…
mikethemadbiologist | May 21, 2008An article in Emerging Infectious Diseases describes a joint collaboration between the CDC and Mexican health authorities that built a system to monitor the spread of Salmonella through the food chain and into people. One finding shocked me.
The authors examined four Mexican states, and the carriage of Salmonella in asymptomatic children ranged from 1.9% to over 11 percent. That's a lot of kids with Salmonella who are not exhibiting any symptoms:
Salmonella carriage was strongly correlated with contamination of meat by Salmonella* and by overall poverty. While the healthy kids had fewer…
edyong | April 11, 2008For comic book characters, big doses of radiation are a surefire way of acquiring awesome superpowers, but in real life, the results aren't quite as glamorous. A victim of acute radiation poisoning can look forward to hair loss, bleeding, the destruction of their white blood cells and bone marrow, and severe damage to their spleen, stomach and intestines.
Radiation doesn't kill cells directly, but it can cause so much damage that they commit suicide, by enacting a failsafe program called apoptosis. Now, Lyudmila Burdelya and colleagues from Roswell Park Cancer Institute have found a way to…