food Archives - Page 4 of 7 - Maryn McKenna

Big Move: Chicago Schools To Buy Antibiotic-Free Chicken

November 1, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Big news today on several fronts: against the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture and for healthier food for school children. The Chicago Public Schools announced that its main food-service company, Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality, will begin buying and serving chicken drumsticks from birds raised in the local area without antibiotics. The deal will bring 1.2 million pounds of chicken to 473 schools per year, and represents about 25 percent of all the chicken that Chartwells-Thompson serves in the school system.

The new move was announced in a media telephone briefing that was hosted by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming and included representatives from Chartswell-Thompson; the nonprofit organizations School Foods Focus and the Healthy Schools Campaign; Whole Foods Market, which is making it affordable to transport the birds; and Miller Amish Country Poultry, the supplier.

This is an important deal for several different reasons: [Read more…]

25 Dead From Melons: FDA Points to Packing Facility

October 21, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Federal health authorities have determined responsibility for the vast 26-state outbreak of Listeria in cantaloupes, almost three months — and 123 illnesses, 25 deaths and one miscarriage — since it began.

In a long report released this week, they say they found Listeria not in the fields where the melons were grown, but in the packing and cold storage facilities on the single large farm where they all came from; and, in addition, they identified some practices on the farm that may have caused Listeria contamination or allowed it to multiply.

Just as a reminder of what was at stake here since we last talked about it: This is the first time that Listeria was found on cantaloupe in the United States, meaning there wasn’t a lot of past science to draw on. And this was a huge outbreak: The farm had 480 acres in cantaloupe, and shipped more than 300,000 cases of it. The number of fruit involved, according to MSNBC.com, may have been as high as 4 million.

Is China Banning Growth Promoters And Do They Mean It?

October 7, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A tantalizing prospect surfaced yesterday. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis tweeted a link to a Sept. 13 story from an online agricultural trade journal that said, in its entirety:

China’s Ministry of Agriculture has announced a forthcoming ban on antibiotics as growth promoters in animal feed. The ban is supported by the academic community, which believes that without antibiotics in animal feed, the health of animals will be better promoted, microbes’ resistance to antibiotics will be lowered and food will become safer to eat. Recent statistics show that in 2006 China produced 210,000 tons of antibiotics, and 97,000 tons were added to animal feed. Today it is estimated that 400,000 tons are produced annually.

So, first: If this story is accurate, it would be huge news. But, second: The story lists no sources and is almost a month old; in that month, there has been no other major coverage of this decision that I can find — which means a responsible reporter (which I try to be) needs to do some digging rather than pushing the link along.

Cantaloupe Outbreak: 13 Dead, 18 States, More To Come

September 28, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I’ve been away at a couple of very interesting conferences — more on those soon — so I’m late to this story; on the other hand, the story hasn’t even peaked yet, and thus there’s plenty of time for us to catch up.

So: An outbreak of foodborne illness that appears to be spread by fresh cantaloupes has sickened 72 people so far, in 18 states, and 13 have died. According to investigators, the source of the contamination has not yet been found. And also, according to a media briefing today, the contaminated cantaloupes were also shipped overseas, to countries that investigators would not identify. And, as an extra bonus, the tally of cases and deaths is likely to keep rising, because the particular illness in this outbreak has an incubation period of up to two months.

Big News But: USDA Bans "Other" E. coli Strains

September 13, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Good news, but not excellent news, today from the US Department of Agriculture: It has agreed that, starting in March 2012, six more strains of E. coli will be considered “adulterants,” putting them in the same regulatory category as the much-feared E. coli O157:H7.

It is a big step, to do this. Those six bacterial bad actors — technically, E. coli O26, O45, O103, O111, O121, and O145 — are now responsible for the majority of foodborne illness caused by E.coli in the United States, causing almost twice as much illness each year as O157 does.

Food Safety in China, and the Risk to the U.S.

August 23, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Another week, another food-safety crisis in China. Several news networks — Associated Press, Australian Press and Xinhua — report that 11 people have died and anywhere from 120 to 140 were sickened by contaminated vinegar. Stoking tensions further is the reason so many were poisoned at once: The victims live in a small village in far-west Xinjiang province and are ethnic Uighurs, the minority group whose desire for political independence from Beijing led to brutally suppressed riots in 2009. Uighurs are overwhelmingly Muslim, and most of the small village, about 150 people, had gathered for an iftar meal to break their Ramadan fast.

The poisoning appears to be due to ethylene glycol; the vinegar had been stored in barrels that previously contained antifreeze. According to the AP, investigators haven’t yet been able to say whether the vinegar was put in the barrels out of ignorance, making it a problem of accidental contamination, or deliberately by an unscrupulous producer seeking to cut corners.

Drug Resistance in Food — Coming From Aquaculture?

August 12, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

In the midst of the giant Salmonella Heidelberg outbreak last week — now up to 107 cases in 31 states, and triggering a recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey — it was easy to miss that a second and even more troubling strain of resistant Salmonella is on the move. As I wrote last week, that strain is called Salmonella Kentucky ST198, it is much more drug-resistant than the U.S. Heidelberg outbreak, and it has been spreading since 2002 from Egypt and north Africa through Europe, and has now been identified in the United States. Its primary vector appears to be chicken meat.

There is an interesting and troubling aspect to the spreading Kentucky strain that there wasn’t time to talk about last week, in the midst of the Heidelberg news. It’s this: The authors suspect that this enhanced resistance — to Cipro, and thus the class called fluoroquinolones that are very important in treating Salmonella — may have come into African chickens via drug use in aquaculture.

Resistant Salmonella: Deadly Yet Somehow Not Illegal

August 5, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

As the scale of the nationwide outbreak of Salmonella Heidelberg started to sink in Thursday — along with the stunningly large recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey, much of it probably already eaten — there were a number of moments that made a careful listener need to stop and just think.

Highly Resistant Salmonella: Poultry, Antibiotics, Borders, Risk

August 3, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

If you’re a strain of Salmonella, it’s a very good week. If you’re a human, not so much.

There are two stories occurring simultaneously that underline the rising danger of drug-resistant organisms in the food supply, and the porousness of networks for detecting the dangerous bugs in time.

Attack of the Deadly Slime: Farm Effluent Ruins French Beaches

July 26, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Vacationers in northwest France are being warned to stay away from beaches, which are growing a bumper crop of a seaweed that releases a potentially toxic gas. The culprit: Up-stream releases of manure from intensive farming that overload the near-shore waters with nitrates.

The seaweed (sea lettuce, Ulva lactuca) must be removed within 48 hours of washing ashore — because as it rots, it releases so much hydrogen sulfide that swimmers and strollers are endangered. The French ministry for health and the environment has warned visitors to avoid areas with overgrowth, and told workers scooping up the seaweed that they must wear monitors to alert them they have entered especially toxic pockets and must clear out within minutes.

E. coli: A Risk for 3 More Years From Who Knows Where

July 7, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The latest news from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the EU’s CDC, suggests that the massive outbreak of E. coli O104 is declining. The number of new cases being discovered has fallen, and the most recent onset of illness among confirmed cases was June 27. The toll is now 752 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome and an additional 3,016 cases of illness in 13 countries, for a total of 3,768 illnesses including 44 deaths. (The EU adjusted that total to remove 161 cases that were suspected but not lab-confirmed. It also did not include the five confirmed cases, one suspect case and one suspect death in the United States.)

But a simultaneous report from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reveals that, despite the epidemic curve’s trending down, the outbreak can’t be considered over. The ultimate source — the contaminated seeds from which salad sprouts were grown — has been so widely distributed that no one really knows where they have gone or for how long they might remain for sale. One prediction, based on the probable package labeling, is that they could remain on shelves for three more years.

WCSJ: Plant Diseases, Farmer Suicides And The Peril of A Hungry Future

July 3, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Here’s my second report from the World Conference of Science Journalists — and if you thought the first one on diabetes in China was depressing, just wait for this one.

Since I wrote SUPERBUG the book and started this blog, I’ve been fascinated by stresses and problems in food production. (For evidence, see any of this long archive.) This conference in Qatar, which drew 726 journalists, most from the global south, was a chance to hear from people immersed in food issues in places we in the north don’t know enough about. So for my panel on agriculture and food security, I invited people whom I wanted to learn from.

And wow, did I.

WCSJ: Maybe The Biggest Disease Threat Isn't Infectious At All

July 1, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I’ve been away the past week at the World Conference of Science Journalists, a biannual gathering that brought 726 writers and broadcasters from 87 countries to Doha, Qatar. I was there to give a presentation about blogging, and also because I organized two panels on under-reported epidemics and on food and farming issues in the developing world. My panelists’ testimony was so powerful that I wanted to share some of the details.

Going into the conference, the epidemics panel was my favorite. That’s not because I cheated and made myself one of the speakers, but because it brought into public view so many of the disease-control issues that we talk about here. When I say hidden epidemics, what I mean is this: The diseases that routinely grab headlines are almost never the ones that cost society the most in illness and deaths, and also in money to control and repair them.

Think of Ebola, for instance. There has never been a case of human Ebola in the United States. And as I’ve written before, viral hemorrhagic fevers repeatedly have been imported to North America without ever starting an outbreak. Yet whenever Ebola sparks in Africa, it earns scare-font headlines here, as though it were about to rampage across the continent — even though, in all its known engagements with humans, Ebola has killed less than one-tenth of the 19,000 that MRSA, for instance, kills in the US in a single year.

I asked a set of distinguished health journalists, all friends, to come to Doha to talk about diseases that deserve headlines, but never get them. Here’s what they said:

Is Drug Resistance in Humans Coming From Chickens?

June 28, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

There’s a new paper out in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that makes a provocative claim: There is enough similarity between drug-resistance genes in E. coli carried by chickens and E. coli infecting humans that the chickens may be the source of it.

If it is correct — and it seems plausible and is backed by past research — the claim provides another piece of evidence that antibiotic use in agriculture has a direct effect on human health.

E. Coli: Some Answers, Many Questions Still

June 24, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The past few days have seen the simultaneous publication of the first vetted medical-journal pieces on the vast European outbreak of E. coli O104. They’re fascinating for what they report that is new about this perplexing epidemic — now up to 3,802 cases including 43 deaths, according to the World Health Organization — and also for the further questions they raise.

Possibly most headline-worthy: Two reports in Eurosurveillance, Europe’s peer-reviewed open-access epidemiology journal, that suggest this strain is communicable from person to person and also produces unusual and troubling symptoms.

E. coli: What we know and need to

June 8, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The stream of news from the E. coli O104:H4 outbreak in Germany has been so steady that it’s been hard to catch my breath long enough to post on it. The Robert Koch Institute in Germany said today that they think the epidemic curve is cresting, which makes me unusually late to the party. Nevertheless, since there are likely to be more cases and more deaths — and a long struggle still to understand what happened — I thought it would be useful to count up the things that we can say for sure, and those that remain puzzlingly open questions.

First: Is this the largest E. coli outbreak ever? According to food-safety uber-attorney Bill Marler, this outbreak — more than 2,600 victims, 13 countries, 26 deaths (Nature News has a great graphic of cases by country) — is dwarfed only by a 1996 epidemic in Japan. (Here’s Marler’s list). If it’s not the largest, it is likely to have produced the largest percentage of serious illness: As of today, there are 725 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome (689 in Germany, 33 in the rest of Europe, three in the United States), according to WHO-Europe.

More MRSA, in milk: A new strain in cows and humans

June 3, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Despite the massive AIDS anniversary this week, I was expecting to write about the EU E. coli outbreak next. But there’s striking new news on MRSA that makes it worth putting off E. coli one more day. I’m traveling many time zones away from home, though, so this will be quick.

Researchers in England and Denmark have announced they have found a never-before recorded variant of MRSA in cow’s milk in England that has already caused human infections in England, Scotland and Denmark, and researchers in Ireland have simultaneously announced that they have found the same strain in hospitalized patients there as well.

Here’s how this unfolded:

MRSA in meat: How much? Which? And more bad news.

May 31, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

(Sorry for the radio silence, constant listeners. It’s been a challenging few weeks at Casa Superbug, with a death in the family and the chaos afterward of catching up to the rest of life. But back now, with some interesting stuff planned for later this week.)

Last week was the General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). This is the conference at which, several years ago, Tara Smith’s team at the University of Iowa first announced they had found MRSA ST398 in pigs in the United States, so it always bears watching for new MRSA news, and this year it didn’t disappoint.

First: I’ve complained persistently because the federal system that monitors antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals and food, NARMS (National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System) doesn’t include MRSA among the pathogens that it tracks. It is possible that might be changing — because at ASM, a team from the Food and Drug Administration reported the results of a pilot study that looked for MRSA in retail meat in the US and found it.

Growth Promoters: If You Can't Convince Them, Sue Them

May 25, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A little less than a year ago, the Food and Drug Administration took a step that, depending on your point of view, was either far too activist or nowhere-near-enough-but-good-try: It proposed, in a draft document, that the agricultural industry voluntarily restrict its use of growth-promoting micro-doses of antibiotics.

It was a significant step. The FDA has been trying to restrict subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock since the 1970s because of the practice’s clear contribution to the development of antibiotic resistance, and had always been defeated. At the same time, it was far from bold: The proposal was made in a draft document that would be made final at some unspecified future date, and that when it became final would have behind it no force of regulation or law. (Here’s my long discussion from last year of the context and history of FDA’s move.)

And there things rested, while the FDA’s docket reportedly filled up with thousands of comments from both sides of the issue. The document — formally, Draft Guidance #209, Judicious Use of Antimicrobial Drugs in Food-Producing Animals — is scheduled to be finalized sometime before the end of this year. But in its draft form, it excited abundant opposition, and the administration official who seemed to be leading the charge on it, memorably suggesting, “We have the regulatory mechanisms and the industry knows that,” has left the FDA for a state-government job.

Clearly, things aren’t moving very fast. So today, a coalition of nonprofit groups attempted to get the issue jump-started: They sued.

Farm Antibiotics: 'Pig Staph' in a Daycare Worker

May 9, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

It’s been just about seven years since an alert epidemiologist in the Dutch town of Nijmegen identified an aberrant strain of MRSA, drug-resistant staph, in a toddler who was going in for surgery to fix a hole in her heart. The strain was odd because it didn’t behave normally on the standard identifying tests, and because it had an unusual resistance factor — to tetracycline, a drug that it should not have been resistant to, because the Netherlands had such low rates of MRSA that tetracycline wasn’t being used against the bacterium there.

Pursuing the source of the strain, researchers at Radboud University found it in the toddler’s parents and sister, and in the family’s friends. Not knowing where else to look, they asked what the parents and their friends did for a living; discovered they were all pig farmers; and went to their farms, and checked the pigs, and found it being carried by them, too. Suddenly, that strange resistance pattern made sense: The Netherlands uses more antibiotics in pig agriculture than any other country in the European Union, and the drug that it uses the most is tetracycline. Clearly, the aberrant strain — known as MRSA ST398 for its performance on a particular identifying test — at some point had wandered into pigs, become resistant to the drugs being given to the pigs, and then crossed back to humans, carrying that new resistance factor as it went.