Ross Anderson is a freelance journalist living in Port Townsend, Washington. Previously he worked 30 years at the Seattle Times, where he covered politics, natural resources and environmental issues. He was a John S. Knight Jornalism Fellow at Stanford in 1979 and has won a number of awards, including a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and several awards for his now-and-then maritime column for the Port Townsend Leader. In recent years, he has occasionally worked with food safety attorney William Marler on various writing projects.
In the fall of 2006, health officials in Minnesota and Vermont reported multiple cases of Salmonella Typhimurium poisoning with matching genetic patterns. Working with federal officials, they began looking for a source.A month later, their investigations had focused on fresh tomatoes, sliced and consumed in a variety of restaurants. And the tomatoes were, in turn, traced to a packing house...
In 1854, as a cholera epidemic killed hundreds in London, an English physician named John Snow was determined to find out how the disease was transmitted.Snow doubted the prevailing belief that disease was spread by breathing "bad air." He noted that the disease was centered near a public water pump on Broad Street. The water in that area, he argued,...
The U.S. is a major consumer of illegally imported African "bushmeat" and other wildlife products - and of the perilous microbial zoo that frequently accompanies those products.That's the bottom line of a study published this week in the online journal PLoS ONE.Bushmeat describes meat parts from exotic African wildlife species, including baboons and chimpanzees, rats and other rodent species -...
Federally imposed processing safeguards prevented an estimated 190,000 cases of Salmonella poisoning from broiler chickens in the late 1990s, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.The statistical study compared food-poisoning data in the years before and after imposition of the sometimes-controversial Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) program in the mid-1990s.Previous studies had concluded that HACCP...
Pregnant women and people with leukemia and several other types of cancer are as much as 1,000 times more susceptible to Listeria infections, French researchers report.Doctors at the French Institute for Public Health Surveillance (Institut de Veille Sanitaire) summarized the results of a major study of French listeriosis patients, concluding that pregnant women and cancer patients are far more at risk...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has agreed to decide by March 31, 2012 whether bisphenol A, the controversial chemical known as BPA, should be banned from use in food and beverage packaging.The FDA agreed to the deadline as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of many consumer and environmental...
Posting the results of government meat, poultry and egg inspections and testing data could have "substantial benefits" to food safety, according to the highly respected National Research Council.An NRC committee made up of agriculture experts and food safety advocates studied the possible consequences of publishing such detailed information on the Internet, and concluded that it could introduce a new incentive...
The Food and Drug Administration has reiterated its finding that apple juice sold across the U.S. is safe to drink, with naturally occurring arsenic levels well below the agency's "level of concern," but says it may set new guidelines on an appropriate level for inorganic arsenic."FDA monitoring has found that total arsenic levels in apple juice are typically low," according...
Consumers throughout the west should avoid ASSI brand frozen oysters from Korea, which have been linked to an outbreak of norovirus in Washington State, the Food and Drug Administration said.An FDA warning, released at the close of business Friday, advised consumers not to eat frozen, shucked oysters packed in three-pound bags and labeled ASSI brand "INDIVIDUALLY QUICK FROZEN OYSTER" and...
By now, most of us understand that tomatoes simply ain't what they used to be. Once upon a time, the tomato was synonymous with summer, a juicy and flavorful fruit that enticed: Eat now, for tomorrow ye may die. A native of South America, it was the New World's gift to the Old World, where Italian cuisine made it famous.Then came...
As many as 20 percent of Americans -- 60 million people -- are more vulnerable to foodborne illness due to their age or health conditions that affect their immune systems, according to a newly published study by British medical researchers.In addition to the elderly, susceptible people include young children, pregnant women, alcoholics, diabetics and people stricken with AIDS, HIV, various...
A Salmonella outbreak traced to Cargill Inc. ground turkey has claimed 130 more victims - workers laid off at the company's Springdale, Ark, processing plant."We have people who don't have any work," Cargill spokesman Mike Martin told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.The Minnesota-based meat company, which employs a total of 1,200 people at the Arkansas plant, said the layoffs were necessitated...
Like all disease, foodborne illness seems to strike at random. When people are exposed to foodborne microbes, some of them get sick while many others will suffer few or no ill effects.Now it appears that the randomness extends to the public response. Some outbreaks of disease are quickly traced to their sources while other epidemics -- probably the great majority...
A rare, slow-motion outbreak of toxic E. coli sickened at least 250 people and killed one across the United Kingdom over a span of eight months this year before being traced to raw leeks and potatoes, British health authorities announced Friday.The national Health Protection Agency (HPA) said it monitored the outbreak for six months as people continued to fall ill,...
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has assembled a new network of epidemiologists and other public health experts in hopes of responding more quickly and effectively to outbreaks of foodborne illness.Dubbed the Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation (CORE) Network, the team will be directed by Dr. Kathleen F. Gensheimer, the former Maine state epidemiologist. As the CORE director, she will...
Copyright © Marler Clark
Free-Lance Writer
