posted 05-17-2002 12:57 AM            

Yonkers building evacuated after chemical scare; 6 people sick

By Jim Fitzgerald, Associated Press, 5/16/2002 23:08

YONKERS, N.Y. (AP) A four-story apartment building was evacuated Thursday night after six residents who ate together became ill because of what authorities feared was cyanide contamination. ''They thought it was cyanide,'' said Susan Tolchin, a spokeswoman for Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano. ''Then they thought it was food poisoning. They don't know what it is. They really don't know.''

The six people, all from an apartment on the building's top floor, were taken to St. Joseph's Medical Center; two were in critical condition and the others were stable, hospital spokesman Nicholas DeRobertis said.

The two critical patients were unconscious and on life support, Mayor John Spencer said. The other residents of the 18-apartment building were taken to a nearby parish hall. There were ''some other people'' in the apartment with the victims who did not get sick, and health officials were leaning toward a cause that was food related and was not airborne, Spencer said. ''Some did not eat,'' he said, ''and they're all right.''

The FBI and state terrorism officials were helping local police with the investigation ''due to the sensitivity of it and the times we live in,'' the mayor said. The contaminant was ''some sort of poison ... possibly cyanide,'' he said.

Police Commissioner Charles Cola said the victims' conditions deteriorated very quickly, not typical for food poisoning victims, leading him to believe ''it was some kind of chemical they ingested.'' He said police were trying to find out ''what food it was, how it got there and what was in it.''

posted 05-17-2002 11:18 AM            

MEXICO CITY — Mexican police found a stolen truck on Thursday that had been carrying 10 tons of sodium cyanide, but most of the deadly chemicals were missing.

The Environmental Ministry urged border guards to take precautions to ensure that large amounts of the chemical weren't smuggled out of the country. Officials called the alert "precautionary" and said there was no evidence any sodium cyanide had left Mexico.

Authorities cordoned off the area around where the truck was discovered, abandoned along a highway in Zacatlan, about 120 miles northwest of Mexico City in central Puebla state.

posted 05-17-2002 12:09 PM            

Food Cited in N.Y. Illness Mystery

By Jim Fitzgerald
Associated Press Writer

Friday, May 17, 2002; 10:06 AM

YONKERS, N.Y. –– Six people became suddenly and violently ill in an apartment, sparking a chemical-contamination scare that led to the evacuation of the building and the deployment of hazardous materials workers and anti-terrorist agents.

Officials said later that the illness was probably caused by something in the victims' food, but the outbreak was still being treated as a possible crime."We're leaning toward some kind of food poisoning because of the violent way they got sick," Police Commissioner Charles Cola said Friday. He mentioned botulism as one disease that might match the symptoms.

Two people were in critical condition and on life support, Mayor John Spencer said. The others were listed as stable, said Dr. Nicholas DeRobertis of St. Joseph's Medical Center."It's definitely something they ingested, that they ate or drank, but we don't know what," he said.

Tests that might determine the cause of the illness would not be finished until much later Friday, the hospital said.The hospital closed briefly when emergency room workers reported rashes that may have been caused by contact with the victims. But tests showed no airborne contamination or contagion, Spencer said. He urged residents to be calm, saying, "It looks like everything is going to be all right."

The New York City anti-terrorism task force was called in Thursday night "due to the sensitivity of it and the times we live in," the mayor said.

Spencer initially said the illness seemed to be caused by "some kind of poison," and cyanide was considered a possibility. Cola said the victims' conditions deteriorated quickly.

The victims, whose names were not released, had eaten together in the apartment less than a mile north of the New York city line. Other people in the apartment who had not eaten did not become ill, the mayor said.

Residents of the 18-unit building, including several children, were taken to an auditorium and tended by Red Cross workers until police allowed them to return home before dawn."They said it wasn't something you could see and so I didn't know which way to go," said neighborhood resident Lawrence Kelly, 22. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32491-2002May17.html

posted 05-19-2002 12:43 PM            

Food Preservative Blamed for Illness

YONKERS, N.Y.- A food preservative was to blame for the sudden outbreak of illness that triggered a chemical-contamination scare in downtown Yonkers, a health official said.

"The food that the family digested was heavily contaminated with sodium nitrite," said Mary Landrigan, spokeswoman for the Westchester County Department of Health. "In that quantity it can be deadly."

Six victims were taken to St. Joseph's Medical Center Thursday night with severe breathing problems, bluish pallors and mental confusion. Because the cause was not immediately known, police, firefighters, hazardous-materials workers and anti-terrorist agents were deployed.

One victim remained in critical condition Saturday; another was in critical but stable condition, a hospital spokeswoman said. The other victims have been released.

Health officials said the victims, identified only as adults of Egyptian heritage, had been at a dinner party featuring a dish that included processed food from Egypt.

Officials narrowed their hunt for a cause Saturday to a substance, in a packet labeled in English and Arabic, that the victims said they had sprinkled on their meal.

posted 05-19-2002 01:01 PM            

SODIUM NITRATE
MSDS Number: S4442 --- Effective Date: 11/02/01

Potential Health Effects
----------------------------------

Inhalation:
Inhalation of dust irritates the respiratory tract. Symptoms may include coughing, shortness of breath.

Ingestion:
May cause gastroenteritis and abdominal pains. Other symptoms may include dizziness, bloody diarrhea, convulsions, and collapse. Purging and diuresis can be expected. Small repeated doses may cause headache and mental impairment. Rare cases of nitrates being converted to the more toxic nitrites have been reported, mostly with infants.

Skin Contact:
May cause irritation, symptoms including redness, itching, and pain.

Eye Contact:
May cause irritation, symptoms including redness, itching, and pain.

Chronic Exposure:
Under some circumstances methemoglobinemia occurs in individuals when the nitrate is converted by bacteria in the stomach to nitrite. Nausea, vomiting, dizziness, rapid heart beat, irregular breathing, convulsions, coma, and death can occur should this conversion take place.

Aggravation of Pre-existing Conditions:
Workers with a history of kidney or lung disease may be more susceptible to the effects of this substance.
http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/s4442.htm

What is Sodium Nitrite?

Sodium nitrite is a food additive that has been used for decades to preserve meats, poultry and fish.

When used alone or in conjunction with sodium nitrate, nitrite gives cured meats their characteristic reddish-pink color, flavor and texture. Nitrite and salt also inhibit the outgrowth of C. botulinum.

Sources of Sodium Nitrite

More than 85 percent of a person's daily intake of nitrite comes from nitrate in green, leafy vegetables or root vegetables, such as lettuce, spinach and carrots, and some drinking water. At most, about 5 percent of a person's daily intake comes from cured meats.

Role of Sodium Nitrite in the Body

Sodium nitrite has a number of biological functions in the body. Your body needs a certain level of nitrite in order to fight bacteria found in the stomach and protect against bacterial illnesses, such as gastroenteritis. In fact, your body produces nitrite from sodium nitrate through a naturally occurring chemical process in the saliva.

Sodium nitrate that is consumed is absorbed quickly in the body and the majority is eliminated from the body through urine in approximately five hours. A portion of the nitrate is secreted into the salivary glands, and a small percentage (approximately 5 percent) of the salivary nitrate is reduced to nitrite in the saliva and travels down the gastrointestinal tract to the stomach.

In the stomach, nitrite can form nitric oxide. Nitric oxide has been found to serve as a biological messenger in important physiological functions, such as healing wounds and burns, controlling blood pressure and boosting immunity.

The body generates more nitrite through this process than is ingested through food. Some scientists believe that the body's natural production of nitrite from foods may be a part of its defense mechanism since nitrite inhibits the growth of harmful bacteria and prevents deadly food-borne diseases.

How Safe is the Use of Sodium Nitrite in Cured Meats?

Some of the concern about nitrite grew out of the fact that nitrites could potentially react in the stomach with certain chemicals that are released during protein digestion to produce a chemical known as N-nitrosamines. N-nitrosamines has been associated with cancer in animals.

There also were a number of studies during the 1970s that linked the consumption of nitrite with cancer in laboratory animals or associated the consumption of cured meats with illnesses in children. As a result of some lingering concerns about nitrite safety, the FDA and the USDA commissioned a comprehensive review of sodium nitrite's role as a food additive.

The results were two scientific reports from the National Academy of Sciences (issued in 1981 and 1982). The 1981 report stated that nitrate does not cause cancer, although some population studies have found an association between high exposure to nitrate levels and certain cancers. Also, nitrite does not act directly as a cancer-causing agent in animals. The NAS recommended that both these issues be researched further. The NAS also recommended that people's exposure to both nitrates and nitrites be reduced as much as possible without jeopardizing the protection against botulism.

The 1982 NAS report investigated alternatives to the use of nitrate in foods. Although there were some promising results, a workable alternative has not yet been found.

Recent Developments on Nitrite Safety

Two important actions in the year 2000 have reinforced the message that the use of sodium nitrite in cured meats is safe and is not associated with cancer risk in humans.

The first is a thorough review of the results of sodium nitrite studies by the National Toxicology Program, which undertook the review at the request of the FDA. After carefully considering all the evidence presented, the NTP Board of Scientific Counselors voted unanimously in May 2000 that the evidence showed that sodium nitrite does not cause cancer in male rats, male mice or female rats. While they found "equivocal evidence" in the forestomachs of female mice, the scientists have determined that the finding is not relevant to human health because humans do not have forestomachs. This comprehensive review by NTP shows that sodium nitrite does not cause cancer in laboratory animals, even when they are fed massive doses throughout the animals' lifetime.

The second action occurred in the state of California, where a panel of independent expert toxicologists reviewing almost 100 scientific publications about sodium nitrite voted that the evidence does not show that sodium nitrite causes developmental or reproductive toxicity. If found by the DART committee to be harmful, sodium nitrite would have been listed under the state's Proposition 65 law, which was enacted to protect citizens against known cancer-causing agents and reproductive toxicants.

Use of Sodium Nitrite Today

The FDA and USDA have deemed sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate, or the combination, as safe to use as a preservative for meat and poultry at specific, regulated levels. By law, the curing process must result in no more than 200 parts per million (ppm) of sodium nitrite in the finished meat or poultry product.

The cured meat industry made substantial changes to the manufacturing process in the past 20 years to address some of the concerns about nitrite in cured meats. It has stopped using sodium nitrate (except for some specialty meats) in major meat processes and reduced the use of nitrite in the processing of cured meats. Residual levels of nitrite found in nitrite-cured meats have decreased in the past 20 years and now average one-tenth of what the regulations actually allow. The industry also has increased the use of two other substances – ascorbate and erythorbate – in the curing process, which are known to deplete residual nitrite and inhibit the production of N-nitrosamines. http://www.medem.com/MedLB/article_detaillb.cfm?article_ID=ZZZ80XEN0IC&sub_cat=380

posted 05-23-2002 11:15 PM            

YONKERS, N.Y.- A chemical that poisoned six people at a dinner party has been traced to a bag labeled "salt" that instead contained sodium nitrite. The mislabeled bag apparently came from a meat-curing business. The chemical is often used as a preservative in small amounts. Commissioner Charles Cola said Tuesday that one of the victims had found and kept the bag when she cleaned out the apartment of a man who had moved back to Egypt. "The bag was factory sealed on the top and looked like it was unopened, but on the bottom it was stapled closed," he said. "The guy had apparently used it to store sodium nitrite, maybe from bigger bags. So these people opened it thinking it was a fresh bag of salt, and meanwhile it was a repackaged bag of sodium nitrite." Cola said there were other properly labeled bags of sodium nitrite in the apartment. Police have not yet spoken to the man. All six victims survived the Thursday night poisoning, which sparked initial fears of chemical contamination. One remained hospitalized in stable condition. http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/thrive/2002/may/22/052203773.html

USA: Wendy's sandwich "exploded" says woman in lawsuit
21 May 2002
Source: just-food.com editorial team

Mitzi Pumphrey was in court last weekend to demand no less than US$25,000 in compensation from Wendy’s quick service restaurant chain, claiming that she suffered severe burns when a chicken sandwich purchased at the company “exploded” onto her face and hands.

The Clyde, Ohio woman filed the suit in Sandusky County Common Pleas Court, and insisted that US$25,000 is a reasonable amount given the level of suffering inflicted on her and family by the exploding sandwich.

Her attorney, Samuel Bolotin, explained that there must have been a defect in the design of the chicken sandwich, and that the jury should make a judgment against Wendy’s because its employees failed to warn customers of the potential dangers involved in eating one. http://just-food.com/news_detail.asp?art=49585&app=1&c=1

Tainted meat eluding detection

Critics: USDA bacteria testing system plagued by problems

ASSOCIATED PRESS

May 23 — A bacteria testing system meant to ensure that ground beef is safe instead is allowing potentially tainted meat to be put on the market, consumer advocacy groups said Thursday.

A STUDY OF Agriculture Department records found the meat safety system plagued by delays after it was started in early 1998.

At some plants, testing stopped for months at a time before being completed. In other cases, the department waited weeks to take corrective action at plants that had clearly flunked, said the report released by Public Citizen and the Government Accountability Project.

The report accused USDA of operating under a “don’t look, don’t find policy” that is “fundamentally deceiving the public with false reassurances” about the safety of meat.

Elsa Murano, USDA’s undersecretary for food safety, said the testing system “is continuously being reviewed, evaluated and improved” and that the department is “aggressively targeting” plants that fail to control bacteria.

The groups said the findings raise questions about testing data that the department has presented as evidence of reduced salmonella contamination at plants.

“Companies were failing these tests and USDA was allowing them to continue to put out meat stamped inspected and approved for extended periods of time, and they’re still doing it,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Consumer Federation of America’s Food Policy Institute.

posted 06-11-2002 07:36 PM            

By Paul Elias
AP Biotechnology Writer
Monday, June 10, 2002; 9:18 PM

TORONTO –– The Bush administration opposes the labeling of genetically engineered food, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told the world's premier biotechnology industry gathering.

"Mandatory labeling will only frighten consumers," he said during a breakfast speech Monday at the BIO 2002 conference. "Labeling implies that biotechnology products are unsafe."

Labeling food produced through genetic engineering is a touchy subject for the U.S. biotech industry, both at home and abroad. Domestically, the industry worries that labels would sour consumer demand.

Abroad, however, 19 countries require labeling and the European Union has since 1998 banned the sale of any new engineered products. The ban has angered U.S. exporters and hampered the growth of European agricultural biotech firms. The EU is expected to consider lifting the ban later this year, but may require labeling.

Some 70 percent of the world's biotech food is grown in the United States. Soy and corn genetically engineered to be pest- or herbicide-resistant are used in a wide variety of foods and drinks. The Food and Drug Administration says the ingredients are just as safe as those produced by conventional methods.

U.S. officials have said the labeling could cost U.S. companies $4 billion a year.

Thompson said biotechnology can lead to safer food that are better for the environment because of improved crop yields, among other benefits.

Critics complain that not enough testing has been done to determine the long-term health effects of splicing the genes of two species together to create food.

"The science is so immature, we don't know what we are doing," Canadian genetics professor David Suzuki said at an anti-biotech rally in a Toronto park on Sunday. If you took Bono out of U2 and stuck him in the Toronto Symphony and said make music, noise would come out but you have no way of knowing what it would sound like."

Thompson on Monday also called on drug makers to lower their costs and promised to overhaul the approval process of the FDA.

"We are creating an FDA where risk management is the rule and not the exception," he said. "You will not recognize the FDA a year from now."

He said the FDA currently treats all applications the same, whether its for cosmetics or lifesaving drugs.

While the FDA is streamlining its application process, Thompson called on drug makers to lower the cost of their products.

"They're looked at as part of the problem instead of part of the solution," he told a news conference. Some drugs sold in the United States sell for 40 percent less in other countries, including Canada, Thompson noted.

If drug companies don't heed the call to lower their prices, public and regulatory pressure could ultimately lead to price controls, he said.

Thompson also said that the impact on his department of President Bush's proposal to create a Department of Homeland Security have not yet been detailed. Bush proposed to move 300 workers, mostly involved with bioterrorism research, and $4 billion from Thompson's agency to the new department.

posted 06-26-2002 06:34 PM            

Hundreds Fall Ill on Spain's Holiday

ASSOCIATED PRESSGIRONA, Spain- Forty-four people were hospitalized and another 832 fell ill after eating a local delicacy at a festival on Spain's northeastern holiday coast, the region's healthy ministry said Wednesday. The outbreaks of vomiting, diarrhea and fever were traced to "cocas," a creme-filled pastry sold over the weekend at an outdoor summer event in Torroella de Montgri, 70 miles northeast of Barcelona.

The ministry said first analysis showed the presence of the salmonella bacteria, which is more often found to contaminate eggs. Most people recover within a week without treatment, but the infection can be deadly.

The regional health minister, Joaquim Casanovas, warned that the number of victims could rise significantly since the bakery making the cocas had produced 6,800 portions.

Casanovas said violations of hygiene codes had been discovered at the bakery in Torroella, according to the news agency.

Thirteen of the infected are under 14 and nine of them are elderly people, the ministry said in a statement. The bakery that made the pastries has been shut down pending an investigation. Casanovas said the establishment passed an inspection in March, but had been required to make certain improvements that he did not specify.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/thrive/2002/jun/26/062601236.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today: June 26, 2002 at 11:00:23 PDT

Cancer-Causing Food Report Expected

ASSOCIATED PRESSGENEVA- An emergency U.N.-sponsored meeting of experts on food safety has examined what is known about newly suspected cancer-causing substance acrylamide and is preparing recommendations for release to consumers Thursday, a spokesman said.

The three-day meeting that started Tuesday was called to determine why acrylamide forms in some french fries and other products and how to keep the substance at safe levels.

"Part of the mystery so far is what is the chemical process or the chemical reaction that causes acrylamide to form," said Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization. Hartl said the two dozen experts from Europe, North America and Japan were expecting to work late into the night "looking at their conclusions."

"They've been kicking around what's known and deciding what's not known and what they will be able to say on Thursday in terms of recommendations to national food authorities and to consumers," Hartl said.

The recommendations may include such details as the safest temperature for cooking french fries and the quantities of different foods that can safely be consumed, he said.

The meeting was organized after initial tests in Europe - subsequently backed up by a study in the United States - found high levels of acrylamide in some foods.

Acrylamide, used to produce plastics and dyes and to purify drinking water, has been shown to be carcinogenic in animal experiments and is suspected of causing cancer among people exposed to high levels for long periods. Although traces of it have been found in water, its possible presence at high levels in basic foods came as a shock.

A Swedish study published in April sounded the first alarm that some starch-based foods cooked at high temperatures contained acrylamide. Subsequent studies in Norway, Britain, Switzerland and the United States basically backed up the findings of Sweden's National Food Administration.

A number of scientists have expressed misgivings about the validity of the Swedish results, which were based on 100 foods, and were released at a government news conference rather than passing through normal peer review procedures in a scientific journal.

Food industry representatives also said the study findings had yet to be confirmed. Mary Sophos, spokeswoman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America, said people shouldn't change their diets based on the initial findings such as those released Tuesday by the Washington-based consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest.

"CSPI's news release is premature and misleading," Sophos said. "We don't yet have enough information to make any informed statements about acrylamide. We must allow the experts in Geneva to do their work."

The U.S. findings agreed with European findings that french fries had the highest levels of acrylamide. Potato chips also had high levels. But the U.S. group found puzzling variation in levels.

One brand of corn chips had a tiny amount of acrylamide while another had a moderate amount and a brand of similarly made corn taco shells had high levels. The U.S. federal Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that it had developed its own method to test precise levels of acrylamide in foods and has begun testing dozens of different products.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/thrive/2002/jun/26/062601379.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Today: June 26, 2002 at 8:00:38 PDT

Some Foods May Cut Alzheimer's Risk

ASSOCIATED PRESSCHICAGO- Eating nuts, leafy green vegetables and other foods rich in antioxidants such as vitamin E may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's, two studies suggest.

The findings build on growing research into the effects of antioxidants on dementia. The latest studies seem to suggest that vitamin-rich foods, but not vitamin supplements, have beneficial effects.

The researchers, however, said more definitive studies are needed. The connection, at least, is considered plausible: Antioxidant vitamins have been shown to block the effects of oxygen molecules called free radicals, which can damage cells and are thought to contribute to cancer and heart disease.

And lesions typically associated with exposure to free radicals have been found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. One of the studies found strong effects from vitamins E and C. In the other, results from vitamin E foods were more conclusive, but researchers said there was a suggestion vitamin C also provided benefits.

Previous research suggested that vitamin E pills could slow disease progression in people already diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The new studies examined people who had not developed the mind-robbing ailment at the outset and suggested no effect from pills.
But pill use was somewhat uncommon and of comparatively short duration in both studies.

The studies appear in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. One study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, involved 815 Chicago residents 65 and older who had no initial symptoms of mental decline.

They were questioned about their eating habits and followed for an average of about four years. Alzheimer's developed in 131 participants. It was diagnosed in 14.3 percent of those with the lowest intake of vitamin E foods, compared with 5.9 percent of those with the highest intake.

When factors such as age and education were taken into account, the highest-intake group faced a 70 percent lower risk of developing the disease. Intake of vitamin C, found in foods such as citrus fruits, also appeared to have offer some protection, but those results were not statistically significant, said lead researcher Martha Clare Morris of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.

Morris said participants with the highest vitamin E intake ate amounts that could be obtained from a diet that includes whole-grain cereal for breakfast, a sandwich with whole-grain bread for lunch and a dinner including a green leafy salad sprinkled with nuts. There was no protective effect in participants with a gene variation called apoplipoprotein E-4, which has been linked to the development of Alzheimer's.

The other study, from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, involved 5,395 people in the Netherlands 55 and older who were followed for an average of about six years. Alzheimer's developed in 146 participants. Those with high intakes of vitamins E and C were less likely to become afflicted, regardless of whether they had the gene variation.

"The idea that vitamin E and vitamin C might have beneficial effects on the underlying Alzheimer's disease process makes sense, and it seems unlikely that antioxidant-rich foods would negatively affect brain aging," Daniel Foley of the National Institute on Aging and Dr. Lon White of Pacific Health Research Institute in Honolulu said in an accompanying editorial. Still, they noted several limitations in both studies, including relying on participants' memories of their eating habits and not following them longer.

posted 06-28-2002 04:29 PM            

MOSCOW –– Nearly 1,500 pounds of berries from an area heavily hit by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster were seized this month from Moscow markets because of radioactive contamination, an official announced on Friday.

The bilberries, akin to blueberries, were found to have 14 times the acceptable levels cesium, said Yelena Ter-Markirosova, spokeswoman for Radon, the capital's radiation-monitoring agency.

She said experts had confiscated 1,472 pounds of the berries – grown in western Belarus – since June 18.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61958-2002Jun28.html

posted 06-28-2002 08:27 PM            

I think there's more to this acrylamide story than meets the eye.

acrylamidehttp://www.google.ca/search?q=acrylamide&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&hl=en&meta=

I'm trying to find out if the food tested was genetically engineered or not.

posted 06-28-2002 08:58 PM            

by Nova Pierson
Calgary Sun

Security and medical officials are trying to determine how 30 Mounties stationed at Kananaskis for the G-8 summit ended up with symptoms of food poisoning.
http://www.calgarysun.com/cgi-bin/niveau2.cgi?s=generic&p=59107.html&a=1

Case closed on Mountie misery

The case of the sick Mounties has been officially closed and what caused 30 officers to become ill on Sunday will remain a mystery.
"The RCMP sees this investigation as basically over," said Const. Max Johann with the G-8 security office.

Food poisoning from food served at the Nakiska Camp where the ill officers are stationed has been ruled out.

Traverse Food Services is cooking once again for cops who are stationed in Kananaskis for the G-8.

2002-06-26
http://www.calgarysun.com/cgi-bin/niveau2.cgi?s=generic17&p=59167.html&a=1

posted 06-28-2002 09:22 PM            

That story about the RCMP was so interesting that I just had to post the full text of it here. It's really strange that they closed the case on the mysterious illness that affected the mounties.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

RCMP seek cause of mystery illness
by Nova Pierson
Calgary Sun

Security and medical officials are trying to determine how 30 Mounties stationed at Kananaskis for the G-8 summit ended up with symptoms of food poisoning.

Four of the RCMP officers were taken from Nakiska Camp to Foothills Hospital on Sunday night.

Three of them were hospitalized and received treatment for dehydration. Two were released yesterday.

Officers who weren't hospitalized were isolated and treated at the camp — and unit commanders checked out members stationed at the camp who weren't affected by the outbreak.

It isn't believed there is any security threat involved in the incident or that G-8 leaders would be in danger of contracting food poisoning.

"There is no foul play suspected so far," said Const. Max Johann of the summit security office.

An RCMP investigation has since eliminated food services at Nakiska Camp in Kananaskis as a possible source of the illness.

National Defence medical technicians, RCMP doctors and the Calgary Health Region examined all contracted food services at Nakiska Camp and determined food met or exceeded all industry standards.

"We have eliminated food services as a possible source and have reinstated Traverse Food Services effective immediately," said Insp. Gordon Black, officer in charge of camps.

An investigation is under way to discover what caused the sickness of the Mounties, some of whom were ill prior to arriving at the Nakiska Camp.

"They have to interview 30 people to find out what they ate in common, if it's an ice machine or something else," Johann said.

It isn't clear whether the hospitalized Mounties will return to work in time to continue their G-8 duties.

The 26 who weren't taken to hospital remain at the Nakiska Camp and are expected to be able to work through the summit.

Officials say there will be 16 government food inspectors, dressed in white coats and hair nets, scrutinizing every morsel of food served at Kananaskis.

They are to be in the kitchen around the clock, to monitor food preparation and see that proper dishwasher and refrigerator temperatures are maintained
http://www.calgarysun.com/cgi-bin/niveau2.cgi?s=generic&p=59107.html&a=1

posted 07-01-2002 02:42 PM            

WASHINGTON (July 1, 2002 6:19 a.m. EDT) - ConAgra Beef Co. of Greeley, Colo., is voluntarily recalling approximately 354,200 pounds of fresh and frozen ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli bacteria, the Agriculture Department announced Sunday.

The department's Food Safety and Inspection Service said the labels on all the products being recalled bear the establishment code "EST.969" inside the USDA seal of inspection. It was produced on May 31 and distributed to retail, food service and institutional establishments nationwide. the problem was discovered through microbiological traceback sampling, the inspection service said.

"Because of the potential hazard of foodborne illness from consumption of meat products contaminated with harmful bacteria such as E. coli ... I urge consumers who have purchased the suspect product not to eat it and return it to the place of purchase," said Linda Swacina, acting FSIS administrators. "USDA is informing the public so consumers who may have purchased and stored the product in their refrigerators or freezers will know to check. Also, diners may wish to ask if their meals contain the recalled product."

posted 07-13-2002 04:47 PM            

They are the ultimate 21st-century food - quick, easy and highly processed. But if you knew about the high percentage of skin, the water, and the pulped carcasses that go into some of them, would you be so keen to reach into the freezer for chicken nuggets? In a major investigation, Felicity Lawrence travels to processing plants in Britain and Thailand to uncover the disturbing truth about every kid's favourite food

Monday July 8, 2002
The Guardian

Europe is big on breasts. The Japanese prefer thighs, dark and gamey ones. Feet are a bit of a fetish in China. Gizzards go to Russia. But smooth, damp slabs of white flesh are what we British buy when we want chicken. That leaves the carcasses, and skin, mountains and mountains of it - pale, flaccid, pimply, raw, ripped off by 100,000 shift workers' hands, from Thailand to Brazil, from the Netherlands to Norfolk. The skin goes around the world for chicken nuggets.

I am watching an army of small, perfectly formed nuggets march along a conveyor belt, with manufacturer Gary Stiles, at his factory in Wiltshire. He has spent his life in the meat trade.

At one end of the factory line is a pulp of half-frozen meat and skin in a giant stainless-steel hopper. Minced and mixed beyond recognition, it is being extruded through a small tube on to metal plates. These press it into pale pink nugget shapes which then trundle on down the belt. Through a dust bath of flour and seasoning they go, before being lowered under a sheet of constantly pouring batter.

Then on in juddering formation through a tray of scattered breadcrumbs and into a vast vat of boiling oil for 30 seconds.

As they emerge, workers in white coats, blue hairnets and white boots catch them, bag them in plastic, and post them back for the last rites. The belt carries them into a nitrogen tunnel to take them down to freezing and finally out into a cardboard box, labelled with his own brand Pure Organics For Georgia's Sake or Tesco organic chicken nuggets, according to the orders of the day.

Above the roar of machinery, Stiles explains that you need some skin to keep the nuggets succulent; 15% is about right, he reckons. Mixed in that proportion with breast and dark meat, it matches what you would get if you were eating a whole bird, and he knows exactly where his comes from. Like the rest of his meat, his skin is bought from two organic farms that he knows personally, one in England, one in Wales. Unlike some manufacturers, he won't use more skin than that, and he won't use mechanically recovered meat (MRM), which is obtained by pushing the carcass through a giant teabag-like screen to produce a slurry of protein, then bound back together with polyphosphates and gums. Nor does he use other additives.

Stiles likes to think that his nuggets, at £1.99 for 250g, are, like the beer, "reassuringly expensive". But the trouble is, once you've minced bits of a chicken to a pulp, that pulp could be anything from anywhere. With other manufacturers, sometimes it is. Recycled pet food, breasts injected with pig and cattle proteins, banned carcinogenic antibiotics - they've all been found by the authorities recently in chicken destined for processing.

Denatured and deracinated, the chicken nugget is a symbol of the way we eat now. It is the epitome of our 21st-century system of globalised, industrial food production.

Like much of our diet today, the nugget is processed so highly that its taste and texture depend as much on engineering and additives as on any raw ingredients, making it an easy way to disguise cheap or adulterated food. And just as the nugget's form is far removed from its contents, so we have become completely divorced from the source of those contents, from the animals that provide them and from the people who transform them. The nugget is, in fact, the product of a transnational chain so fragmented and complex that even those in the business do not fully understand how some parts of it work.

It depends on the industrialisation of livestock, on an endless supply of uniform factory birds to fit standardised factory machines. It depends, too, on the mass migration of workers, both legal and illegal, since adding the value to it requires an equally endless supply of low-value labour.

The rise of the nugget has been dizzying. We bought 42 million packs of them - that's £79m worth, or 21,000 tonnes - in the UK last year, just to eat at home, according to analysts Taylor Nelson Sofres. British adults also ate 73 million meals of them away from home in the same period. Children probably ate more. Served in school dining halls, fast-food outlets, at hospital bedsides, and on the tables of harassed parents, nuggets have become ubiquitous. Mass production has created a homogeneity in our diets at a time when the origins of our food are more varied than ever. If you want to know what goes into your nuggets, you need to look to the commodity markets, exchange rates and tariffs. The label is not the place to find out.

One story earlier this year highlighted just how little we know about what lies inside the golden breadcrumb coating. When Leicestershire trading standards received a complaint from a member of the public about the quality of some nuggets, they decided to test 21 samples from 17 different shops, including the major supermarkets. In one-third of the samples, the label was misleading about the nugget's meat content. One pack of nuggets contained only 16% meat, 30% less than it claimed. (And skin, of course, counts as "meat"). The trading standards officials are unable to identify the brands involved for legal reasons. Instead, they gave a warning to the worst offender. Subsequent tests recently have shown that the manufacturer has not changed its ways. Look further back down the chain, and it becomes clear that doctoring has become routine.

Even if the percentage of meat in a nugget looks reassuringly high, you may be surprised by what exactly counts as meat. Nugget manufacturers source their meat in various ways. Some use British chicken. Some buy high-quality meat direct from Thailand or Brazil. Some buy whatever is cheapest on the market, which is often frozen Thai and Brazilian chicken imported into the EU through Holland's ports.

The Netherlands is the centre of the "tumbling" industry, a process in which chicken is bulked up with water and other additives. Dutch processors defrost the meat and then inject it with dozens of needles, or tumble it in giant cement-mixer-like machines, until the water is absorbed. Salted meat attracts only a fraction of the EU tariff applied to fresh meat. The tumbling helps dilute the salt to make the chicken palatable, so as well as making huge profits selling water, the processors can avoid substantial duties. Once it has been tumbled, the meat is refrozen and shipped on for further processing.

The story gets less appetising still. One of the things that has puzzled observers of the poultry industry is how some processors manage to get so much water to stay in the chicken. Why doesn't it just flood out when it is turned into a takeaway or a ready meal or a chicken nugget? Hull trading standards officer John Sandford has spent over five years investigating. The answer he discovered was profoundly shocking.

DNA tests specially developed by Sandford with the public analyst laboratory in Manchester enabled the English food standards agency to identify lots of water (in one case 43%) and traces of pork proteins in samples of Dutch chicken breasts labelled "halal". Six months later, Irish authorities made an even more unsettling discovery in chicken: undeclared bovine proteins. Seventeen samples from Dutch processors contained them. Some manufacturers were using a new technique - injecting so-called hydrolysed proteins. These are proteins extracted at high temperatures or by chemical hydrolysis from old animals or parts of animals which are no use for food, such as skin, feathers, hide, bone and ligaments, and rather like cosmetic collagen implants, they make the flesh swell up and retain liquid.

These discoveries raised as many questions as they answered. What kind of cow products had been used to produce bovine proteins? If the processors were not declaring the presence of bovine proteins on the labels, could they be trusted to follow the regulations on removing certain high-risk cattle materials from the food chain? The possibility of BSE in chicken meat had raised its ugly head.

Chicken from the Dutch processors named by the Irish authorities remains widely available in the UK. Industry sources say that some nugget manufacturers at the bottom end of the market buy tumbled Dutch chicken, although they would be unaware that some processors' meat contains bovine proteins.

Others nuggets will be made from various bits of British chicken. Some are made from chunks of chicken breast and skin. Some are mostly skin, or skin and MRM. If tumbled meat is being used, the chicken is defrosted in microwaves before being minced into nuggets. Manufacturers can neutralise the salty taste by adding sugar in various forms, often as dextrose or lactose, and put flavour back in with chicken flavourings in the meat pulp, in the batter or in the breadcrumbs. Other additives can help restore the texture. Soya proteins are the commonest used, with gums as emulsifiers, to stop the whole mix separating out again. Phosphates also help glue up the proteins. Some nuggets are made in Britain, but increasingly nuggets are also imported ready-made from developing countries. If a manufacturer does anything to the chicken in this country, it can be legally labelled "produced in England". To get to the beginning of the nugget story, though, we must head east, to a land of chicken and cheap labour.

The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise near CP Towers in Bangkok is chilly, its automatic doors and air conditioning sealing it off from the blast of 40C heat outside - and the choking smog of east Asia's fastest-developing city. There is one family group sharing a tray of chicken nuggets - a Thai mother and father with a fat little boy bursting from a designer leather jacket, but the other patrons are all alone, disconnected, eating their fast food with silent efficiency. The nuggets slip down. Hot and crisp on the outside, soft and moist inside, they have that textureless, easy-on-the-jaw, flavoured "mouth feel" that children like.

A McDonald's supplier claims the invention of the nugget in 1979. McDonald's, worried by the trend away from red meat towards "healthier" white meat, asked Keystone Foods if it could produce a boneless chicken finger food which would be in keeping with its other fast food. Keystone laboratories came up with McNuggets, little gobbets of minced, reconstituted chicken, battered and breaded.

But it was the Vietnam war and US troops wanting R&R with familiar food which started Thailand off on its trajectory of breathtaking growth, producing food for export. The country is now one of the world's largest exporters of poultry and chicken products - $600m worth last year. Food exports are projected to grow to a staggering $25bn worth by 2007.

KFC franchises in the UK source some of their meat for what they call chicken strips - made from pieces rather than minced chicken - direct from Thailand. Tesco has invested heavily in the country and owns the majority share of the retail arm of Thailand's leading chicken producer, Charoen Pokphand (CP).

Grampian, supplier of fresh chicken and nuggets to all the main British supermarkets, has just closed down a factory in Scotland and ended its contract with some of its British farmers, while buying two huge factories outside Bangkok. Managing director Alistair Cox says it is very hard to compete in a world market in the UK. "The UK government puts an onerous regulatory framework around UK farms and factories, which add costs. Imports coming into the UK may not meet the same standards (although Grampian's aim is to have the same standards in its Thailand operations), but the main cost is labour, and it's cheaper over there."

Driving north out of the sprawl of Bangkok, it takes over an hour to reach the Grampian Foods Siam factories, where 150,000 birds are killed a day and 120,000 a day can be turned into nuggets and other chicken products. Eventually, the traffic jams give way to marshy plains, criss-crossed by canals. Migrant workers, drawn from the poor rural areas in the north and east to work in the industrial belt around the capital, have built their wooden huts over the waterways, which double up as transport system and sewer.

A powerful smell of raw meat and a procession of juggernauts loaded with blue and yellow crates of chickens, uncovered and exposed to the blistering temperatures of late morning, announce that you are close to an industrial chicken factory. A notice at the HQ main entrance says no children under 15 are allowed, while at the gate of a second factory up the road, where nuggets are made, accident figures are posted. (Thailand has the world's second-highest per capita industrial accident rate.)

In many ways, Thai chicken factories are just like English ones - equipped with vast stainless-steel production lines to take the birds from slaughter to finished product, and fed by "crops" of chickens from large-scale intensive farms. They are inspected for hygiene and welfare standards by EU inspectors.

It is in the lives of those who work in them that the gulf becomes apparent. Some of the 3,500 workers at Grampian Foods Siam live on the factory sites in huge dormitories under corrugated-iron roofs. Others spend hours each day travelling in from miles around. We have a rendezvous at the end of a shift with some of the workers who are bussed in the long journey from the outskirts of Bangkok to this and other chicken factories.

The light, though not the heat, is fading as we pick our way through a dusty slum of half- finished concrete houses next to a small, open-air slaughterhouse where chickens are being killed for the domestic market. A row of windowless wooden shacks, built on a broken platform over marshland, open directly on to the six-lane highway. Old plastic supermarket bags clog the ground under the platform stilts and the smell of sewage is overpowering.

Nine of us crowd into a small room and sit crosslegged in a circle on the floor, sharing a communal meal of noodles with slivers of pork, green leaves and papaya. This is home to Khun Neepa, who, together with half of those in the room, works at Centraco, a leading producer of frozen chicken for export to England for ready meals and nuggets. The others work for Grampian.

We eat, then talk. Most of them are paid by the day, and earn the statutory minimum wage of 165 baht (£2.50) a day, six days a week, for a nine-hour day which includes a one-hour break. They work in two shifts, dawn till mid-afternoon or mid-afternoon into the night, depending on the orders. Overtime, which can be two or three hours a day, pays more, and they work it and days off whenever they can to send more money home. Most of them are the first of their families to go into the factories; their parents were rice farmers.

The most labour-intensive part of the factories are the cutting rooms where it is as cold as a fridge and hundreds of workers wearing face masks and gloves cut, chop, debone and rearrange parts. This is where cheap raw animals begin their transformation into profitable "added value goods". Hygiene is very strict. The workers have to wash their hands and boards every hour. There are doctors at the sites in case there are accidents; they have all seen two or three - fingers caught in machines, knives going through nerves, that sort of thing.

The company doesn't like to take on anyone over 40, and the supervisors are very quick to give you warnings - two and you lose seven days' work, any more after that and it's the sack. But Grampian's a good place to work, they say.

At Centraco, Neepa has now organised a union, the first in a Thai chicken factory. Her filing cabinets are jammed in alongside her pots and pans. It's been a fight: she's been sacked and taken to court, but she won and now things are better, she says - they have clean drinking water and uniforms provided, though she doesn't see her children (a six-year-old girl and two-year-old boy) much. They live with her parents in another province.

Khun Sril finds it harder to bear. She used to work in supermarkets and hotels but now she's 33, she has been told that she is too old and no longer attractive enough, so she is working at Centraco. It's hard when the chickens come really fast - her factory can process 190 birds a minute - and she's cut her finger a couple of times, and had to go to hospital when a knife fell on her foot. She has to spend 1,500 of the 4,300 baht she earns a month on rent for a small room without sanitation. She often goes hungry because she is sending money home to her parents in the north to look after her two children, aged two and four. She sees them once a year. Her voice trails off as she talks about them and we fall silent. The others gently make their excuses and leave: it is late, they have to be up early.

Ricky and I are sipping fresh lime sodas in the cool of a five-star hotel in Bangkok. He is a smooth, besuited Thai executive from CP Foods who seems to think I am a broker and is rattling off sales figures in a mid-Atlantic accent: CP is the country's largest chicken exporter, producer of 2,200 tonnes of chicken breast a month for the UK; it owns 100 feedmills and processing factories in China, where labour is even cheaper; it supplies KFC in Europe, and Tesco; it owns large farms - 30,000 birds per shed, or 50,000 in two-storey houses, which meet Tesco-specification stocking densities, with chickens reared and killed on a 42-day cycle, nugget flavourings to different specifications, all hand-cut meat, battered and fried...

I interrupt the flow to ask him about antibiotics found in Thai meat. The EU recently sent its veterinary inspectors to China and they were alarmed to find indiscriminate use of antibiotics in chicken and fish farming, including the use of drugs banned in Europe as cancer-causing. As a gesture of even-handedness, the commission tested Thai poultry, too, and was surprised to find nitrofurans and chloramphenicol residues in samples. Both are banned antibiotics in Europe. Now all Thai poultry imports to the EU are supposed to be checked. Ricky admits that the industry is anxious but argues that it is an isolated problem. He blames producers who are subcontracting, or buying in chicken from China and then relabelling it as Thai produce before selling it on, just as British factories buy in poultry from the Netherlands and relabel it as British.

A steely grey dawn is breaking over Eastbourne, and while the windows of the smarter seaside hotels are still blank, the lights are flicking on in the seedier boarding houses in between. Outside the glazed verandah advertising banana splits, jam doughnuts and Sussex cream teas, two young men are having an argument in Russian. It is 5.35am and I am waiting alone at a bus stop on Seaside Road, next to a shop which is patriotically flying half a dozen union flags.

Suddenly at 5.38am they appear, as if from nowhere, like apparitions, wreathed in rings of cigarette smoke. There is a quick exchange of "Buenos dias" between five or six Spanish- speaking middle-aged men, in trainers and old jeans. A man in an Afghan hat hangs back in a doorway. Two minutes later a dirty, unmarked white coach rolls up and eight or nine get on board, taking their places with a dozen others, already slumped in the old brown seats with their heavily used ashtrays, as they try to catch a last snatch of sleep.

These are some of the foreign shift workers who are bussed each day for an hour or more between the south coast and the Grampian factory at Uckfield to kill and cut up chickens, packing pieces for Safeway, Somerfield and the Co-op, and supplying spare parts to the company's nugget factory in East Anglia.

The coach stops several times to pick up more, and by the end there are about 50. How many nationalities, I ask? "20, no 22," someone thinks: "Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, Kosovans, Bosnians, other eastern Europeans, Iraqis, Arabs, lots of Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis, Spanish, Portuguese, many, many foreigners, not many English." English people do not want this kind of work. "There are many, many refugees." There was a problem a while ago at the factory when "they told all the Russians and Kosovans they had to go home".

Carmen is Spanish, 50ish, smarter than the rest in black jacket and red lipstick. She worked 15 hours yesterday, and after the bus journey back, got home at 11pm and then was up again for work at 5am. "The money is too little, £4.20 an hour, only about £160 a week, unless you do the overtime. That's good, £7 an hour, so you have to do the overtime." She pays £50 a week rent to share a room she can hardly turn round in. She saw an advert in her local Spanish paper for packers in a factory in England and it sounded good - there are no jobs for her in Spain. "But they don't tell you it's hours on the bus each way and it's very cold, so cold in there, and food is so expensive here." We are driving along narrow country lanes now where commuters' dream cottages are still dreaming. The hawthorn is in full bloom and knee-high cow parsley is a shimmer of gauze in the early morning light. "Everyone is moving, England is not England, Spain is not Spain. Everyone moving for jobs," Carmen sighs.

We arrive at the factory, tucked in a fold of Sussex down, at 6.30am. A white double-decker bus, also packed with foreigners, lurches in behind, then come vans and more coaches.

This scene is replayed across Britain each day: from the centre of Derby to the cluster of chicken factories owned by other companies in the Midlands, from Great Yarmouth to the Grampian production lines in East Anglia, from Exeter to the Lloyd Maunder factory in Devon where 18 nationalities work cutting and packing chicken for Sainsbury's.

Most big manufacturers, including Grampian, insist on checks on the paperwork of foreign workers, but inevitably some slip through the net. Where manufacturers employ subcontractors to provide labour, the responsibility in law for checking that the worker is entitled to work, devolves to the agent. Many of the illegal workers have forged papers and, according to immigration officers who have spoken to the Guardian, illegal labour operated by gangmasters is a significant and growing problem in the meat-processing business, as in other sectors of the food industry. Alistair Cox, managing director of Grampian, acknowledges that it is a problem across the industry. "We use agencies but we also check all their records and welcome immigration officials into the business."

Don Pollard has made a study of migrant labour for the T&G union. "The supermarkets are dependent on illegal labour. By definition, figures are guesstimates, but about 40% of their food suppliers' workforces are tied up with gangmasters and illegal labour."

A different kind of illegal activity has been absorbing Sue Sonnex for the last couple of years. In 2000, three Rotherham men were found guilty of laundering £3m worth of unfit chicken and turkey, supposedly destined for tins of Spillers and Pedigree petfood, back into supplies for human consumption. Sonnex, a chief environmental health officer, has been investigating the disposal of condemned meat following the Rotherham case and thinks it represents the tip of an iceberg. During her inquiries, she uncovered chicken nuggets made almost entirely of chicken skin. The industry's problems are endemic, she says, a symptom of a system in which it makes economic sense to ship raw meat hundreds of miles and disguise it with additives so its origin becomes impossible to trace. Once you accept this sort of legal adulteration of processed food, there is no end to it; the ingredients can just as well be pet food. Respectable manufacturers suffer; rogues get away with it.

As a nugget manufacturer, Gary Stiles thinks that we have become too disconnected from our food and disconnection has bred fear and mistrust. He was forced to remake the connection between what he made and what he fed his children when his daughter, Georgia, the Georgia of his brand name, turned out to be autistic. He and his wife started to research the link between diet and illness. He now feels that "if you put junk in, you get junk out", and he's not prepared to do that any more.

· Workers names have been changed to protect their identities
http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,2763,751244,00.html

________________________________________________________________

Warning given on doctored chicken fillets

Felicity Lawrence, consumer affairs correspondent
Thursday July 11, 2002
The Guardian

The food standards agency is to warn wholesalers of suspect brands of Dutch chicken fillets that have been doctored with undeclared bovine proteins, pork proteins and water. The step follows a Guardian investigation revealing that the brands circulate widely in this country.

Tests by the Irish food safety authority had found bovine and pork proteins in the chicken. The origins are uncertain, according to the Irish authority, which has raised its concern at a possible risk of BSE. The proteins are injected into the chicken fillets in a process called "tumbling", to make them absorb water and increase their weight and hence price.

The wholesalers are likely to be given one month to act, after which they will be liable to prosecution if found stocking brands that are mislabelled. "What we want to do is alert the industry and say there is a problem here that needs to be cut off," a food safety source said. The agency said that it was "considering" such a move.

Chris Smith, managing director of H Smith Food Group, said: "We are concerned. We have been told by the agency that it is a labelling problem, and that we must check that these products are properly labelled." It is not illegal to inject chicken with beef or pork proteins, as long as it is labelled.

The Irish authority announced last month that its tests on chicken from Dutch processors had found 17 brands contained undeclared foreign DNA: seven had bovine DNA, seven pork DNA, and three both. The authority had been tipped off by the UK agency that it had concerns at the "quality and safety" of Netherlands chicken.

Sir John Krebs, chairman of the agency, told the trading standards institute's annual conference in Birmingham on Tuesday that "there was a problem about meat products in general" and "uncertainty about what goes into them".

Sir John added that he had been told by Seac, the government's advisory committee on BSE, that there was unlikely to be a safety issue arising from the discovery of bovine proteins in chicken if the cows used to make them had been subject to EU regulations.

Seac's chairman, Peter Smith, said that he was dependent on the agency finding out where the proteins were coming from; but, if hide was the source, as the Dutch authorities have now indicated to the agency, then the risk of BSE would be very small. A spokesman for the Irish authority said yesterday that it had still not received information from the Dutch processors about what was in the protein mixes they used to inject their chicken.

Pressure has been put on the Dutch authorities to clamp down on fraud in their processing industry and both the Irish authority and the UK agency have said they are unhappy with the response.

posted 07-17-2002 02:26 PM            

Hormone food scandal rocks Europe

14:55 16 July 02

NewScientist.com news service

Scientists are meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to try and resolve Europe's latest food scandal: illegal steroid hormones in animal feed, meat and even soft drinks. The contamination may involve eight of the 15 European Union countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain.

Before the meeting began, the European Commissioner for health and consumer protection, David Byrne, blamed the incident on "fraudulent exchange and disposal of pharmaceutical waste", and pledged new controls on animal feed.

The first signs of trouble emerged in early July on Dutch pig farms with a wave of infertility among sows. Tests of the pigs' feed revealed medroxy progesterone acetate (MPA), a synthetic progesterone that can cause infertility.

MPA is a widely-used ingredient in human birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy. It is also used as a growth promoter for livestock in North America and Australia. But hormonal growth promoters are illegal in the EU.

Sugar coated

The MPA was traced to the now-bankrupt firm Bioland in Arendonk, Belgium, which had sold tainted glucose syrup to feed producers. Bioland made the syrup from waste water containing sugar, which came from a plant near Dublin, Ireland owned by the US firm Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. The water was left over from the process of sugar-coating hormone pills.

There are reports that Bioland did not have a license to handle pharmaceutical waste, or to make human food. But the Belgian Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain announced on 8 July that they had also traced Bioland glucose syrup to two soft drinks companies.

In drink samples taken in 2001, they found MPA in excess of legal limits. The agency did not identify the drinks that were contaminated, but said they "are no longer in circulation".

But the contaminated feed is. Germany alone imported 8500 tonnes. More than 1300 German farms thought to have bought the product are now forbidden to sell animals for slaughter until their feed has been tested and cleared.

The Dutch authorities are testing all pigs at slaughter for MPA. And Dutch farmers are now suing Wyeth and the Irish waste handler who sold the sugar-water.

Dioxin and PCBs

On Tuesday, the European Commission's scientific standing committee on the food chain is discussing the situation. One likely recommendation will be that the Commission speeds up a proposed list of ingredients to be permitted in animal feed. The EU currently states only what is not permitted in feed.

The Commission promised the list after the 1999 Belgian scandal in which livestock ate dioxin and PCB-laced feed, but has yet to produce it. In the meantime, the food scandals have continued.

There was another dioxin incident in Belgium in January 2002, while in May 2002, a banned pesticide, nitrofen, turned up in feed grain in Germany after it was stored in warehouses in the former East Germany, where nitrofen was used.

Debora MacKenzie
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992551

posted 07-20-2002 12:18 AM            

Facts About Deadly E. Coli

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The germ that sparked Friday's recall of millions of pounds of ground beef is a toxic strain of bacteria naturally present in the intestinal tracts of all warm-blooded animals, including humans.

Most of the hundreds of strains of Escherichia coli, or E. coli, are innocuous. E. coli O157:H7, however, produces a powerful toxin that can cause bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramps and in some cases death. Most people recover without treatment.

The strain is not naturally present in humans, but does occur in cattle. Infected animals can spread the bacteria through their feces, which can wind up on beef during the butchering process.

For steaks and other cuts of meat, that normally is not a problem since bacteria on the surface of the meat are quickly killed by heat when cooked.

For ground beef, however, grinding can fold the bacteria into the meat. There, bacteria can survive cooking, insulated from the heat at the center of even a medium-rare burger.

Most E. coli-related illnesses stem from eating undercooked ground beef, including the 1982 outbreak that led scientists to first recognize the strain's toxicity.

Feces-contaminated water, vegetables and fruit, as well as unpasteurized milk or juice, can also cause infection.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate 61 people are killed and 73,000 sickened each year by E. coli. The CDC recommends all ground beef be thoroughly cooked, using a thermometer to ensure the meat reaches at least 160 degrees, and that everything that comes into contact with meat be washed to prevent contamination.

Those without thermometers should avoid eating ground beef patties that are still pink in the middle, said CDC spokeswoman K.D. Hoskins.

Guy Plunkett, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where E. coli's genetic code was mapped, said as few as 10 to 100 E. coli bacteria are sufficient to infect a human.

"The problem with O157 is that it seems you need to ingest fewer organisms," said Plunkett. "It's more efficient at being a pathogen." That makes it relatively easy to spread the bacteria in industrial slaughterhouses. There, the meat of dozens of animals can be ground together, allowing the infected meat of even a single steer to contaminate an entire day's production, Plunkett said.

---

On the Net: http://www.cdc.gov/

posted 07-20-2002 07:06 PM            

PARIS (Reuters) - French slaughterhouses have failed to remove cattle parts banned for their risk of carrying "mad cow" disease, authorities said on Friday, days after the government refused to lift an illegal embargo on British beef.
French veterinary services found that over 10% of cattle carcasses about to enter the food chain still contained banned spinal cord, the food safety agency AFSSA said, detailing an inquiry conducted last year.

Spinal cord has been banned in the European Union since 1996 to protect consumers from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the fatal human version of mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

The authorities, who stressed the inquiry was conducted before a French law came into force requiring slaughterhouses use vacuum pumps to strip carcasses instead of manual cutting, said residues were as big as 20 centimeters in 2% of cases.

Significant amounts of other so-called SRMs (specified risk materials) such as tonsils and thymus were also found in 32 abattoirs last year, the authorities said.

Britain's National Farmers Union (NFU) described the findings as "alarming," with the publication of the report coinciding with France facing a fine for its British beef ban.

"The arrogance of the French authorities in continuing to ban British beef on completely spurious grounds while at the same time failing to ensure its own beef meets health standards is appalling," NFU President Ben Gill said on Friday. "This astounding level of hypocrisy is staggering even by French standards," he said in a statement.

The European Commission said on Wednesday it was sending France to court for a second time for failing to lift a ban on British beef imports, requesting a daily fine of 158,250 euros.

France said its position on the embargo remained unchanged in the light of the Commission's decision. "How can France's ban on British beef be taken seriously when its own food safety body finds its own abattoirs are not properly addressing law designed to protect humans from diseases such as BSE?" Gill said.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=571&ncid=751&e=9&u=/nm/20020719/hl_nm/beef_madcow_dc_1

__________________________________________________________________

Today: July 20, 2002 at 9:40:18 PDT

E. Coli Concerns Prompt Meat Recall

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON- The possible presence of toxic E. coli bacteria is prompting the recall of 19 million pounds of hamburger, the second largest beef recall on record.

The expanded recall was announced Friday after at least 16 people in Colorado were sickened by hamburger processed by ConAgra Beef Co. of Greeley, Colo., which serves chain and independent grocery stores, food service operators and restaurants.

The number of E. coli reports was continuing to rise. At least six other cases of illness have been reported in California, Michigan, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming, but none have been linked yet to the ConAgra beef.

"This action is being taken as a cautionary measure to ensure the protection of public health," Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said. The move broadens a recall ordered at the end of June. E. coli bacteria are naturally present in the intestinal tracts of all warm-blooded animals, including humans.

Most of the hundreds of strains are innocuous, but E. coli O157:H7, which is not naturally present in humans but does occur in the intestinal tracts and feces of livestock, produces a toxin in people that can cause bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramps and in some cases death.

ConAgra's recall is of beef trim used to make ground beef, as well as fresh and frozen ground beef products that may be contaminated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends all ground beef be cooked to 160 degrees in the center to kill the pathogen.

Company officials and the Agriculture Department warned consumers to be on the lookout for the affected meat, which could have been sold under