• New method manipulates particles for sensors, crime scene testing

    Researchers develop a new tool for medical diagnostics, testing food and water for contamination, and crime-scene forensics; the technique uses a combination of light and electric fields to position droplets and tiny particles, such as bacteria, viruses, and DNA, which are contained inside the drops

  • Dengue fever strikes United States after 65-year absence

    After an absence of sixty-five years, dengue fever has reentered the United States through the Florida Keys; the CDC reports that twenty-eight people in Key West came down with the dangerous fever; infected mosquitoes have been moving northward thanks to global warming, and there has been increased travel between the United States and South and Central America and the Caribbean — areas which have seen nearly five million cases of dengue fever from 2000 to 2007

  • Wooden or plastic pallets are a dangerous link in food chain

    Pallets are often stored in warehouses or outside behind grocery stores, where they are easily reached by debris from garbage or bacteria from animals; new sanitation tests found that about 33 percent of the wooden pallets it tested showed signs of unsanitary conditions, where bacteria could easily grow; 10 percent tested positive for e. coli, which can cause food poisoning, and 2.9 percent had an even nastier, and often deadly, bug called listeria

  • Coral snake antivenin to run out in October

    If you live in Florida, you should now be doubly careful not to be bitten by the poisonous coral snake; the only company making antivenin for coral snake bites is no longer producing the drug — and the last batch will hit its expiration date in October.

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  • Safer food imports goal of public-private venture

    With imports accounting for 15 percent of the U.S. food supply, the United States needs a better way of ensuring food safety than border inspections; the University of Maryland teams up with a Massachusetts company to launch training center for foreign foodproducers

  • Food-labels contaminate food

    Chemicals used in adhesive which is used to attach food labels to packaging can seep through packaging and contaminate food; one of those chemicals is considered highly toxic and found in high concentration in some adhesives

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  • Katrina, Rita cleaned up polluted, lead-laden New Orleans soil

    It appears that hurricanes Katrina and Rita, with all the devastation they have caused, made one beneficial contribution to the future of New Orleans: decades of Louisiana-type corruption and collusion between the oil industry and the state government have caused the city’s soil to be heavily polluted, laden with lead, arsenic, and other poisonous substances; the sediments washed into the city by the hurricanes have blanketed the polluted soil, resulting in a dramatic drop in the presence of lead and arsenic in the city’s soil — and in the blood stream of children in the city

  • Faster salmonella strain detection now possible with new technique

    New scientific method identifies salmonella strains much faster than current methods in use; faster detection of specific strains can mean recognizing an outbreak sooner and stopping tainted food from being delivered and consumed

  • Failure to test for six strains of E. coli leaves gaps in U.S. food safety network

    Six E. coli strains are not regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; E. coli O157:H7 causes 73,000 illnesses and 50 deaths every year in the United States; the six other strains are considered less pervasive, sickening an estimated 37,000 people a year and killing nearly 30; they could be causing more illnesses that labs do not detect because they are not testing for them

  • Epidemic, bioterrorism study in Las Vegas

    A research project in Nevada looks to help hospitals and public health officials do a better job of quickly identifying the sources and pathways of influenza, E. coli, and other contagious pathogens that can quickly spread through a population; the project will also help in designing ways to cope with a bioterror attack

  • More delays in opening Fort Detrick BioLab

    DHS’s new BioLab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, is hobbled by a series of flaws and glitches which have prevented researchers from moving into the facility years after it had been dedicated; the most serious problem was the placement of valves that allow access to HEPA filters in biosafety level 3 lab; the filters must be decontaminated or replaced every few years, but the valves to let workers into the air ducts were too far from the filters

  • Allowing for important medical research while keeping medical data private

    Algorithm developed to protect patients’ personal information while preserving the data’s utility in large-scale medical studies; a Vanderbilt team designed an algorithm that searches a database for combinations of diagnosis codes that distinguish a patient; it then substitutes a more general version of the codes — for instance, postmenopausal osteoporosis could become osteoporosis — to ensure each patient’s altered record is indistinguishable from a certain number of other patients. Researchers could then access this parallel, de-identified database for gene-association studies

  • U.S. not ready for clean up effort after a bioterror attack

    The small 2001 anthrax attack in the United States cost hundreds of millions of dollars in decontamination costs, and some of the facilities attacked could not be reopened for more than two years; a large-scale biological release in an American city, though, could potentially result in hundreds of thousands of illnesses and deaths and could cost trillions of dollars to clean up

  • HHS IG: U.S. needs more FDA food inspections

    Federal food inspectors are conducting fewer reviews of food manufacturing plants, with many facilities going more than five years without being checked; the reason: budget cuts since 2001 have shrunk the workforce at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA); an estimated 76 million people in the United States get sick every year with food-borne illness and 5,000 die

  • Tularemia bacteria detected in Columbus, Ohio; no bioterror attack suspected

    BioWatch sensors in Columbus, Ohio, last week picked up higher than normal presence of the bacteria tularemia — a bacteria which may be used in bioterror attacks; Columbus Public Health officials continued to emphasize that people are not at risk and there is no suspicion that bioterrorism was attempted here