Health
If It's Tuesday, It's Swine Flu
Published May 26, 2009 @ 08:24PM PT
Isn't that how the saying goes? No? Terrible abuse of the English language? Sorry. But still, we continue keeping an eye on our factory-farmed viral friend ...
- A third of people over 60 seem to have some immunity to this strain of flu, perhaps explaining why it's hitting younger people harder. Disease organism populations are long-lived, go figure.
- Massachussetts has found 66 new cases, Chicago reports the 12th death in the nation, the first soldiers in Kuwait have been officially diagnosed, there are at least 74 cases in Kansas, Puerto Rico reports its first case and there are 31 new cases in New Jersey
- Yet overall, the rate of new cases is slowing in the U.S. and in New York, schools are reopening after 20 of them closed following the H1N1-caused death of an assistant principal.
- Elsewhere, there are now 135 cases in Spain, 289 in Japan (where flu masks are flying off drugstore shelves) and there are two more in the UK for a total of 122.
- As is noted repeatedly in the reporting of these flu stories (with good reason) maintaining personal hygiene in public is important, especially for those with weakened immune systems. We may be relying on a lot of public sanitation and good behavior if this strain comes back during its usual season, as our public health infrastructure is underfunded compared to last year for the same reason that everything's underfunded compared to last year.
- If you get sick, please stay home from work and/or school. If you employ people, please be a mensch about this, you stand to benefit, too. This strain is spreading slowly, but it's in 41 countries and health officials say it might take two years to see what it'll really do - there's no need to help it along with new hosts.
(Aerial photography of a typical confinement hog farm with attendant lagoons of pig manure courtesy of friendsoffamilyfarmers on Flickr.)
Obama Tackles Federal Preemption of State Safety Laws
Published May 22, 2009 @ 10:51AM PT
And federal preemption in general. Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft writes the following about hitting the back button on regulations that prevented consumers suing companies according to state and local laws in a number of policy areas:
... This will irritate the Chamber of Commerce types who have no interest in "states' rights" when those rights include a consumer's right to sue businesses under state law. Business interests persuaded the Bush administration (and have often persuaded federal courts) that state law should be preempted by federal law to spare businesses the burden of complying with 50 different standards of liability. Of course, businesses aren't forced to do business in 50 different states, and it hardly seems unfair that they be subjected to the laws of those states in which they choose to do business. ...
Well, good. Sometimes state laws are more protective of consumers.
So maybe this means that California can keep downer cows out of their food supply. Maybe it will return control of seed law to local governments.
Medical device manufacturers are adamantly opposed to ending FDA's preemption authority, rounding up patients from all over the country who've been convinced that extending stronger consumer protections would be the death of medical innovation. Yep, if manufacturers have to avoid killing or injuring their customers, they could no longer heal them and would stop marketing new products. By that logic, food companies, also, would stop selling food if they couldn't occasionally get away with giving people Salmonella or E. Coli infections.
That's logic for you. Just, whimper.
Major Beef Recall
Published May 22, 2009 @ 04:46AM PT
These complaints about food safety just never get old. I guess it's more work for me, but look, I'd just rather live in a country where this kind of thing wasn't a running story.
From Leila Atassi at the Plain Dealer, via Ellinorianne on DailyKos, who provides a link to the USDA list of affected products:
.... A 7-year-old Cleveland girl died Sunday from an E. coli infection that local health officials say could be linked to a massive ground-beef recall issued Thursday from an Illinois-based company.
Health officials did not identify the girl or provide details of the circumstances that led to her death. But Cleveland Health Director Matthew Carroll said the case might be the latest in a cluster of E. coli infections traced to Valley Meats LLC of Coal Valley, Ill.
The company pulled nearly 100,000 pounds of hamburger patties Thursday after a U.S. Department of Agriculture investigation confirmed that three Cleveland-area residents were infected by eating the same tainted ground beef. ...
There's also currently a beef recall from a Houston-area store, and in New York, a recall of Alex & George (A&G) brand beef patties.
As the article about the New York recall notes, the strain E. coli 0157:H7 is a particularly dangerous variety of a very common gut bacteria in humans and animals. There's evidence that cows kept on pasture have less to negligible traces of this strain compared to cows kept indoors. And as a bovine literature review demonstrates (pdf), in general, feeding cows barley, corn or distillers grains seems to increase the presence of E. coli 0157:H7 as opposed to forage grass feeding which tends to reduce that bacterial population for reasons that aren't yet clear. (Giving the animals probiotics and adding a modest amount of citrus peel to their diet seems to help, also.)
We're not at "largest beef recall in history" territory yet, as we were last year, (and more on that later today), but the cows mostly have sick gut bacteria for the same reasons people are sick in this country: too much sugar (grain feed for cows is the equivalent of humans eating table sugar by the spoonful) in all our diets, too much meat in ours.
If consumption could be curbed to where factory feedlots weren't seen as a business necessity anymore, it'd be healthier for everyone. I know there are people who will say, well, it was just one kid and thank goodness she didn't starve to death. The same excuse gets trotted out when you point to people with cancer or birth defects from pesticide poisoning.
And if it's you, or your kid, that always just sounds like bunk. It should sound like bunk to all of us.
'You can't kill people with your product' shouldn't be considered an unreasonable restriction on doing business, yeah?
(Photo credit: elecnix on Flickr.)
Children: Not Actually Garbage Disposals
Published May 21, 2009 @ 01:13PM PT
Apparently, it costs too much to give kids healthy food in school.
School lunches are full of excess fat and school nutrition budgets used as a slush fund for commodities producers, especially the beef and dairy industries, which are overrepresented in children's diets by even this unrepentant omnivore's estimate. Emphasis mine:
... But all that cheese adds up. Public schools serve more than 4 billion meals every year -- a number that would make many fast-food chains envious -- and officials say all those lunches are contributing to the growing health crisis among kids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity rates have doubled in children and tripled in adolescents since 1980, spurring an epidemic of type II diabetes, once considered an adult-onset condition. Obesity has also been associated with heart disease, arthritis, and certain cancers, and researchers have found fatty streaks in the blood vessels of children as young as 10.
"USDA needs to relate the current crisis in kids' health to the meals that are being served, especially to poor kids, because that's the population that's most vulnerable," says Antonia Demas, director of the Food Studies Institute, a child-nutrition group based in upstate New York. Because low-income children often eat both breakfast and lunch at school, "they get at least two-thirds of their calories from school each day, and they're the population really showing an increase in the diet-related diseases."
... Given the industry's clout, USDA officials are careful to include agribusiness representatives in almost every discussion about the school lunch program. In the mid-1990s, a group of health advocates met with the USDA a to ask that schools be allowed to serve soy products like veggie burgers. According to one participant, a department official asked them, "Have you spoken with the Cattlemen about this? Until the Cattlemen go for this, we aren't going to be able to move on it." Soy alternatives were eventually allowed, but only after the beef industry group was consulted. ...
And as we discovered last year when video footage of slaughterhouse practices was revealed, downer cows have been making it into the school lunch meat supply. Children aren't only eating too much meat, it isn't the good stuff.
Jill Richardson, writing at LaVidaLocavore, suggests an alternative: make school lunches wholesome and appetizing, like they do in Italy, France and Japan,countries where they don't treat kids like garbage disposals for food only the starving would volunteer to eat.
(Photo credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr. That picture might look appetizing, unless it was a good composite of your every single breakfast and lunch, as opposed to the occasional 'I'm going to hell for this' treat.)
A Shorter America
Published May 20, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
It's a 2004 article, but this New Yorker piece on the height gap between Americans and Europeans seemed particularly relevant to a time when food banks all around the country are seeing increased turnout and conservatives have been seen complaining about the food being 'wasted' on the poor:
... While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.
The average American man is only five feet nine and a half—less than an inch taller than the average soldier during the Revolutionary War. Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics—which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans—women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.
Just in case I still thought this a trivial trend, Komlos put a final bar graph in front of me. It was entitled “Life Expectancy 2000.” Compared with people in thirty-six other industrialized countries, it showed, Americans rank twenty-eighth in average longevity—just above the Irish and the Cypriots (the Japanese top the rankings). “Ask yourself this,” Komlos said, peering at me above his reading glasses. “What is the difference between Western Europe and the U.S. that would work in this direction? It’s not income, since Americans, at least on paper, have been wealthier for more than a century. So what is it?” ...
Immigration, as the article goes on to clarify, isn't it. The once very short Dutch, who are now among the world's tallest, and tall Guatemalan Maya children who are raised in America, tell a different story. Indeed, even wealthy Americans are eating worse, and it shows:
... Steckel has found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teen-age eating habits. “If these snack foods are crowding out fruits and vegetables, then we may not be getting the micronutrients we need,” he says. In a recent British study, one group of schoolchildren was given hamburgers, French fries, and other familiar lunch foods; the other was fed nineteen-forties-style wartime rations such as boiled cabbage and corned beef. Within eight weeks, the children on the rations were both taller and slimmer than the ones on a regular diet. ...
People's heights depend on their levels of nutrition and access to healthcare. The United Nations, as the article points out, has been using average heights (which differ very little between most populations) as a proxy for estimating overall health for some time in light of this knowledge. And while there's a maximum likely height, the US is trending away from it. We're feeding nearly everyone poorly now, but especially low income families who can often only afford that fast food.
Do we want future generations of our fellow citizens to be stunted? I would hope not. Think about that next time you hear someone complaining that food stamp benefits are too generous, or that fresh vegetables are wasted on the poor.
Everyone needs access to good nutrition:
... It is almost impossible for the average food stamp recipient, who gets about $270 a month, to eat according to dietary recommendations, O’Neil said.
Methods of stretching dollars, like shopping at a variety of stores for sales, often are not an option for families with limited transportation, she said. ...
When we have the equivalent of a Growing Power in every city, maybe it won't be such a problem. But for now, it's important at the least to change attitudes about how we feed each other. The health of low income families in Louisiana, Detroit, or any other centers of urban and rural poverty, ultimately reflects on all of us as a nation.
H1N1 Swine Flu Still Spreading, Still Caused by Low Diversity
Published May 19, 2009 @ 02:04PM PT
Today's healthcare roundup by DemFromCT on DailyKos points to a Reuters story about the spread and hospitalization rates from the swine flu virus:
... The H1N1 swine flu virus killed a vice principal at a New York City school over the weekend and has spread to 48 states. While it appears to be mild, it is affecting a disproportionate number of children, teenagers and young adults.
This includes people needing hospitalization -- now up to 200, said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"That's very unusual, to have so many people under 20 to require hospitalization, and some of them in (intensive care units)," Schuchat told reporters in a telephone briefing. ...
Flu season, health officials say in the article, is usually done by May, so new cases should be ramping downward. Up to 100,000 people may have the new H1N1 flu (as opposed to the regular, seasonal H1N1 or H3N2 viruses) and it seems to be hitting young people much worse than the elderly, which is an unusual pattern.
If you've been stopping by here recently, you probably already know that at least one of the viral ancestors of this current flu was a virus first spotted on a North Carolina factory hog farm. Researchers have been warning for years that the immuno-compromised populations of factory farms, plus their constant vaccinations and antibiotic dosing, are a model breeding ground for epidemic diseases.
Certain people in world governments who don't know any better have responded to the public health threat posed by factory farms by ... wait for it ... decrying the threat posed by small, mixed-species farms, and often slaughtering the animals on such subsistence farms without recompense.
But as it happens, the presence of multiple species of animals can be as much a bulwark against disease as cramped, homogenous populations can be encouraging of it:
... It's obvious that biodiversity is a good thing, but we're still discovering new ways that it helps us. Indeed, a new study gives more evidence that reduced biodiversity can increase the chances that certain diseases will jump from animals to humans. "In the last few years, scientists have increasingly noticed that, when biodiversity dips, rates of Lyme disease, West Nile virus, SARS and other infectious diseases rise. Called zoonotic diseases, these illnesses also spread from animals to people." ...
Biological first principles: 1; Modern efficiency: 0.
As the news article covering the biodiversity research points out, scientists still need to determine which combinations of species are best. But I'd guess they're going to find that the usual equilibrium for a given ecosystem is probably healthiest because if it weren't, that ecosystem would have succumbed to negative selection pressure.
That may sound simplistic, but competition in nature is fierce and constant. Poorly adapted species, or species that couldn't stand up to opportunistic invasions, have fared badly.
Anyway, reality is that we aren't getting back to Eden and the swine flu is out of the bag. But in future, maybe, maybe we could be a little smarter about how we manage things. Because if we're being graded on our natural resource management to date, we're probably flunking out.
Gluten-Free Diets and Gut Bacteria
Published May 19, 2009 @ 11:30AM PT
I was a little concerned to read this claim that a gluten-free diet might be detrimental to the balance of gut bacteria:
... According to results of a small study with 10 people consuming a gluten-free diet, populations of beneficial gut bacteria, such as Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus, decreased, while counts for Enterobacteriaceae and Escherichia coli increased. ...
On the one hand, that's a little worrying, because gut bacteria do rather a lot of digestive heavy lifting. Everyone who's ever had their gut flora wiped out by a particularly heavy course of antibiotics knows firsthand that I speak the truth.
On the other hand, what the heck were these study participants eating, anyway? There seem to be a good number of diets in the world based around gluten-free staples like corn, potatoes, rice and teff. Are all the people who eat those diets deficient in gut bacteria? Seems unlikely.
And the participants themselves were healthy, so they were switching away from their normal diet for this trial. I think there are probably too many unknowns for these results to mean anything. What would be both fascinating and illuminating would be a worldwide sampling and study of gut bacteria in a wide range of diets, though the possibility that environment plays a role in what species of intestinal flora you end up with wouldn't be eliminated. You'd have to control for that, I would guess, by sampling people in the same regions and living conditions who had different diets.
Anyway, I'm not going back to eating wheat bread and pasta, oatmeal or spelt just for the sake of some bacteria. The migraines aren't worth it.
Especially when, on looking into this, I found an article on a site for celiacs indicating that a reaction between gut bacteria and gluten in the absence of vitamin D might cause the immune reaction to gluten in the first place. Bastards!
Maybe I should eat more yogurt, or something, though? I do have it now and again.
In other news, a wonderful soon-to-be cousin made me a sample wedding cake over the weekend from a gluten-free mix and it was delightful. (I think it was a Pamela's mix, the chocolate decadence, but it might have been from the Gluten Free Pantry.) I'm sure no one's gut bacteria would approve of it, but it even tasted good to people who can eat normal cake and I'm going to have more of it anyway.
