Millions of Pounds of Ready-to-Eat Beef, Chicken Recalled Due to Listeria
Affected products may have been used in ready-to-eat products that are “on store shelves or in consumers’ refrigerators or freezers,” or available for use by restaurants and other establishments.
almost every week, we read about similar food recalls in the USA. Imagine how common such things happen in other countries.
this is an important issue, since a longer shelf life means more food. How do you keep food safe and cheap? One answer is Chemicals that prolong shelf life but keep food cheap enough for ordinary folks (especially here in the poorer areas of the world). RFK Jr points out these cause long term health problems but hey, the cost benefit ratio means well nourished poor people.
Food recalls not only mean less food available to eat, but foods contaminated with common germs are a big health risk.
Germs cause diarrhea. Usually from the 4 F problem (contaminated FOOD (usually from not being stored correctly...the poor here don't have refrigerators), FINGERS, (not washing hands), FECES (fertilizer not washed off of vegetables, also contaminated water from poorly placed latrines) and FLIES (that carry germs on their feet that land on your food).
So how do you stop bacterial contamination of meats and cheeze and fresh vegetables? Keep it clean, wash your hands, store it properly.
But for countries where food processing plants (not local farmers a mile away) supply your food, one overlooked answer to contamination is radiation to kill germs.
Here is an article about it in the journal Foods in 2023 which is actually discussing using radiation to prevent food contamination with pathogenic germs:
But first they note that this high tech expensive technology should not be the main way to stop food poisoning:
It is essential to note that irradiation is just one aspect of a comprehensive approach to ensuring the microbial safety of meat. Other interventions, such as good manufacturing practices, hygiene controls, and appropriate storage and handling practices, are also crucial for reducing the risk of contamination
but for food processing plants, radiation is another way that could help:
Irradiation has been studied extensively for its efficacy in reducing microbial contamination of meat. By exposing the food to ionizing radiation, the latter reduces or eliminates harmful microorganisms that can cause foodborne illness. Previous research showed that irradiation could effectively reduce levels of pathogens such as Salmonella and Escherichia coli as well as levels of spoilage organisms, leading to improved microbial safety and a reduced risk of foodborne illness.
another technical article discussing not only radiation but UV light Ozone microwaves etc. And how these technologies might help not just with bacteria but with viruses.
this is a news report summary of using radiation from eight years ago:
this is a lecture from MIT from 2019,...It is more technical but he is a good teacher that makes it easy to follow his arguments..
at three minutes in, he notes that you often find small bugs in rice.
We find this is a problem: we grow and sell organic brown rice to upscale supermarkets in Manila and nearby cities. There is no way our small business could afford to radiate the rice to kill the bugs, so we use more traditional ways to keep our rice from spoilage.
When we package the rice, we sift the rice so the small bugs fall through the screen, and then blowtorch it lightly to kill the eggs that didn't detach (and would result in live bugs months later) but not enough to harm the rice.
We also pack it in vacuum bags which extends the shelf life and keeps it dry so it doesn't spoil as quickly.
As our city modernizes, we have modern supermarkets now that have the same standards of US supermarkets (and higher prices than the traditional markets AKA Palenkes).
But our cook usually buys fresh food every day at the Palenke down the street.
What is a Palenke? An open air market with small vendors selling their wares.
This video by a local comedian is about the wonderfulness of the Filipino Palenke.
there is an experimental vaccine for the Marburg virus.
this is from the WHO site: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/marburg-virus-disease
Marburg virus disease (MVD), formerly known as Marburg haemorrhagic fever, is a severe, often fatal illness in humans.
The average MVD case fatality rate is around 50%. Case fatality rates have varied from 24% to 88% in past outbreaks.
Early supportive care with rehydration, and symptomatic treatment improves survival.
There are currently no approved vaccines or antiviral treatments for MVD, but a range of vaccines and drug therapies are under development.
Rousettus aegyptiacus, a fruit bat of the Pteropodidae family, is considered the natural host of Marburg virus. The Marburg virus is transmitted to people from fruit bats and spreads among humans through human-to-human transmission.
Community engagement is key to successfully controlling outbreaks.
there was an outbreak in Zimbabwe when I was there according to this site. But you know, we had isolated cases of severe hemorrhagic fever of unknown origin, so I wonder if this was marburg not diagnosed.
apparently it ccan spread person to person but this requires contact with body fluids.
Once introduced in the human population, Marburg virus can spread through human-to-human transmission via direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected people, and with surfaces and materials (e.g. bedding, clothing) contaminated with these fluids.
Health-care workers have frequently been infected while treating patients with suspected or confirmed MVD. This has occurred through close contact with patients when infection control precautions are not strictly practiced. Transmission via contaminated injection equipment or through needle-stick injuries is associated with more severe disease, rapid deterioration, and, possibly, a higher fatality rate.
Burial ceremonies that involve direct contact with the body of the deceased can also contribute in the transmission of Marburg virus.
Lassa fever is another hemorragic disease in western Africa.
Yes there is an Ecohealth link: Poor guys they were wanting to investigate these diseases but because they were behind the Wuhan debacle they didn't get their funded.
Ecohealth also wanted to place a multimillion dollar lab here in the Philippines and was stopped when the local senators found that the grant was from the US Dept of Defense, not from the HHS or another civilian health department.
The CIA was paid to lie to you about Covid. From the House Oversight Committee, we learn in a bombshell report that “The CIA was paid to change its assessment on the origins of Covid-19.” If this whistleblower testimony is validated, the U.S. government has deliberately violated the Covid Origins Act.
The government also refused to provide a list of names of scientists who fell ill while working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab, even though they were aware of who these scientists were.
that article is useless. For more information check the actual CDC article LINK
The article states:
During March 13–July 19, 2024, among a total of 111,856 SARI patients identified, 100,260 were excluded because of missing influenza RT-PCR results (70,055); ineligibility or not being in a vaccine target group (14,245);
Italics mine....so most folk with flu like symptoms were not tested at all: meaning the study was based on a small subgroup.
This evaluation suggests that while only one in five SARI patients had received the 2024 influenza vaccine, those who were vaccinated were at significantly lower risk for hospitalization from any influenza virus infection, including the predominant influenza A(H3N2) and influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 subtypes.
huh? One in five of the small subgroup had gotten the vaccine. Were they tested in the ER or doctor's offices?
Although South American countries prioritized young children, persons with comorbidities, and older adults for vaccination to prevent influenza illness complications, the documented influenza vaccination coverage levels (21.3%) were below pre–COVID-19 norms
The study was from South America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. But most of the data comes from Brazil. And it is about one strain of Influenza A, not Influenza B.
These countries have a growing middle class but also slums with malnutrition and drug use. And farmers and slum dwellers and working class folk don't go to hospital unless very sick: If you are old you might just die at home.
So the shot might help a bit, but this study is deeply flawed.
the study does show that the flu vaccine works a bit.
Summary: Get the shot if you are high risk. I am unsure about the data in children: I did see a few severe cases of children very very ill in the 1998 epidemic, but they were ill with secondary staph pneumonia.
I also should note that one rural clinic where I was filling in for another doc did collect data on anyone who met the fever etc. criteria: this was to alert the CDC if there might be an epidemic going around. But we didn't check the blood test to affirm it was infuenza.
the number of people dying of Fentanyl overdose has gone down, and some think that having narcan available is one of the reasons. It also might be because, like the use of LSD and hallucinogens in the 1970s, people saw the harm being done to those who took them, and just said no.
But the UK Mail says: Uh, maybe it's because all the hard core addicts died.
Dr Caleb Banta-Green, an addiction expert at the University of Washington, says King County, which includes Seattle, is like a microcosm for the rest of the country.
Deaths from fentanyl there plummeted nearly 10 percent at the end of 2023 compared to the last quarter - but Dr Banta-Green believes the outbreak is 'self-extinguishing'.
... Latest data shows that in the 12 months to April 2024, the US saw 65,787 deaths from synthetic opioid overdoses, mainly fentanyl - down from a peak of 77,693 in June 2023.
historian Tom Holland discussing the Pittdown man hoax, and the racism (eugenic idea that British were superior because mankind evolved in the UK) behind why so may eagerly accepted the hoax:
I should add: This idea no longer is accepted, and the anti white rhetoric is partly in response to this racism 100 years ago...
but using evolution to prove one's superiority is not limited to the Brits.
All authors agree that the Chinese discussions about Peking Man—and more broadly, paleoanthropology and prehistorical archaeology—serve a nationalist agenda with its racial implications.
However, there is not only a divergence regarding the significance of such a racial aspect in the nationalism, but also and more importantly a lack of a theoretical explanation as to why the discourse is racial, although simply by creating and applying those concepts a reader informed by fundamental knowledge about racial thinking can clearly see the association between them.
This theoretical elaboration is necessary not only because it will effectively engage the Chinese defence that has rejected even nationalist—let alone racial—implications of the discourse, but also because it will contribute to our understanding of the varieties of scientific racism that appear to have nothing to do with a harmful or even dangerous racist agenda.
Of course, the Peking man fossils were lost during WWII (how convenient), and some speculate that like Richard II, they might be found under a Peking parking lot. But similar fossil finds suggest that, unlike Piltdown man, they were real.
so what do both of these finds have in common?
Both had links to Teilhard Chardin, a Jesuit whose posthumous works postulated that mankind was evolving toward an omega point (published after he died because the Vatican recognized them as heresy and forbad their publication, so he gave them to a friend who published them after he died). He is sort of a saint to the modernists, who would like to turn the old fuddy duddy Church with it's ten commandments into the Church of what's happening now, promoting the green religion and the religion of if it feels good why can it be wrong.
Well, those sins have been around for centuries, and the green religion mixes both good and bad, the bad part being the elites who want to tell farmers how to grow stuff without modern seeds or chemicals, and if the society collapses from food being scarce and expensive, well, that is not their fault.
but these things are getting push back from those nasty conservatives but also from reality.
The real danger of Teilhard's ideas is the mythology of utopia that is infiltrating society.
the evolution to a superman/omega point proposed in his books is still resonating with the transhumanist types. And the heresy part is not the science of evolution, but the fact that in this myth there is no place for Jesus as Savior of the world, and that his life and death and resurrection are important.
Of course, when even the Pope goes around saying all religions lead to God and forgets to mention Jesus, this echoes Teilhard's ideas (and is based on an assumption that religion and God are not real but psychological ways to cope with reality).
The irony is that Teilhard was there when the fossils of the Piltdown man was discovered, and strangely enough, that he found a tooth that was needed to convince many that the skull was real.
Some people even suspect he was part of the hoax, but the more charitable insist that his actions might have been a joke that went wrong. The Conversation discusses.
Regardless of who was responsible, the Piltdown hoax is a stark reminder to scientists that if something seems too good to be true, then perhaps it is. The hoax is unprecedented in its complexity (some of the Piltdown finds were more expertly modified than others, and the skill of the forger(s) is one of the aspects we are examining). But it is not the only example of trickery within palaeontological and archaeological circles.
Piltdown Man's temporary ascendancy undoubtedly cost the field. For instance, it delayed widespread acceptance of Australopithecus africanus, an early hominin found in South Africa in the mid-1920s, as a genuinely ancient relic of human evolution.
Less obviously, Piltdown Man demonstrates the power of the scientific method to expose the truth, eventually....(but only after) the discoveries at Piltdown were steadily undermined by finds made elsewhere, even though the reasons for the specimens' failure to withstand scrutiny were not fully articulated until 1953.
again, this makes one laugh. Why did it take so long? Fear of objecting to the scientific consensus? Fear of being seen as objecting to the trendy Darwinian Eugenics and maybe even allying oneself with those dumb Papists?
Dirty little secrect:
The political wish to support British racial superiority rather than science per se sort of discouraged the discussion of the fossils as a hoax.
the Conversation article quotes his letter hinting that he knew about it, so why did he keep quiet about the hoax?
and indeed he might, since according to this WAPOST article, link2 he found the canine tooth
Later "excavations" at two Piltdown sites revealed a jaw bone, teeth, stone tools and a piece of carved fossil bone deemed a "cricket bat." They also cast a cloud of suspicion over everyone who took part. A volunteer in Woodward's department, Martin Hinton, seemed a likely suspect, especially after researchers at the Natural History Museum discovered a trunk of stained bones he'd left in storage there. Some skeptics eyed Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and prominent paleontologist, who discovered a canine tooth that figured prominently in the skull's identification.
so here is the ripple effect.
Darwininan evolution suggested there is no God because things evolved naturally. But it also suggested evolution of the fittest. Get rid of God and compassion for the weak( most religions say God wanted people be humble and help others and that greed is bad, and Christianity adds: since folk were getting it wrong and killing those who pointed this out, he sent his Son to show them.),
Get rid of true religion, and voila, Greed is good, destroying the environment in the name of profit is good, and science is god.
So Nazi eugenic ideas about untermensch were scientific, and destroying the retarded, the brain damaged, Jews, Gays, Gypsies was okay, and using Slavs and others in countries they conquered was justified.
But science demands honesty. Science is not dogma, but a description of what is observed, so future observations will change our ideas.(Catholicism at least has long held that God can be found not just in the Bible but in the book of nature, so accepts science as good. And don't point out Galileo: His theories could not be proved by science until they changed the orbits to oval instead of round, and decided the universe was larger than believed, so the parallax arguments no longer held).
And so before one condemns the Piltdown hoax, maybe condemn the medical journals and experts who pushed the various covid hoaxes without proper skepticism.
In Oct 2021, they printed another article An appeal for an objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that said whoops, that article and several others not only didn't prove that theory. But these articles silenced those who questioned it. (sorry about that Chief).
it took them awhile: The rival journal the BMJ noted this in July 2021:The covid-19 lab leak hypothesis: did the media fall victim to a misinformation campaign?
Scientists and reporters contacted by The BMJ say that objective consideration of covid-19’s origins went awry early in the pandemic, as researchers who were funded to study viruses with pandemic potential launched a campaign labelling the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory.”
A leader in this campaign has been Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organisation given millions of dollars in grants by the US federal government to research viruses for pandemic preparedness.
Over the years EcoHealth Alliance has subcontracted out its federally supported research to various scientists and groups, including around $600 000 (£434 000; €504 000) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” said the letter, which listed Daszak as one of 27 coauthors.
Daszak did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The BMJ.
so we have a butterfly effect.
expert whose organization funded the covid virus research in Wuhan gets others to support the idea that it came from animals and silenced anyone who questioned this.
And of course, the establishment that went along with this, and not only didn't allow anyone (even President Trump) to question the story, but managed to censor discussions of treatment, quarantines, and vaccines.
When science is god, then questioning the priests of science is heresy, and you will be punished for doing this.
and it started with Piltdown:
Science hoax on evolution not investigated because it went along with politics of British racial superiority.
Priest who was there kept quiet for 40 years even though his letters hint he knew the truth.
Peking man bones are being used by China to prove the superiority of the Han Chinese race today.
Priest who knew about the Piltdown hoax goes on to reject the central beliefs in Catholicism: i.e. that Christ's life and death meant God intervened in history to make the world a better place and the good news that the reality behind the world is a God who loves you.
Julian Huxley, the biologist and eugenicist (and brother to writer Aldous Huxley), was deeply impacted by Teilhard.
In 1957, Huxley wrote:
“The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself —not just sporadically…but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.”
This was the origin of modern transhumanism—a movement largely characterized by the concepts of emerging superintelligence, and an exponential arc of evolution.
This is getting into theology which is over my head but when I read this type of stuff, I notice it is about the elites evolving into supermen one with the universe, not about the guy planting rice or driving a tricycle trying to make a living, or the mom caring for her baby, or those living an ordinary life.
In transhumanism and much of the modern world, the aim of life is success, happiness, and fulfilling your desires. Hmm... hasn't this idea been a plot in many sci fi stories (Cordwainer Smith anyone?) and movies.
This requires of course health and a high IQ and oodles of money. So the implication is that the lives of ordinary folk are worthless (useless eaters anyone?)
So proposing evolution as God, with man's aim is not to know love and serve God, but as a cog in the evolution of a superman, who will presumably rule the world, suggests that science has evolved from a search for truth to the handmaid of the powerful to shape and control the world..
CDC traced contacts of those traveling in the same airplane with a person with MPox, and found no one got the disease.
During 2021–2022, 113 persons traveled on commercial flights while they were infectious with clade II mpox. Among 1,046 traveler contacts followed by U.S. public health agencies, CDC identified no secondary cases.
What are the implications for public health practice?
Traveling on a flight with a person with mpox does not appear to constitute an exposure risk or warrant routine contact tracing activities.
Hmm... guess none of these folks joined the mile high club during the trip.
