Thursday, October 17, 2013

10/17/2013 Daily Health News: CDC Idle - Flu Season Starts, Microbes at Dairy Farms, Antibiotic Resistant Salmonella, "Craze" Dangerous, .

Idle CDC Worries Experts as Flu Season Starts
The fall flu season in the U.S. is unfolding largely unobserved.
The CDC's labs and surveillance programs are idle, thanks to the government shutdown, and outside experts are worried that essential data is being lost. Indeed, a CDC spokeswoman told MedPage Today that just about all of the regular apparatus that monitors flu and flu-like illness has been shut down. Some 80% to 85% of the usual staff is on enforced leave, according to Barbara Reynolds, PhD, the agency's director of public affairs. That means information about such things as pediatric influenza, antiviral resistance, admissions to hospital for flu or flu-like illness, and mortality and morbidity owing to pneumonia and influenza is not being gathered. There is no "national snapshot" of the flu season, Reynolds said. On the other hand, she added, some staff members are still working on non sub-type-able influenza A, in an attempt to ensure that the nation is not caught by surprise by another flu pandemic.
But it's not just data and it's not just flu, according to Gregory Poland, MD, an infectious diseases specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "There are an endless number of infectious disease threats that, as we often say, are an airplane ride away from us," Poland said. And the CDC is the "only entity" that tracks infectious disease on a national scale, he added. "So now you've got a week, 2 weeks, who knows how long, where there's no one really responsible for watching what's happening nationally." Continue Reading

TAKING AIM AT MICROBES ON FARM A GOOD STRATEGY TOWARD FOOD SAFETY
Just because you can’t see something with the naked eye doesn’t mean it isn’t there. While that statement certainly doesn’t qualify as rocket science, it is, nevertheless, an important message to heed when it comes to microscopic beings such as harmful bacteria, viruses and parasites that can make animals and people sick. In a report,... Continue Reading

PETITION TRIES TO FORCE FDA TO RECALL ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANT SALMONELLA
The outbreak of Salmonella linked to Foster Farms chicken products has some consumer advocates talking again about a petition filed in 2011 by the Center for Science in the Public Interest asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to declare antibiotic-resistant Salmonella an adulterant. Doing so would allow the agency to recall meat based simply on...Continue Reading

SCIENTISTS FIND METH-LIKE CHEMICAL IN ‘CRAZE’ BODYBUILDING SUPPLEMENT
Late Monday, you could still buy the body-building diet supplement Craze online from Amazon in candy grape, berry lemonade and piƱa colada flavors, but it was “currently unavailable” at Driven Sports, Inc., the company that markets the product. Earlier in the day, an international panel of scientists disclosed that one of the ingredients in the... Continue Reading

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