Purina Dog Food Recalled Due to Salmonella

Nestlé Purina PetCare Company is voluntarily recalling a limited number of 3.5-pound bags of its Purina ONE beyOnd Our White Meat Chicken & Whole Barley Recipe Adult Dry Dog Food from a single production run and shipped to retail customers in the United States. This is being done because one bag of the product was found to be contaminated with Salmonella.

Only Purina ONE beyOnd Our White Meat Chicken & Whole Barley Recipe Adult Dry Dog Food with both the "Best By" date and the production code shown below are included in this voluntary recall:

Bag Size 3.5

Best By Date & Production Code OCT 2014 31071083

UPC Code 17800 12679

*"Best By" Date and Production Code are found on the back or bottom of the bag.

No additional Purina or Purina ONE dog or cat products are involved in this voluntary recall at this time. No salmonella-related illness has been reported to date in association with this product.

Consumers who have purchased Purina ONE beyOnd Our White Meat Chicken & Whole Barley Recipe Adult Dry Dog Food products with the specific "Best By" Date and Production Code should discontinue feeding the product and discard it.

Salmonella can affect animals eating the product, and there is a risk to humans from handling contaminated products. People handling contaminated dry pet food can become infected with Salmonella, especially if they have not thoroughly washed their hands after having contact with surfaces exposed to this product. Healthy people infected with Salmonella should monitor themselves for the following symptoms: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal cramping and fever. Rarely, Salmonella can result in more serious ailments including arterial infections, endocarditis, arthritis, muscle pain, eye irritation and urinary tract symptoms. Consumers exhibiting these signs after having contact with this product should contact their healthcare providers.

Pets with Salmonella infections may exhibit decreased appetite, fever and abdominal pain. If left untreated, pets may be lethargic and have diarrhea or bloody diarrhea, fever and vomiting. Infected but otherwise healthy pets can be carriers and infect other animals or humans. If your pet has consumed the recalled product and has these symptoms, please contact your veterinarian.

At Nestlé Purina PetCare, the safety and efficacy of our products are our top priority. We apologize for any inconvenience due to this voluntary recall. For further information or to obtain a product refund, please call NPPC toll-free at 1-800-473-8546, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Medicine Recalled Because it Contained a Hair

Hospira, Inc. announced today it is initiating a voluntary nationwide user-level recall of one lot of Aminosyn™ II 10%, Sulfite-Free, 500 mL, NDC 0409-4164-03 Lot 26-138-JT. This action is due to one confirmed customer report where an unknown foreign particle was included in the injection port and in contact with product. The foreign particle was confirmed by Hospira as human hair. To date, Hospira has not received reports of any adverse events associated with this issue for this lot. This recall is being conducted as a precautionary measure. The root cause has not been determined and is under investigation.

Aminosyn II is combined with dextrose, electrolytes, trace elements, vitamins and, in the case of total nutrient admixtures, fat emulsion as part of parenteral nutrition therapy. If the particulate matter is not detected until the point of care, there may be a delay in therapy. In the event that the particulate was not observed, the particulate identified theoretically would not be able to pass through the intravenous catheter or an intravenous infusion. It is also unlikely that the particulate could block the infusion of solution into the patient.

In the unlikely event that the particulate breaks and pieces are able to pass through the intravenous catheter, injected particulate material may result in local inflammation, phlebitis, and/or low-level allergic response. Capillaries which may be as small as the size of a red blood cell, approximately seven microns in diameter, may become occluded. Patients with pre existing condition of trauma or other medical condition that adversely affects the microvascular blood supply are at an increased risk.

Aminosyn II 10% is an amino acid injection used as a source of nitrogen in the nutritional support of patients where oral nutrition cannot be tolerated and is packaged in a 500 mL flexible container, lot number 26-138-JT (the lot number may be followed by a 01) with an expiration date of August 1, 2014. The affected lot was distributed nationwide between March 2013 and August 2013 to wholesalers/distributors, hospitals and pharmacies.

Anyone with an existing inventory should stop use and distribution, quarantine the product immediately, and call Stericycle at 1-866-737-4701 between the hours of 8am to 5pm ET, Monday through Friday, to arrange for the return of the product. Replacement product from other lots is available.

Any adverse reactions or quality problems experienced with the use of this product may be reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) MedWatch Adverse Events Program either online, by regular mail or by fax.

• Online: www.fda.gov/medwatch/report.htm
• Regular mail: use postage-paid, pre-addressed Form FDA3500 available at
• www.fda.gov/MedWatch/getforms.htm
• Fax: 1-800-FDA-0178

Potato Salad Recalled due to Listerya

Garden-Fresh Foods, Inc. of Milwaukee Wisconsin is recalling A Limited Quantity of Spartan Fresh Selections American Potato Salad In 16 oz. Packages, because it has the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, an organism which can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems. Although healthy individuals may suffer only short-term symptoms such as high fever, severe headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea, Listeria infection can cause miscarriages and stillbirths among pregnant women.

Spartan Fresh Selections American Potato Salad was distributed by Spartan Stores in the State of Michigan and Toledo Ohio.

The affected Spartan Fresh Selections American Potato Salad is packaged in square 16 oz. plastic retail containers with a UPC Code Number 0 11213 90320 0 and a USE BY DATE of 09/06/13/04.

There have been no illnesses reported in connection with this product.

Consumers who have purchased this product should not open the package or use the contents. Instead, they should return the product to the location of purchase for a full refund.

Consumers with questions can contact Garden-Fresh Foods, Inc. at 1-800-645-3367 Monday through Friday between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

 

India Works to End Childhood Malnutrition

Close to 1.3 million children die every year in India because of malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Ninety nine per cent of all under-five deaths occur in developing countries, with the most common causes of death being pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria. These are illnesses to which children are particularly vulnerable, especially when they are malnourished, a condition that weakens their immune systems. Malnutrition contributes to more than a third of all child deaths.

Worldwide, over 100 million children are underweight. While it is a serious problem in sub-Saharan Africa, even higher rates of stunting are found in South Asia, particularly in India. Along with Nepal and Bangladesh, India has the world’s highest rate of malnutrition.

One way to fix the problem is to teach mothers about the right nutrition for their children or to incentivize them through conditional cash transfers. Distributing information is an important part of a solution, although it does not always lead to behavioural changes. Mothers are advised that when their child has diarrhoea they should increase their child’s fluid intake and continue to feed them normally. According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) -3, nine out of 10 mothers do not follow this recommendation. In fact, four out of 10 mothers actually reduce their child’s fluid intake.

Medical solutions to the problem of malnutrition include deworming and nutritional supplements. De-worming campaigns are quite effective and have been conducted in many day care centres and health encampments. The treatment has been especially popular in Kenya and other parts of Africa, and now in India, the practice has become compulsory in all schools. Popularly used nutritional supplements include vitamin A, zinc, iron, and various minerals. In addition, iodised salt has been a popular weapon of the government of India as it continues to try and promote its consumption over normal salt.

There is also a behavioural approach that attempts to alter the behaviour of mothers and workers who interact with the child. This includes giving children the right type and amount of nutrition. They  try to change behaviour towards calorific food and encourage the consumption of a variety of foods.

About 50,000 people live In the slums that surround the city limits of Chandigarh. Less than 5% of the houses have working water filters. At the same time, however, 70% of the households own mobile phones. The people living in these slums are typically migrants from rural areas where wages are extremely low. The mothers in this treatment group are women who send their children to daycare centres in the slums.

India is home to the world’s largest child care programme. There are currently over one million of these day care centres run by the government across India. Each day care centre serves around 30 children on an average. The children go to the centre every morning at 9am and are fed their midday meals by daycare workers. The workers are given training on child health and nutrition when they are hired by the government.

Another aspect of the daycare workers’ responsibilities is to visit and communicate with the mothers whose children attend the centre, giving them advice on how to keep their children healthy. The daycare centres offer two potential channels by which to help children living in the slums. The first is by the distribution of the midday meal and the second is by providing information and counsel to the mothers. However, a World Bank report finds leakages in the provision of meals and almost no effective communication between workers and mothers. A total of 145 daycare centres were sampled for this study.

The experiment tackles the question of whether it is the lack of information on nutrition given to mothers, or the lack of child care worker motivation that makes child malnutrition persist. The total children weighed twice (before and after an intervention. There were 4,101 children with around 1,000 in each one of three treatment groups (subject to an intervention) and a control group (not subject to any intervention). In the first treatment group, mothers receive recipe books written in Hindi. As around half of these mothers cannot read, the information is also distributed to other family members, including fathers, older sons and daughters. Government workers may also assist by reading and sharing information from the recipe book. The recipe book is designed with the help of a local nutritionist and contains 10 recipes, which provide an array of vitamins and minerals as well as sufficient calories.

In the second treatment group The child care workers were provide incentives to perform better. They are paid bonuses of Rs.100 for each child whose weight they successfully increase so that he or she is no longer classified as malnourished after three months. For each child under their care, the workers are given a goal card with the weight at which the child will no longer be considered malnourished. If a child at a normal weight becomes malnourished, however, I subtract Rs.100 from the total. This motivates the worker to make the necessary household visits.

To test how the two types of treatments interact, the informational and incentives treatments are combined in the third group. Complementarity may exist if incentivized workers are able to be more effective with nutritional information available to the mother. On the other hand, one of the two treatments may be sufficient for improving weight. A separate set of centres form the control group where no intervention is assigned.

Results show that malnutrition is reduced significantly in three months for children in the combined treatment group by 4.2% but there are negligible effects in the individual treatment groups. The combined treatment effect persists for a year even after the incentives are removed after three months. One estimate suggests that the country gains Rs.20 for every rupee spent on the combined treatment in terms of increase in future wages for these children due to an improvement in health and attendance.

Policy recommendations should be based on evidence from experiments and that increasing fixed wages to child care workers will not solve the problem. Similarly, offering performance pay is likely to be ineffective unless mothers have nutritional information available to them. Not only does this empower them, but it also facilitates communication between mothers and workers which enables a behavioural change to occur. Mothers receiving the combined treatment feed their children more protein and calories. A small push is required on both the demand side as well as the supply side to target child malnutrition in India. Further experimentation in development economics can bring us closer to understanding how this serious problem can be fixed efficiently and permanently.

 

Source Hindu Times

Oysters Recalled by Wegmans

The following Oysters have been recalled at Wegmans:

Island Creek Oysters UPC: 20614800000

Merry Oysters UPC: 20615400000

These products were sold at the Northborough, MA store ONLY

Reason for Recall:

The Massachusetts Dept of Public Health and the Massachusetts Dept of Fish and Game announced 8/30/13 a closure of oyster growing areas and a recall of oysters has been implemented. These oysters may be contaminated with Vibrio parahaemolyticus. This naturally-occurring bacterium can cause foodborne illness if the oysters are consumed without cooking.

The recalled products were sold in Wegmans seafood department at the Northborough, MA store ONLY between July 29, 2013 and August 31, 2013.

All products may be returned for a full refund.

For more information, please call Wegmans Consumer Affairs at 1-855-934-3663,Sunday from 9:00am-5pm or Tuesday through Friday from 8am-5pm.

Canada: Two Companies are Recalling Tahini for Salmonella

Ottawa, August 31, 2013 - The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Sesameco are warning the public, food service establishments, and retailers, not to consume, serve, use, or sell the Tahini product described below because it may be contaminated with Salmonella.

The affected Tahini product was sold by the manufacturer, Sesameco.  The affected product was sold from March 5, 2013 to May 15, 2013 in 18 kg (40 lb.) packages bearing no label and no lot code indicated on the package.

The affected product was sold in bulk and may have been repacked at retail.  Consumers who cannot determine the original product identity are advised to check with their retailer to determine if they have the affected product yet.

There have been no reported illnesses associated with the consumption of this product yet.

The second manufacturer is the Phoenicia Group Inc. They are warning the public, food service establishments, and retailers, not to consume, serve, use, or sell the Tahini products described below because they may be contaminated with Salmonella.

The following Tahini products, sold commencing February 1, 2013 with no lot code indicated on the package, are affected by this alert. This alert does not include Cedar brand Tahini products where a lot code appears on the package.

Some of the affected products were sold in bulk and may have been repacked at retail.  Consumers who cannot determine the original product identity are advised to check with their retailer to determine if they have one of the affected products.

There have been no reported illnesses associated with the consumption of these products yet..

The distributor, Inc., St-Laurent, Quebec, is voluntarily recalling the affected products from the marketplace.

All Tahina products, manufactured by Al Nakhil Co, of Lebanon between September 5, 2012 and April 21, 2013, are affected by this alert. At this time, the following products have been identified:

Affected products are Ceder brand Tahini in 907 g (2 lb) size. The UPC code is 0 62356 54525 3. The labels indicate "Product of Canada"  It is also sold in 18 kg (40 lb with a UPC code 0 62356 54522 2

Food contaminated with Salmonella may not look or smell spoiled. Consumption of food contaminated with these bacteria may cause salmonellosis, a foodborne illness. In young children, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems, salmonellosis may cause serious and sometimes deadly infections. In otherwise healthy people, salmonellosis may cause short-term symptoms such as high fever, severe headache, vomiting, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea. Long-term complications may include severe arthritis.

Northwestern University Makes Antibacterial coating out of Food

A simple kitchen sink experiment helped Northwestern University researchers discover that green tea leaves can make an excellent antibacterial coating.And so can red wine, dark chocolate and cacao beans, they found. It’s the powerful and healthful polyphenols at work in a new way.

Polyphenols are naturally occurring molecules found in plants whose functions include structural support and defense against bacteria and oxidative damage.Polyphenols are sticky, and the researchers exploited this useful property, while also retaining some of the compounds’ well-known biological properties. They made new multifunctional coatings based on tannic acid and pyrogallol -- inexpensive compounds resembling the more complex polyphenols found in tea, wine and chocolate.

Simply dissolving polyphenol powder in water with the proper dash of salt quickly produces colorless coatings that have antioxidant properties, are non-toxic and can kill bacteria on contact.

The coatings which can stick to virtually anything, including Teflon, could be used on a wide range of consumer, industrial and medical products, from catheters and orthopedic implants to membranes for water purification and materials used in food processing, packaging and preparation.

The study is published today (Aug. 22) in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

“We discovered a way to apply coatings onto a variety of surfaces that takes advantage of the sticky properties of the polyphenol compounds,” said Phillip B. Messersmith, who led the research. “It’s a very simple dip-coating process, and the antibacterial and antioxidant properties are preserved in the coating.”One could take a stainless-steel hip implant, he said, apply the process to it, and the coating that emerges spontaneously and with no other modifications will kill bacteria and quench reactive oxygen species, such as free radicals.

Messersmith’s team tested all kinds of materials -- medically relevant polymers, engineering polymers, metals, inorganic substrates and ceramics -- and a coating stuck to each one. The researchers also demonstrated they can easily modify the coatings to give them additional functions, such as an antifouling property to prevent cells from building up on a surface, such as a pacemaker.

“What’s interesting is that the raw materials we regularly encounter in our diets can benefit us in a way we had never envisioned -- as coatings on medical devices,” said Tadas S. Sileika, a graduate student in Messersmith’s lab and first author of the paper.

“The coatings innately have properties that are very beneficial to saving lives and keeping people healthy. Without any further modification, they can help prolong the life of a medical device, reduce inflammation in a patient and prevent bacterial infections,” he said.

For 15 years, Messersmith’s lab has been developing new biomedical materials, including another coating called polydopamine, also based on phenols, which are found in the sticky glue that marine mussels use to stick to rocks. Because of their chemical similarities, Messersmith and his colleagues wondered if the phenolic compounds found in plant-derived red wine, green tea and dark chocolate might have similar sticking power.

This curiosity led to the kitchen sink experiments in which the researchers detected a colorless residue left behind on containers exposed to green tea and red wine. Experiments using polyphenol-rich food extracts from green tea, red wine, dark chocolate and cacao beans also produced coatings.

Messersmith and his team then went one step farther: after finding this behavior also holds for low-cost polyphenols and similar compounds, they developed a simple method for producing the multifunctional coatings.

They found that immersing objects into a saline solution of tannic acid or pyrogallol results in spontaneous coating deposition, just like what happened with the extracts and beverages. Using these inexpensive precursors instead of the extracts improves the speed and lowers the cost of the process, increasing its commercial viability, the researchers said.

“The stickiness of plant polyphenols is behind the so-called astringency effect that people can experience when drinking red wine high in tannins,” Messersmith said. “The tannins stick to, or bind, saliva proteins, producing the sensation of puckering and dryness. We’ve put this stickiness to work in a novel way.”

Polydopamine has shown great promise as a biomedical coating, but the plant polyphenol-based coatings can trump it in two important ways: The plant polyphenol-based coatings are colorless, so they don’t alter a material’s optical properties, and the compounds used to produce them are roughly 100 times cheaper. And that’s in addition to their innate antibacterial and antioxidant properties.