I’ve always been a numbers guy. I am not talking about mathematics, but just plain numbers. I do still wake up at night occasionally thinking I have a college algebra or calculus test in the morning. But that’s math.
At some point I took an aptitude test and learned that I should be a certified public accountant, a profession I’ve come to respect, but at the time I could think of nothing more boring.
Those tests did point me at arithmetic. Just give me the numbers, please.
No surprise I am a baseball fan and, yes, on occasion I’ve placed a wager knowing the odds. I know the OBP and the ERA, and the over and under. Point me to the sports book.
So let me tell you how I view the new numbers on foodborne illness in America from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The new projections and those old estimates CDC made in 1999 are kind of like Powerball and Mega Millions.
No, I do not suggest buying lottery tickets. Back when the mob ran the numbers you had a decent chance of winning occasionally, but not since the government took over the business.
Powerball, which is played in 42 states and the District of Columbia, gives you a 1 in 62 chance of turning your $1 bet into the minimum $3 win. Mega Millions, played in 41 states, gives you a 1 in 75 shot of turning a $1 bet into a $2 win.
People in many states can play both games. Those who can play both probably do not pick one or the other based on the differences in those odds. Instead, they probably decide which game to play based on habit or the size of the current jackpot.
If there were a game, however, in the form of a lottery or a casino table where you had a 1 in 4 chance of winning and it did not pay out in foodborne illnesses, people like me would be lining up to get in.
Now let’s pretend we’d been playing in this casino with 1 in 4 odds since 1999, and the word comes down it is changing to 1 in 6. What would we do? My bet is we would not change casinos, nor even lift our heads up from our tables.
We would continue to play because, just like the difference between Powerball and Mega Millions, there would not be much distinction in those changed odds.
The fact that CDC’s new best estimate for foodborne illnesses–48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths–is less than its 1999 estimate of 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths is not much of a game changer.
The day CDC steps up and says the chance of you getting a foodborne illness is no more likely than your winning $3 in Powerball, now that would be a game changer.
Right now, winning a week of explosive diarrhea or worse is still way too easy. It will happen to you long before you win $3. It’s all in the numbers.
Food safety in the United States is being jeopardized by surveillance and workforce cutbacks and other gaps in the public health system, a new study from the nonpartisan Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) concludes.
The wide-ranging “Ready or Not?” report–an annual assessment for the past eight years– evaluates the public health system’s ability to handle contagious diseases, disasters, and bioterrorism. ”There is an emergency for emergency health preparedness in the United States,” the report states. ”The severe budget cuts by federal, state, and local governments are leaving public health departments understaffed and without the basic capabilities required to respond to crises.”
TFAH warns cutbacks are leading to everything from fewer restaurant inspections to less surveillance capacity for discovering which pathogens are making people sick.
There are 50,000 fewer public health workers today than 20 years ago–and one-third of current workers are eligible to retire within five years, the report says. It calls for policies that ensure a sufficient number of adequately trained epidemiologists, physicians, nurses, and other health workers to respond to public health threats.
The study says the U.S. lacks a coordinated, national approach to biosurveillance, noting major variations in how quickly states collect and report data needed to respond to bioterrorism or disease outbreaks.
Among its key findings, the report found that 21 states were not able to rapidly identify disease-causing E. coli O157:H7, and submit the lab results within four days in 90 percent of the cases during 2007-08.
The 21 states that failed that test were Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and West Virginia.
Seven states–Alabama, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, and South Carolina–were not able to share data electronically with health care providers.
Those gaps are significant, the report explains, because “the ability to rapidly detect and determine the extent and scope of foodborne disease outbreaks–and other infectious disease outbreaks or bioterrorism attacks–is crucial to minimizing the impact of these outbreaks on the public’s health.”
The report notes that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta requires state public health labs to be able to use pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) protocols to rapidly identify specific pathogens.
CDC asks that state labs submit results within four days so the Pulse-Net database can be used to detect and help stop disease outbreaks. CDC works on as many as 1,400 foodborne disease outbreaks annually.
Public health funding has been cut in each of the past two years by 18 states, and during the last year by 33 states. About 23,000 jobs have been eliminated since January 2008 by local health departments. Since 2005, federal funding for public health preparedness has been reduced by 27 percent. At this point, however, only Hawaii, Iowa, Montana, and the District of Columbia report not having enough lab staff to work five 12-hour days for six to eight weeks.
The 52-page “Ready or Not” report was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Former U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker, Jr. is TFAH’s president.
McDonald’s is standing its ground after being sued Wednesday in California for marketing its Happy Meals to children.
The plaintiff in the class action lawsuit is Monet Parham, mother of two from Sacramento. She is represented by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which has been threatening such a lawsuit for months.
In the suit, McDonald’s is apparently not being accused of contributing to the Parham children’s obesity, but rather of having more control over them through Happy Meal marketing than the influence of their mother saying “no.”
“I object to the fact that McDonald’s is getting into my kids’ heads without my permission and actually changing what my kids want to eat,” Parham said in a news release.
Parham is the mother of Maya and Lauryn, ages 6 and 2, respectively. The girls do not appear to have a weight problem.
McDonald’s spokeswoman Bridget Coffing said of the lawsuit, ”We are proud of our Happy Meals and intend to vigorously defend our brand, our reputation, and our food.”
CSPI has been threatening McDonald’s since June, but the 32,000-outlet chain, which has restaurants ini 117 countries, has refused to play.
Instead, McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner wrote to Michael F. Jacobson, CSPI’s executive director, telling him: “CSPI is wrong in its assertions, and frivolous in its legal threats.”
Skinner said McDonald’s menu has more choice and variety than ever before. It also makes in-depth nutritional information available to parents.
In announcing the lawsuit, Jacobson said McDonald’s is still mostly in the business of selling “burgers or chicken nuggets, fries and sodas to very young children.”
“In other words,” Jacobson said, “McDonald’s offerings consist mostly of fatty meat, fatty cheese, French fries, white flour, and sugar—a narrow combination of foods that promote weight gain, obesity, diabetes, and heart diseases—and may lead to a lifetime of poor diets.”
Still, the lawsuit is apparently about whether McDonald’s “high tech” marketing is exploitive and strong enough to interfere with a family’s decisions.
“What kids see as a fun toy,” says Parham, “I now realize is a sophisticated, high-tech marketing scheme that was designed to put McDonald’s between me and my daughters.”
CSPI filed the lawsuit in California Superior Court in San Francisco, the only city in America that has essentially banned Happy Meals, setting nutritional standards for meals that use toys or other gimmicks to promote food for sale to children. Joining in representing Parham is Richard Baker of Baker Law, P.C. in Birmingham.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) sent a letter to Nestlé Monday, asking the Swiss-based food giant not to purchase Quorn, a line of frozen-meat substitutes shaped from a vat-grown protein product containing the fungus Fusarium venenatum.
Nestlé is one of several companies bidding for Premier Food’s Quorn unit, The Guardian newspaper reported.
CSPI, the U.S.-based nonprofit nutrition and food safety watchdog group, has waged a long campaign against Quorum, urging the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its “generally recognized as safe” designation or require it to be labeled as a potential allergen.
CSPI says products made with Fusarium venenatum can cause vomiting, diarrhea and anaphylactic reactions in some people with mold allergies.
Quorn, according to its website, is an all-natural meat-free product line available in the U.K. since 1985 and in the U.S. since 2002. The company says it is the best-selling meat-free brand sold in natural food stores.
The product is fermented in vats and then the chicken-flavored paste is fashioned to look like patties, nuggets, tenders, roasts, cutlets and meatballs. It is marketed as a “mycoprotein.”
In 2003, CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson published a letter in the journal Allergy characterizing the adverse reactions of 284 Quorn consumers and CSPI maintains a website to collect such reports. A subsequent article in the American Journal of Medicine reported that, according to a CSPI-commissioned telephone survey in Britain, a higher percentage of people believe they are sensitive to Quorn than to shellfish, milk, peanuts, wheat or other common allergens.
”It was clearly a mistake for food safety regulators in Europe, the United States, and Australia to approve Quorn for human consumption in the first place,” Jacobson said in a press announcement Monday. ”It would be a real tragedy for a major food company like Nestlé to start marketing foods made with this harmful ingredient on a bigger scale. There’s so much concern about allergic reactions to conventional foods, so it’s especially inappropriate to broaden the marketing of an unnecessary and novel powerful allergen.”
U.K.-based Premier Foods purchased the Quorn line from Marlow Foods five years ago.
CSPI says Quorn’s manufacturer used to claim that its signature ingredient was “mushroom based.” The company’s website now describes Fusarium venenatum as an edible fungus “like mushrooms, morels, or truffles.”
CSPI argues that Fusarium venenatum is quite unlike mushrooms, and “is actually a form of mold–some of which are edible and some not.”
“We have so many safe, sustainable, and wholesome fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to enjoy on their own and from which to make meat substitutes,” Jacobson said in the press announcement. ”Why resort to vat-grown, allergenic mold? To me, Quorn seems better suited to dystopian science fiction than health food stores.”
Ontario restaurant owners Mahmoud Asaad and Senan Daoud have lost an appeal in four of the five cases in which they were convicted in 2009 in connection with a 2007 outbreak of non-O157: H7 E coli.
In a Dec. 10 ruling, appellate Judge Ann Watson upheld the pair’s convictions for serving unfit food to the public for four of the named consumers. ”I agree with His Worship that the evidence upon which he based his convictions was overwhelming, ” Watson found.
In the instance of the fifth named injured consumer, however, the appeals judge set aside the convictions because there was contradictory evidence about the onset date of illness for a girl who ate at the restaurant with her father.
Asaad and Daoud ran the Yeman Restaurant on Merritt St. in St. Catharine’s when it became the only link in an outbreak of a rare strain of E. coli. The restaurant owners were each fined $7,500 each after their 2009 convictions.
In their appeal, the restaurateurs argued that the incubation period for E coli left a reasonable doubt as to whether their facility could have been the source of the dangerous bacteria.
The only thing that linked the E. coli victims was the Yeman Restaurant, the courts found. It was closed temporality by the public health department. An inspection found the E. coli on chicken shawarma and a knife used to cut the chicken.
