"A bacteriophage infects, then reproduces within a bacterium and destroys it.
NIH - Science News June 3, 2000

Is That Dog In Your Hamburger?

The Answer Is "Yes" If George Bush Gets His Way

In a further degradation of food safety standards, the Bush Administration's
USDA is now allowing rabbit, cat and dog meat to be mixed with ground beef
and sold. Andrew Martin of the Chicago Tribune reports:

A short notice from the United States Department of Agriculture has created
a stir-and perhaps a wave of nausea-among the nation’s meat inspectors.

Called “FSIS NOTICE 15-06: Use of Non-Amenable Animal Tissue in Inspected Products,” the notice essentially says that animals that you wouldn’t
normally associate with hamburgers can be “included in amenable meat or
poultry products produced in official establishments.”


In other words, anything from deer to dog meat can be ground into hamburger, as long as it meets state regulations, which inspectors say tend to be
looser than the federal government’s.

Martin asked Steven Cohen, spokesman for the USDA's Food Safety Inspection
Service, if dog meat really could be mixed with beef and sold to consumers across America:

“I don’t believe that it is illegal, but there is no place that is producing dog meat,” Cohen said, adding that the regulation fits a “very limited
circumstance. “I don’t think there’s anyone who is doing this on a commercial basis.”

But roadkill wouldn’t qualify because, since the animal wasn’t slaughtered,
it would be considered adulterated, he said.

According to Martin, even migratory birds could be added to the mix:

Non-amenable animal tissue, as defined in the notice, is any tissue from animals not subject to inspection under the Federal Meat Inspection Act and
the Poultry Products Inspection Act. It includes edible tissue from exotic animals, rabbits, migratory birds and other animals not under the scope of
USDA inspection, like alligator and kangaroo.

This is especially troubling because state inspections are often much weaker
than the USDA's – which itself has been weakened by the Bush Administration.

With Bird Flu a real threat, allowing the admixture of migratory bird tissue
with beef is asking for trouble – big trouble.

And how has this announcement affected the nation's already disheartened
Food Inspectors?

News of the notice swept through the community of meat inspectors after one
of them sent an email to USDA’s technical support center asking for
clarification. In response to a question, Kris Kenne, a USDA staff officer, said someone could mix deer meat with pork and sell deer dogs with a USDA
logo as long as the ingredients were labeled and state law allowed it.

Does this also mean that a slaughtered cat or dog can be added to sausage, Kenne was asked?  “Yes, that is a possibility should one wish to pursue to use them as an ingredient in the product.
Public perception may not be so acceptable of the practice though,” Kenne responded.…

“Suffice it to say, this is bizarre to inspectors in the field,” said Trent Berhow, president of the Midwest Council of Food Inspectors locals…
 

Unlike methyl bromide, which is being phased out because it was determined to be an ozone depleting substance, sulfuryl fluoride is not an ozone depleter.

Dow AgroSciences is pursuing the registration of sulfuryl fluoride as a gas fumigant for postharvest use in dry fruits, tree nuts, and cereal grains. The postharvest formulation of sulfuryl fluoride will be called ProFume gas fumigant. Tolerance testing is currently under way on each of the food types, with the ultimate goal of phasing in the use of ProFume as methyl bromide is being phased out. According to Brian Schneider, Dow AgroSciences' ProFume biology development leader, this should be an accomplishable goal. "We have a jump-start since sulfuryl fluoride is already registered for structural uses," contends Schneider. 

"Because sulfuryl fluoride is an inorganic material, as opposed to the organic methyl bromide, it doesn't bind onto items being protected, so more of the chemical is available to get to the insects," says Schneider.
MORE

Viruses that slay bacteria draw new interest

For people with a damaged liver or too much iron in their blood, enjoying raw oysters from the Gulf of Mexico is a deadly gamble. Most of the oysters harbor Vibrio vulnificus, a bacterium responsible for almost all seafood-related deaths in the United States. Healthy people shrug off the microbe, but susceptible folks who get a full-blown infection have more than a 50 percent chance of dying....

Although U.S. physicians today don't embrace the strategy, phage therapy dates back almost a century (SN: 6/1/96, p. 350). The viruses infect, reproduce within, and eventually burst bacteria. Since phages reproduce only as long as they have target bacteria to infect, Elizabeth M. Kutter of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., calls the viruses "self-replicating, self-limiting antibiotics."

In the V. vulnificus work, Gulig and his colleagues sampled muck from oyster beds and isolated phages that destroy the bacterium. They simultaneously infected mice with V. vulnificus and enriched the rodents' blood with iron, which helps the bacterium thrive. When given phages at the time of infection, five of eight mice remained healthy. Without such treatment, all mice succumbed within 18 hours.  MORE

Eat Me
The Soviet method for attacking infection that we can learn from.

In the 1920s and '30s, with diseases like dysentery and cholera running rampant, the discovery of bacteriophages was hailed as a breakthrough. Bacteriophages are viruses found virtually everywhere—from soil to seawater to your intestines—that kill specific, infection-causing bacteria. In the United States, the drug company Eli Lilly marketed phages for abscesses and respiratory infections. (Sinclair Lewis' Pulitzer-winning Arrowsmith is about a doctor who uses phages to prevent a diphtheria epidemic.) But by the 1940s, American scientists stopped working with phages for treatment because they no longer had reason to. Penicillin, discovered by the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming in 1928, had become widely available thanks to synthetic production and zapped infections without the expertise needed for finicky phages.

But now the equation has changed. Many kinds of bacteria have become antibiotic-resistant—prompting a few Western scientists, and patients, to travel to former Soviet Georgia to give bacteriophages for treatment a try. Phages have been used in the former Soviet Union for decades because scientists there had less access to antibiotics than their American and European counterparts did. Phages were a cheap alternative, and in Soviet clinical trials, they repeatedly stopped infections. Now in a bid for medical tourists, Georgia has opened a center in its capital, Tbilisi, which offers outpatient phage treatment to foreigners. In connection with the Eliava phage research institute, which Stalin helped set up in Tbilisi in 1923, the treatment center offers personalized cures for a host of infections the United States says it can no longer do anything about.

In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control, along with other federal agencies, warned that the world might soon return to a "pre-antibiotic era." Two million people each year now get hospital-borne bacterial infections, 1.4 million of them resistant to antibiotics and 90,000 of them lethal. One example is sepsis, the infection that sickened* Joan Didion's daughter, as Didion relates in The Year of Magical Thinking. New antibiotics are being discovered. But it takes 10 years and at least $800 million to bring an antibiotic to market, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. The big advantage that phages offer over antibiotics is that bacterial resistance is less of a problem. Unlike antibiotics, new phage batches can quickly be whipped up to take the place of phages to which bacteria become resistant.  MORE

Yes, a 20,000% markup: Fluoride-- intended only for human consumption by people under 14 years of age--is injected into our drinking water supply at approx. 1 part-per-million (ppm), but since we only drink 1/2 of one percent of the total water supply, the rest literally goes down the drain as a free hazardous-waste disposal for the chemical industry, where we PAY them so that we can flush their expensive hazardous waste down our toilets. How many salesmen dream of such a deal? (Follow the money.) ... 

Let's begin at the beginning: The first occurrence of fluoridated drinking water on Earth was found in Germany's Nazi prison camps. The Gestapo had little concern about fluoride's supposed effect on children's teeth; their alleged reason for mass-medicating water with sodium fluoride was to sterilize humans and force the people in their concentration camps into calm submission. (Ref. book: "The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben" by Joseph Borkin.)

The following letter was received by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee Wisconsin, on 2 October 1954, from Mr. Charles Perkins, a chemist: "I have your letter of September 29 asking for further documentation regarding a statement made in my book, The Truth About Water Fluoridation, to the effect that the idea of water fluoridation was brought to England from Russia by the Russian Communist Kreminoff. "In the 1930's, Hitler and the German Nazi's envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy of pan-Germanism. The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass-control which was submitted to and adopted by the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would produce sterility in women, and so on. In this scheme of mass-control, sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place. ...

"Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluoride will in time reduce an individual's power to resist domination, by slowly poisoning and narcotizing a certain area of the brain, thus making him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him.” [A convenient light lobotomy]

 MORE

Don't look at the animals - look at the paperwork

USDA Process Verified Program
Suppliers with approved USDA Process Verified Programs are able to make marketing claims associated with their process verified points -- such as age, source, feeding practices, or other raising and processing claims -- and market themselves as "USDA Process Verified." The USDA Process Verified Program does not relieve the supplier of meeting regulatory requirements issued by other Federal Departments or USDA Agencies.

WASHINGTON - The Agriculture Department is cutting its tests for mad cow disease by about 90 percent, drawing protests from consumer groups.

 

The current testing level " 1,000 each day " reflects the heightened concern that followed the discovery in December 2003 of mad cow disease in the United States.

 

Since then, tests have turned up two more cases of the disease, known medically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. The government says there may be a handful of undetected cases.

CANADA - BSE News

With the death of the fifth person from CJD, and the investigation of a sixth since January 2005 in a small area in Idaho, health authorities are scrambling to figure out why. CJD, the 100% fatal brain wasting disease, is supposed to be vanishingly rare. Scientists from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta are puzzled. According to Reuters (ref 1): "Is what is happening in Idaho an anomaly, a statistical fluke? That is possible," said Ermias Belay, a top CJD expert with the CDC who is helping advise officials in Idaho. "But once it exceeds 1.5 or 2 per million, you start asking questions."  [DUH...Ya Think?]

(1) In 2002 a bombshell paper from Professor John Collinge's research group provoked a stir in academia. The paper showed that genetically engineered mice, when injected with mad cow disease protein, unexpectedly produced a molecular profile that closely resembled sporadic CJD, as well as the expected variant CJD profile (ref 2). Collinge's group is a global leader in mad cow disease research. They followed up with confirmatory results in 2004 (ref 3) essentially saying the same thing. The consequence for humans was that mad cow disease might manifest as BOTH variant and sporadic CJD. Collinge's research suggests that maybe we should consider the possibility that some cases of sporadic CJD may arise from eating mad cow meat. This has implications for the Idaho CJD cluster.  MORE

By JULIA WATSON
UPI Food Writer

LE BUGUE, France, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- You might feel relieved, when packing your schoolchild off with a boxed lunch of baloney sandwich, to know that it could be served with a dose of virus on the side -- courtesy of the Food and Drug Administration.

On Aug. 18, for the first time ever, the FDA approved viruses as a useful food additive. Not just for ready-to-eat meats but for poultry, too. Before you recoil in fear at the chicken breast you have poised at the end of your fork, viruses, like certain fats, can be good.

On the other hand, you might feel horrified. Is this taking the description "food additive" in a far-reaching direction that could all too easily run out of control?

The concoction that has just been approved has a job to do. It is a cocktail of six different "good" viruses designed to kill off strains of Listeria monocytogenes bacterium, which just love cold cuts and poultry as much as we do. It will be sprayed on packaged processed meats.

Unlike other additives, however, whose ranks the virus cocktail will now officially join, it will not be listed on the labels. So you won't know it's there.

Last year 500 Americans died from eating Listeria-contaminated ready-to-eat meats and poultry products. Around 2,500 more became seriously ill.

This remarkable FDA approval of a virus for food safety use is a subject, you won't be surprised to hear, that has had Internet bloggers in a frenzy. A sample or two from digg.com:

"How about when the bacteria evolve to be immune to the viruses ... "

"Another problem I see, as some have mentioned is the viruses attacking our natural bacteria flora in our gut. If the virus can sometime down the road attack a friendly bacteria species such as e. coli (yea it's good) or lactobacillus acidofilus then this could be harmful or at least uncomfortable."

"... a certain bacteriophage turns a certain strain of bacteria into the one that cause Cholera. Another one does Diphtheria."

The coffers-filling possibilities for Intralytix, the firm that came up with the stuff, is another red rag to the bulls. The company has already licensed its spray to a multinational corporation for global use -- but, with unusual caution, refuses to name which one. And it's now angling for FDA approval for viral sprays to treat E. coli- and Salmonella-contaminated foods.

The Office of Food Additive Safety at the FDA promises we won't be aware through a change in taste of which meats have been treated with these blights in shiny armor.

But perhaps we should be. Perhaps the issue, as the bloggers have it, has nothing to do with taste concerns.

These bacteriophages (from the Greek meaning "bacteria eater") are not unfamiliar to us. They appear in our digestive tracts, as well as in the environment, food and water, doing what they can to keep us healthy by fighting harmful bacteria.

But Byron J. Richards, a certified clinical nutritionist, is particularly vexed over the FDA's approval. Writing on NewsWithView.com on Aug. 24 he denounces the foods due for treatment as "the first virally contaminated foods entering our food supply with the blessings of the FDA." Strong stuff.

MORE

EPA Unions Call for Nationwide Moratorium on Fluoridation,

Congressional Hearing on Adverse Effects, Youth Cancer Cover Up

Eleven EPA employee unions representing over 7000 environmental and public health professionals of the Civil Service have called for a moratorium on drinking water fluoridation programs across the country, and have asked EPA management to recognize fluoride as posing a serious risk of causing cancer in people. The unions acted following revelations of an apparent cover-up of evidence from Harvard School of Dental Medicine linking fluoridation with elevated risk of a fatal bone cancer in young boys.

The unions sent letters to key Congressional committees asking Congress to legislate a moratorium pending a review of all the science on the risks and benefits of fluoridation. The letters cited the weight of evidence supporting a classification of fluoride as a likely human carcinogen, which includes other epidemiology results similar to those in the Harvard study, animal studies, and biological reasons why fluoride can reasonably be expected to cause the bone cancer – osteosarcoma – seen in young boys and test animals. The unions also pointed out recent work by Richard Maas of the Environmental Quality Institute, University of North Carolina that links increases in lead levels in drinking water systems to use of silicofluoride fluoridating agents with chloramines disinfectant.  MORE

By Dr. Carolyn Dean

June 19, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

The U.S. Delegation to Codex has just issued a formal written statement to the Codex Alimentarius Commission that the United States, during the July 4-9, 2005, meeting in Rome, will support compulsory rules created by this international organization directly overruling U.S. law regarding access to vitamins.

The U.S. law that is about to be vanquished is the Dietary Supplement, Health and Education Act of 1994. Codex is a joint venture between the United Nation’s World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization. (WHO/FAO) The World Trade Organization (WTO) has already stated that it will enforce Codex “guidelines” as the world standard for trade in dietary supplements. This will mean that gradually, pill-by-pill, our access to the dietary supplements we depend on will disappear.  MORE

June 30, 2006 is a day that will be long remembered as a dark milestone in the history of FDA and its campaign against health consumers. On June 30, an FDA "Final Rule" goes into effect, establishing a regulatory power grab of such scale and scope that it attempts to bypass all laws, the will of Congress and fundamental protections for consumers. This "Final Rule," which may as well be called a "Final Solution" for drug consumers, claims that consumers can no longer sue drug companies for the harm caused by any FDA-approved drug, even if the drug's manufacturer intentionally misled the FDA by hiding or fabricating clinical trial data.

In one blatantly illegal act, the FDA is attempting to pull off the greatest Big Pharma coup of all: The outright elimination of any responsibility whatsoever for the suffering and death caused by deadly pharmaceuticals.

In the preamble of the FDA's new "Final Rule" to take effect on June 30, the agency asserts that FDA approval of prescription drugs -- and their implied safety -- may no longer be second-guessed by consumers or organizations of any kind. The FDA's stamp of approval, the agency claims, is an absolute declaration of safety of all such drugs, for any use whatsoever, including off-label use (the use of drugs on health conditions that were never tested in clinical trials)  MORE 

By Byron J. Richards, CCN

August 24, 2006

NewsWithViews.com

On Friday, August 18, 2006, the FDA approved a viral cocktail to be sprayed on foods we eat. This is the first time viruses have been approved for use as food additives. The FDA wants you to believe it will be safe to consume these viruses every day for the rest of your life with no adverse health effects. This is a monumental announcement by the FDA, indicating they are throwing all caution to the wind regarding the safety of our food supply.

Are you willing to stand in line for a virus-laden sandwich? How do you like the idea of buying virus-infested food for your family? The first virally contaminated foods entering our food supply with the blessings of the FDA will be luncheon meat and poultry. Live viruses will be sprayed on foods such as cold cuts, sausages, hot dogs, sliced turkey, and chicken.

At issue is the very real problem of a poor quality FDA-approved food supply that is already full of diseased and sickly animals, many of them imported from other countries. The use of antibiotics during growth and radiation during food processing is required by the fast-food animal farms owned by multi-national companies to cover up the horrendous health of the animals they wish to feed to Americans. Animals in poor health are a friendly place for bacteria to grow and prosper, especially after such meat goes to market. Rather than address the source of the problem, the FDA wants to add another adulteration into our food supply.   MORE

Intersex Fish Found in Potomac River

Pollution Feared to Cause Mutation