n2doc
n2doc's JournalThe Surprising Ingredient In Raw Cookie Dough That Could Make You Sick
by NANCY SHUTE
Cookie dough may be one of the joys of the holiday season, but it's dangerous, at least for people who nibble it raw.
That's the lesson from a new study of a 2009 outbreak of E. coli bacteria, which sickened 77 people, most of them teenage girls and children. The outbreak was traced back to eating raw Nestlé Toll House cookie dough. It was the first time that packaged cookie dough had ever caused an outbreak.
Now for the next surprise: Food safety experts think the most likely culprit is flour. Their findings appear today in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease.
"We didn't conclusively implicate the flour," Karen Neil, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who investigated the outbreak, tells The Salt. But of all the ingredients, she says, flour seems most likely.
Some ingredients, including molasses, sugar, and margarine, had been processed to kill pathogens. And in the past, some forms of E. coli have been found in commercial flour.
more
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/12/09/143450624/the-surprising-ingredient-in-raw-cookie-dough-that-could-make-you-sick
Tools of a kind
By Bruce Bower Web edition : Friday, December 9th, 2011
STRIKING SIMILARITIES
A rock (several views shown) from which sharp flakes were pounded off around 106,000 years ago in southern Arabia displays an ancient East African toolmaking style.Yamandu Hilbert
Culturally speaking, ancient East Africans were a stone’s throw away from southern Arabia.
Stone tools collected at several sites along a plateau in Oman, which date to roughly 106,000 years ago, match elongated cutting implements previously found at East African sites from around the same time, say archaeologist Jeffrey Rose of the University of Birmingham, England, and his colleagues. New finds also include cores — or rocks from which tools were pounded off with a hammer stone — that correspond to East African specimens, the researchers report online November 30 in PLoS ONE.
East African sites that have yielded these distinctive stone artifacts extend southward along the Nile River to the Horn of Africa.
“In the mountain of papers speculating about human dispersal out of Africa, a link between southern Arabia and the Nile Valley has never been considered,” Rose says.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/336833/title/Tools_of_a_kind
Controversy Erupts over Man-Made Pandemic Avian Flu Virus
By Jeneen Interlandi | December 9, 2011 |
It’s a rare kind of research that incites a frenzied panic before it’s even published. But it’s flu season, and influenza science has a way of causing a stir this time of year.
Epidemiologists have long debated the pandemic potential of H5N1, a.k.a. avian bird flu. On one hand, the virus spreads too inefficiently between humans to seem like much of a threat: it has caused less than 600 known cases of human flu since first emerging in 1997. On the other hand, when it does spread, it can be pretty deadly: nearly 60 percent of infected humans died from the virus. For years now, the research has suggested that any mutations that enhanced the virus’s ability to spread among humans, would simultaneously make it less deadly. But in a recent batch of as-yet-unpublished studies, two scientists - Yoshihiro Kawaoka from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center, in the Netherlands – have shown otherwise.
Working separately, they each hit on a combination of mutations (five, in Dr. Fouchier’s case) that makes H5N1 airborne (enabling it to spread readily between humans), without making it less deadly. In laboratory experiments, ferrets infected with this mutant strain passed it to other ferrets in nearby cages (ferrets are a common subject of flu studies because they react to flu viruses in a similar way to humans). A significant proportion of infected subjects died.
Efforts to publish those findings have been fraught. Critics say that making the methodology or gene sequences widely available, amounts to giving would-be bioterrorists an easy recipe. They also worry that these manmade strains might escape from the lab.
more
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=contagion-controversy-erupts
AP source: Paterno fractures pelvis after fall
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — Joe Paterno fractured his pelvis again following a fall at his home but will not need surgery, a person close to the family told The Associated Press on Sunday.
The former Penn State football coach was expected to make a full recovery after slipping Saturday and was admitted to the hospital the next day, the person added. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Paterno, who turns 85 on Dec. 21, is also undergoing radiation and chemotherapy for what his family has said is a treatable form of lung cancer. Son Scott Paterno has said doctors are optimistic about a full recovery from the illness.
Paterno initially hurt his pelvis in August after he was blindsided on the field during preseason practice. It was determined Paterno should remain in the hospital now to facilitate his regimen of cancer treatments while recovering from the pelvis injury, the AP was told.
Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/AP-source-Paterno-fractures-pelvis-after-fall-2395537.php
With Lobbying Blitz, For-Profit Colleges Diluted New Rules
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: December 9, 2011
WASHINGTON — Last year, the Obama administration vowed to stop for-profit colleges from luring students with false promises. In an opening volley that shook the $30 billion industry, officials proposed new restrictions to cut off the huge flow of federal aid to unfit programs.
But after a ferocious response that administration officials called one of the most intense they had seen, the Education Department produced a much-weakened final plan that almost certainly will have far less impact as it goes into effect next year.
The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.
Anita Dunn, a close friend of President Obama and his former White House communications director, worked with Kaplan University, one of the embattled school networks. Jamie Rubin, a major fund-raising bundler for the president’s re-election campaign, met with administration officials about ATI, a college network based in Dallas, in which Mr. Rubin’s private-equity firm has a stake.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/us/politics/for-profit-college-rules-scaled-back-after-lobbying.html
If you build bike lanes, people will use them
This is a chart of the number of bike commuters in New York. It’s known as the NYC Commuter Cycling Indicator, and it comes from surveys taken ten times per year at predetermined points around the city. It doesn’t give a good count of the number of bike commuters in New York, but it gives an excellent idea of the trends: bike commuting has essentially quadrupled in the past decade, and has doubled over the past four years. Which just happen to be the four years during which Janette Sadik-Khan has run the Department of Transportation.
This is important because it shows just how effective strong leadership can be, when combined with a dedication to creating good infrastructure. And if you delve a bit into the numbers behind the indicator, this comes out even more clearly. For instance: in 2007, the Queensboro Bridge saw an average of 1,292 cyclists per day, about 80% of the 1,626 cyclists per day on the Brooklyn Bridge. By 2011, the Queensboro number had shot up to 2,904 bikers per day — 25% more than the 2,322 cyclists crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s entirely a function of the fact that the Brooklyn Bridge is unpleasant for cyclists, despite the fact that by dint of its location it should be one of the busiest bike corridors in the city.
The lesson of this chart, then, is that if you build bike lanes, cyclists will appear to fill them. That’s fantastic news, since cities with lots of cyclists are always the most pleasant cities to live and work in — even for people who don’t bike themselves. New York City has a long way to go before it can be considered genuinely bike-friendly. But it’s moving in the right direction, and the bike-sharing scheme to be launched next year will provide a massive boost. Let’s hope that now Sadik-Khan has provided the necessary momentum, her successors embrace and extend what she has started.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/12/10/chart-of-the-day-nyc-biking-edition/
Profile Information
Gender: Do not displayMember since: Tue Feb 10, 2004, 01:08 PM
Number of posts: 47,953
