EPA Agreement with Amtrak Brings Greater Drinking Water Protections for Riders

EPA Agreement with Amtrak Brings Greater Drinking Water Protections for Riders

(PHILADELPHIA – April 26, 2012) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has entered into an agreement with the National Railroad Passenger Corp. (Amtrak) to ensure safe and reliable drinking water for the railroad’s passengers and crews. To better protect the riding public from illnesses caused by microbiological contamination, the agreement requires Amtrak to monitor all the drinking water systems on its railcars and provide enhanced maintenance for its water systems.

“This agreement is a significant step forward in assuring safe water supplies for the more than 25 million of people in the U.S. who travel by rail each year,” said EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin. “Rail passengers deserve to feel confident that the water we drink on the train is safe.”

The consent order requires Amtrak to provide multi-level drinking water protection for all of its train operations throughout the US, including those where it provides contract services. These protections include: enhanced monitoring for pathogens including e. coli; proper disinfection and system flushing; corrective action and notification when necessary; timely follow-up monitoring; preventive maintenance, and, reporting and record keeping. In the past, Amtrak only sampled its railcars’ drinking water systems on a random basis.

This agreement will assure that Amtrak provides the protections set forth in the Safe Drinking Water Act for public water systems to riders of Amtrak’s fleet of approximately 1,500 railcars. According to Amtrak, over 78,000 passengers ride more than 300 Amtrak trains per day.

A copy of the consent order will be available after 4 p.m. today at this site: http://www.epa.gov/reg3wapd/index.htm.

Hepatitis C Drugs Show Promise

Hepatitis C Drugs Show Promise

In Small Sample, E. Coli Found in 48% of Chicken in Stores

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Thursday, April 12, 2012

In Small Sample, E. Coli Found in 48% of Chicken in Stores 

By STEPHANIE STROM

A recent test of packaged raw chicken products bought at grocery stores across the country found that roughly half of them were contaminated with the bacteria E. coli.

E. coli, which the study said was an indicator of fecal contamination, was found in 48 percent of 120 chicken products bought in 10 major cities by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit group that advocates a vegetarian diet among other things. The study results were released Wednesday.

“Most consumers do not realize that feces are in the chicken products they purchase,” said Dr. Neal D. Barnard, president of the group. “Food labels discuss contamination as if it is simply the presence of bacteria, but people need to know that it means much more than that.”

Food safety specialists said the findings were a tempest in a chicken coop, particularly because the test was so small and the E. coli found was not a kind that threatened public health.

“What’s surprising to me is that they didn’t find more,” said Dr. Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. “Poop gets into your food, and not just into meat — produce is grown in soil fertilized with manure, and there’s E. coli in that, too.”

Dr. Doyle emphasized that the findings by the nonprofit group were different from the recent uproar over “pink slime,” the inexpensive filler containing ammonia gas or citric acid that is often added to ground beef products to kill E. coli and other bacteria. “That’s an additive,” he said.

Antibiotics for Livestock Will Require Prescription, F.D.A. Says

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Thursday, April 12, 2012

Antibiotics for Livestock Will Require Prescription, F.D.A. Says

By GARDINER HARRIS

Farmers and ranchers will for the first time need a prescription from a veterinarian before using antibiotics in farm animals, in hopes that more judicious use of the drugs will reduce the tens of thousands of human deaths that result each year from the drugs’ overuse.

The Food and Drug Administration announced the new rule Wednesday after trying for more than 35 years to stop farmers and ranchers from feeding antibiotics to cattle, pigs, chickens and other animals simply to help the animals grow larger. Using small amounts of antibiotics over long periods of time leads to the growth of bacteria that are resistant to the drugs’ effects, endangering humans who become infected but cannot be treated with routine antibiotic therapy.

At least two million people are sickened and an estimated 99,000 die every year from hospital-acquired infections, the majority of which result from such resistant strains. It is unknown how many of these illnesses and deaths result from agricultural uses of antibiotics, but about 80 percent of antibiotics sold in the United States are used in animals.

Michael Taylor, the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for food, predicted that the new restrictions would save lives because farmers would have to convince a veterinarian that their animals were either sick or at risk of getting a specific illness. Just using the drugs for growth will be disallowed and, it is hoped, this will cut their use sharply. The new requirements will also make obtaining antibiotics more cumbersome and expensive.

No Seizure Risk From Measles Vaccine in Older Children

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Tuesday, April 10, 2012

No Seizure Risk From Measles Vaccine in Older Children 

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

A large new study has ruled out concerns that children over 4 are at greater risk of seizures after getting a common measles-containing vaccine called MMRV. The vaccine -- which combines the shot for measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, with the vaccine for varicella, or chickenpox -- is given to children in two steps, first as toddlers and then again between ages 4 and 6.

Concerns were raised several years ago after scientists found that 1-year-old children who were given the MMRV vaccine had double the risk of a febrile seizure, a brief convulsion triggered by a fever, compared with those who were given the MMR and chickenpox shots separately but on the same day. Febrile seizures, which can also be set off by ear infections, colds and other viral illnesses, strike about 5 percent of children younger than 5 and are particularly common in toddlers. Although they are alarming to parents, they do not cause any long-term problems.

The earlier findings in toddlers raised concerns that children who got the combined shot later on might also be at greater risk of febrile seizures. But the new study, financed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published in the journal Pediatrics, found that that was not the case. Looking at more than 150,000 children who were vaccinated from 2000 to 2008, the researchers found that there was no increased risk of febrile seizures in older children who were given either the combined MMRV shot or the MMR and chickenpox vaccines separately.

5 in Missouri reported ill from E. coli - KansasCity.com

5 in Missouri reported ill from E. coli - KansasCity.com

Chytrid Fungus in Frogs Threatens Amphibian Extinction

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Sunday, April 08, 2012

Chytrid Fungus in Frogs Threatens Amphibian Extinction 

By JOHN UPTON

A clerk serving Cantonese-speaking customers at a cluttered market in San Francisco’s Chinatown reached into a tub of American bullfrogs. She drew a one-pound frog from the top of the pile. She whacked its head, sliced its neck and placed its body in a plastic grocery bag.

The frog cost about $4. If it was sautéed, stir-fried or cooked in a clay pot and served with rice and vegetables, it could provide enough poultry-flavored white meat for a meal for at least two people.

Tests on the bullfrog by Raul Figueroa, a researcher at San Francisco State University, confirmed that it was infected with an invisible but virulent fungus. The chytrid skin fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or B.d., is harmless to humans but may have wiped out hundreds of amphibian species. Two other bullfrogs that The Bay Citizen bought from other Chinatown markets also tested positive.

The disease appears to affect only amphibians, and some species are immune to its effects while others succumb rapidly. It causes the amphibians’ skin to thicken and leads to cardiac arrest.

American bullfrogs are native to eastern North America but are reared in factory farms around the world. Two million bullfrogs are imported into the Bay Area every year, according to federal import records, and millions more are shipped to other major cities.

Scientists and conservationists fear that the global trade could lead to the extinction of countless species of frogs and salamanders. Amphibians play subtle but substantial roles in California’s ecosystem, eating insects and feeding wildlife.

Researchers Use Game to Change How Scientists Study Disease Outbreaks

Researchers Use Game to Change How Scientists Study Disease Outbreaks

04/03/2012 05:00 PM EDT

It may seem like a game of tag, but it's an innovative tool for teaching the fundamentals of epidemiology, the science of how infectious diseases move through a population.

An international team of scientists--including researchers who teach an annual clinic at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Muizenberg, South Africa--is helping epidemiologists improve the mathematical models they use to study outbreaks of diseases like cholera, AIDS and malaria.

In ...

More at http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123638&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

This is an NSF News item.

Deadly bat disease in Missouri, farthest west yet - KansasCity.com

Deadly bat disease in Missouri, farthest west yet - KansasCity.com

Ticks, mosquitoes already showing up in Missouri - KansasCity.com

Ticks, mosquitoes already showing up in Missouri - KansasCity.com

Haiti’s Cholera Outraced the Experts and Tainted the U.N.

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Haiti’s Cholera Outraced the Experts and Tainted the U.N.

By DEBORAH SONTAG

MIREBALAIS, Haiti — Jean Salgadeau Pelette, handsome when medicated and groomed, often roamed this central Haitian town in a disheveled state, wild-eyed and naked. He was a familiar figure here, the lanky scion of a prominent family who suffered from a mental illness.

On Oct. 16, 2010, Mr. Pelette, 38, woke at dawn in his solitary room behind a bric-a-brac shop off the town square. As was his habit, he loped down the hill to the Latem River for his bath, passing the beauty shop, the pharmacy and the funeral home where his body would soon be prepared for burial.

The river would have been busy that morning, with bathers, laundresses and schoolchildren brushing their teeth. Nobody thought of its flowing waters, downstream from a United Nationspeacekeeping base, as toxic.

When Mr. Pelette was found lying by the bank a few hours later, he was so weak from a sudden, violent stomach illness that he had to be carried back to his room. It did not immediately occur to his relatives to rush him to the hospital.

“At that time, the word ‘cholera’ didn’t yet exist,” said one of his brothers, Malherbe Pelette. “We didn’t know he was in mortal danger. But by 4 that afternoon, my brother was dead. He was the first victim, or so they say.”

In the 17 months since Mr. Pelette was buried in the trash-strewn graveyard here, cholera has killed more than 7,050 Haitians and sickened more than 531,000, or 5 percent of the population. Lightning fast and virulent, it spread from here through every Haitian state, erupting into the world’s largest cholera epidemic despite a huge international mobilization still dealing with the effects of the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.

The world rallied to confront cholera, too, but the mission was muddled by the United Nations’ apparent role in igniting the epidemic and its unwillingness to acknowledge it. Epidemiologic and microbiologic evidence strongly suggests that United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal imported cholera to Haiti, contaminated the river tributary next to their base through a faulty sanitation system and caused a second disaster.

“It was like throwing a lighted match into a gasoline-filled room,” said Dr. Paul S. Keim, a microbial geneticist whose laboratory determined that the Haitian and Nepalese cholera strains were virtually identical.

And, as the deaths and continuing caseload indicate, the world’s response to this preventable, treatable scourge has proved inadequate. Cholera, never before recorded in Haiti, stayed one step ahead of the authorities as they shifted gears from the earthquake recovery. While eventually effective in reducing the fatality rate, the response was slow to get fully under way, conservative and insufficiently sustained.