Press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 31, 2012
EPA and USDA Announce First-Ever Microbial Risk
Assessment Guidance
Guideline will help better determine health
risks from food and waterborne pathogens
WASHINGTON - The Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) and the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)
today announced the first-ever Microbial Risk Assessment (MRA) Guideline. This
new MRA Guideline lays out an overarching approach to conducting meaningful
assessments of the risks to Americans posed by pathogens in food and water.
Pathogens ingested in food and water can result in acute
gastrointestinal-related illnesses; some gastrointestinal-related illnesses can
result in long-term and permanent health effects as well as premature death.
This new guideline will improve the quality of the data collected by public
health scientists charged with protecting Americans from pathogen-related risks
in food and water.
“This guidance contributes significantly to
improving the quality and consistency of microbial risk assessments, and
provides greater transparency to stakeholders and other interested parties in
how federal agencies approach and conduct their microbial risk assessments,”
said Dr. Glenn Paulson, EPA Science Advisor. “Based on the success of this
project, we are seeking further opportunities to combine our technical expertise
in our continuing efforts to protect the Americans’ health.”
“The
microbial risk assessment guideline developed by FSIS, the EPA and our other
public health partners will help protect consumers by allowing us to uniformly
assess and reduce health risks from pathogens,” USDA Under Secretary for Food
Safety Dr. Elisabeth Hagen said. “We’re proud to have worked with our partners
on this guideline that will provide our risk assessors with a transparent and
scientifically rigorous document to use in protecting public
health.”
Formal risk
assessments for food, water, and environmentally-relevant chemicals have been
undertaken for decades. However, an overarching microbial risk assessment
guideline has not been available until now. The guideline announced today meets
this need by providing comprehensive, yet specific and descriptive information
for developing assessments of microbial risk in food and
water.
More
information on the guideline: http://www.epa.gov/raf/microbial.htm
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Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Friday, July 27, 2012
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Friday, July 20, 2012
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Former Employee of Exeter Hospital Arrested in Connection with Hepatitis C Outbreak
Press release from the FBI, Boston Division:
Former Employee of Exeter Hospital Arrested in Connection with Hepatitis C Outbreak
Former Employee of Exeter Hospital Arrested in Connection with Hepatitis C Outbreak
| U.S. Attorney’s OfficeJuly 19, 2012 |
CONCORD, NH—David Matthew Kwiatkowski, 32, a former employee of Exeter Hospital, was arrested in Massachusetts and charged with obtaining controlled substances by fraud and tampering with a consumer product, announced United States Attorney John P. Kacavas.
The charges against Kwiatkowski relate to suspected thefts of the controlled substance Fentanyl, a powerful anesthetic that is substantially more potent than morphine. Although Fentanyl has many legitimate medical usages, it is also subject to diversion and abuse. In addition to stealing Fentanyl, Kwiatkowski, who has hepatitis C, allegedly caused at least 30 individuals to become infected with the blood-borne virus that can cause serious damage to the liver. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), hepatitis C causes more deaths annually in the United States than HIV.
According to an affidavit filed in federal court in New Hampshire today, Kwiatkowski was employed as a medical technician in the cardiac catheterization laboratory (CCL) at Exeter Hospital between April 2011 and May 2012. According to the affidavit, Kwiatkowski was observed leaving the CCL during procedures, sweating profusely, attending procedures on his off-days, and engaging in other suspicious behavior. One witness claimed that he appeared to be “on something” while another witness claimed to have observed “track marks” on his arms. As a technician, Kwiatkowski should not have had access to controlled substances such as Fentanyl. However, a search of his vehicle located an empty Fentanyl syringe and several needles.
The affidavit alleges that Kwiatkowski engaged in drug diversion and infected patients with hepatitis C. Drug diversion occurs when an employee with access, authorized or otherwise, switches syringes. This switch occurs when a person steals a syringe containing narcotics intended for a patient, injects himself with the drug, and replaces the drug in the syringe with another liquid (such as saline), which is then injected into the patient. The investigation has revealed that Kwiatkowski was involved in an incident at a hospital in another state where he allegedly stole a syringe containing Fentanyl from an operating room and replaced it with a syringe containing a different liquid.
If a person with hepatitis C engages in drug diversion in this manner, the patient who receives the fluid from the tainted syringe can contract the disease. Kwiatkowski has insisted to law enforcement officers that he only learned that he was infected with hepatitis C in May 2012. However, investigators have uncovered evidence that he has had this disease since at least June 2010, or two years.
Testing of blood samples from Exeter Hospital patients by the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Public Health Services (DPHS) and the CDC has identified genetic similarities between Kwiatkowski’s Hepatitis C strain and that which infected the 30 patients identified to date. All of the infected patients were treated at Exeter Hospital during the precise time frame that Kwiatkowski was employed there. The only known scientific explanation for an outbreak of hepatitis C at a health care facility over such a long duration is drug diversion by a health care worker. The affidavit alleges that, by engaging in this diversion activity, Kwiatkowski recklessly put patients at risk of death or serious bodily injury.
The affidavit states that Kwiatkowski is originally from Michigan. Prior to working in New Hampshire, he was a traveling medical technician who worked on a contract basis in no fewer than six other states. The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Hampshire is collaborating with the CDC and the Departments of Public Health in those other states where Kwiatkowski worked to address any possible public health implications. There is no evidence to suggest that Kwiatkowski worked at any other health care facilities since he stopped working at Exeter Hospital in May.
Kwiatkowski was arrested this morning at a hospital in Massachusetts where he is receiving medical treatment. He appeared before a United States Magistrate Judge and upon his discharge from the hospital, he will be remanded to the custody of federal authorities in New Hampshire. If convicted on the pending charges, Kwiatkowski faces up to 20 years in prison for tampering with a consumer product and four years in prison for obtaining controlled substances by fraud. Each offense also is punishable by a fine of $250,000 and a term of supervised release following any sentence of imprisonment.
United States Attorney John P. Kacavas commented on the arrest, saying, “The evidence gathered to date points irrefutably to Kwiatkowski as the source of the hepatitis C outbreak at Exeter Hospital. With his arrest, we have eliminated the menace this ‘serial infector’ posed to public health and safety.”
The United States Attorney’s Office and the FBI will be attempting to contact all of the potential victims in this case in the near future. This investigation, which remains active and ongoing, has involved the cooperative efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement entities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; the Drug Enforcement Administration; Office of Criminal Investigations of the Food and Drug Administration; the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office; the New Hampshire State Police; and the Exeter, New Hampshire Police Department. Assistance also has been provided by the New Hampshire Drug Task Force; the Marlborough, Massachusetts Police Department; the Boxborough, Massachusetts Police Department; and the United States Attorney’s Office in the District of Massachusetts.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Monday, July 16, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Destroying Nature Unleashes Infectious Diseases
The following is
an excerpt from an article in
The New York Times
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Destroying Nature Unleashes Infectious Diseases
By JIM ROBBINS
THERE’S a term biologists and economists use these days — ecosystem services — which refers to the many ways nature supports the human endeavor. Forests filter the water we drink, for example, and birds and bees pollinate crops, both of which have substantial economic as well as biological value.
If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can cause a breakdown of these systems and come back to haunt us in ways we know little about. A critical example is a developing model of infectious disease that shows that most epidemics — AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more that have occurred over the last several decades — don’t just happen. They are a result of things people do to nature.
Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic — they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife.
Teams of veterinarians and conservation biologists are in the midst of a global effort with medical doctors and epidemiologists to understand the “ecology of disease.” It is part of a project called Predict, which is financed by the United States Agency for International Development. Experts are trying to figure out, based on how people alter the landscape — with a new farm or road, for example — where the next diseases are likely to spill over into humans and how to spot them when they do emerge, before they can spread. They are gathering blood, saliva and other samples from high-risk wildlife species to create a library of viruses so that if one does infect humans, it can be more quickly identified. And they are studying ways of managing forests, wildlife and livestock to prevent diseases from leaving the woods and becoming the next pandemic.
It isn’t only a public health issue, but an economic one. The World Bank has estimated that a severe influenza pandemic, for example, could cost the world economy $3 trillion.
The problem is exacerbated by how livestock are kept in poor countries, which can magnify diseases borne by wild animals. A study released earlier this month by the International Livestock Research Institute found that more than two million people a year are killed by diseases that spread to humans from wild and domestic animals.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Friday, July 13, 2012
Genetic Database of Bacteria Aims to Track Food-Borne Illness
The following is
an excerpt from an article in
The New York Times
Friday, July 13, 2012
Genetic Database of Bacteria Aims to Track Food-Borne Illness
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
WASHINGTON — A new public database aims to catalog the genetic codes of 100,000 types of bacteria found in food, vastly increasing the amount of data that scientists can use to trace the causes of food-borne illness.
The free database, being set up at the University of California, Davis, will enable scientists to pinpoint not only what food carries the bacteria responsible for a given outbreak — raw tuna in sushi, for example — but also what country it came from. And while responses to such outbreaks have typically taken weeks, the new database is expected to reduce that to days.
“It’s actually a big deal from a scientific standpoint,” said Steven M. Musser, the Food and Drug Administration official who announced plans for the database on Thursday.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Friday, July 6, 2012
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
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