Food fears linger even as tomato scare ends
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:57:39 GMTBy RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The tomato scare may be over, but it has taken a toll — it's cost the industry an estimated $100 million and left millions of people with a new wariness about the safety of everyday foods.
An Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds that nearly half of consumers have changed their eating and buying habits in the past six months because they're afraid they could get sick by eating contaminated food.
They also overwhelmingly support setting up a better system to trace produce in an outbreak back to the source, the poll found.
The people who feel that way include the growers.
Virginia's East Coast Produce, one of the largest tomato growers in the country, has been hammered by slumping demand and falling prices, although Virginia tomatoes were cleared early on, said sales manager Batista Madonia III. He said he's frustrated by the government's inability to find the root cause of the outbreak despite a nearly two-month long investigation.
The salmonella outbreak has sickened more than 1,200 people in 42 states since the first cases were seen in April.
"I guarantee in that time frame, more than 1,000 people were injured slipping on a banana peel," said Madonia.
Although federal officials lifted the tomato warning Thursday, the cause of the outbreak remains unknown. Hot peppers are under suspicion, and tomatoes have not been cleared everywhere.
While the poll found that three in four people remain confident about the overall safety of food, 46 percent said they were worried they might get sick from eating contaminated products. The same percentage said that because of safety warnings, they have avoided items they normally would have purchased.
Christy Taylor, a first-grade teacher from Sacramento, Calif., said she has all but given up on supermarket produce and is buying most of her fresh fruits and vegetables at the local farmers' market instead.
"I see the same farmers every single week," said Taylor, 30, the mother of 2-year-old twin girls. "You meet the people and you see where the is coming from."
Her twins love tomatoes, she said, and chomp on them as if they were apples. But until the mystery of the tainted food is solved, "I feel a little bit more comfortable, a little more safe, doing the local farmers' market," she said.
Eighty-six percent in the poll said produce should be labeled so it can be tracked through layers of processors, packers and shippers, all the way back to the farm. The lack of such a system frustrated disease detectives working on the salmonella outbreak. However, the industry is divided over mandatory tracing technology, and Congress is running out of time to act on any major food safety changes before the election.
The poll found that 80 percent of Americans said they would support new federal standards for fresh produce. Meat and poultry have long been subject to enforceable federal safeguards, but fruits and vegetables are not, although produce increasingly is being implicated in outbreaks.
The high level of uneasiness should not be taken lightly, said Michael R. Taylor, a former senior federal food safety official who now teaches at George Washington University.
"When you have almost half the population avoiding certain foods because of safety concerns, that's very significant from the standpoint of economic impact for the people selling the food, and from the standpoint of peace of mind for consumers," said Taylor.
In addition to the salmonella outbreak, this year has seen the largest ground beef recall in history, raising consumer concerns reflected in the poll.
The survey found gender, racial and economic gaps on attitudes about food safety.
Women, who do most of the shopping, were more concerned than men. For example, 39 percent of men said they were "very confident" that the food they buy is safe, but only 23 percent of women said they felt that way. However, men and women agreed on the need for better federal oversight.
In Congress, a leading advocate of food safety reforms said the industry would do well to listen to consumers on the need for tracing.
"We live in an age of technology where you can bar-code a banana," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "We've got to work this through with the industry and come up with something that's reasonable. The more confidence consumers have, the more goods they will purchase."
The survey was conducted by telephone July 10-14 with 1,000 adults and had a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
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Associated Press polling director Michael Mokrzycki and AP writers Christine Simmons in Washington,and Steve Szkotak in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.
Plans for largescale AIDS vaccine trial dropped
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:49:19 GMTWASHINGTON - Plans for a large-scale trial of a potential AIDS vaccine are being dropped in favor of a smaller, more focused study, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday.
The trial of the vaccine, developed by the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, had been planned to include 2,400 men in the United States in a study called PAVE 100.
However, the agency said that it decided that the vaccine did not warrant a trial of this size and scope. Instead NIAID said it will plan a smaller, more focused clinical trial designed to see whether the product has a significant effect on the amount of virus in a person's blood.
If an effect is found, then additional studies, or an expansion of the study could be carried out.
NIAID said it acted after reviewing the results of the STEP trial, a study of another vaccine that was halted last fall after reports of an increased number of infections among volunteers taking part in the test.
The agency said it still considers its vaccine scientifically intriguing and sufficiently different from other vaccines to proceed with the smaller trial.
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On the Net:
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease: http://www.niaid.nih.gov
Health officials Dont eat lobster tomalley
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:04:22 GMTAUGUSTA, Maine - Maine officials are advising consumers to avoid eating lobster tomalley after tests revealed high levels of toxins in some lobsters.
The Maine Center for Disease Control said Friday that lobster meat is perfectly safe but that people should not eat the tomalley — a soft green substance found in the body of the lobster.
High levels of toxic algae known as red tide have been recorded along Maine's coast this summer, forcing the state to close many areas to clam and mussel harvesting. Tomalley functions as the lobster's liver by serving as a natural filter for contaminants that are in the water.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has advised consumers for many years not to eat tomalley, which is considered a delicacy by some.
Mississippi remains most obese state CDC reports
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:23:57 GMTBy MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer
ATLANTA - The South tips the scales again as the nation's fattest region, according to a new government survey.
More than 30 percent of adults in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee are considered obese. In part, experts blame Southern eating habits, poverty and demographic groups that have higher obesity rates.
Colorado was the least obese, with about 19 percent fitting that category in a random telephone survey done last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The 2007 findings are similar to results from the same survey the three previous years. Mississippi has had the highest obesity rate every year since 2004. But Alabama, Tennessee, West Virginia and Louisiana have also clustered near the top of the list, often so close that the difference between their rates and Mississippi's may not be statistically significant.
The South has had high death rates from heart disease and stroke, health risks that have been linked to obesity, some experts noted.
The CDC study only surveyed adults, but results for kids are similar, said Dr. Miriam Vos, assistant professor of pediatrics at Atlanta's Emory School of Medicine.
"Most of the studies of obesity and children show the South has the highest rates as well," Vos said.
Why is the South so heavy? The traditional Southern diet — high in fat and fried food — may be part of the answer, said Dr. William Dietz, who heads CDC's nutrition, physical activity and obesity division.
The South also has a large concentration of rural residents and black women — two groups that tend to have higher obesity rates, he said.
The study found that about 36 percent of black survey participants were obese, while 28.5 percent of Hispanics and 24.5 percent of whites were.
High poverty rates in the South probably are another factor, said Naa Oyo Kwate, assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
In today's America, poor people tend to be obese: The cheapest foods tend to be calorie-heavy, and stores offering healthier, and more expensive, food choices are not often found in poor neighborhoods, she said.
And why is Colorado so thin? It's a state with a reputation for exercise. It has plentiful biking and hiking trails, and an elevation that causes the body to labor a bit more, Dietz said.
Obesity is based on the body mass index, a calculation using height and weight. A 5-foot, 9-inch adult who weighs 203 pounds would have a BMI of 30, which is considered the threshold for obesity.
CDC officials believe the telephone survey of 350,000 adults offers conservative estimates of obesity rates, because it's based on what respondents said about their height and weight. Men commonly overstate their height and women often lowball their weight, health experts say.
"The heavier you are, the more you underestimate your weight, probably because you don't weigh yourself as often," Dietz said.
Overall, about 26 percent of the respondents were obese, according to the study, published this week in CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
A different CDC survey — a gold-standard project in which researchers actually weigh and measure survey respondents — put the adult obesity rate at 34 percent in 2005 and 2006.
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On the Net:
CDC study data: http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa
Obesity creeps up in US report
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:27:32 GMTWASHINGTON - Obesity continued to creep up in the United States last year and now affects more than one in four US adults, a US government report showed Friday.
In 2005, 23.9 percent of adults in the United States were obese, or had a body mass index greater than 30, while in 2007, the percentage had grown to 25.6 percent, data issued by the Centers for Disease Control showed.
Body mass index is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilos by his or her height squared in meters.
In three states -- Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee -- nearly one in three adults was obese.
Mississippi, which is also the poorest US state, had the highest rate of obesity in the United States, at 32 percent. Colorado had the lowest rate of obesity at 18.7 percent and was the only state in which obesity was running at less than 19 percent.
No state has achieved the official target to bring obesity down to 15 percent of the adult population by 2010, the report showed.
Obesity was highest for non-Hispanic black women, nearly four in 10 of whom were obese.
University graduates were the least likely to be obese -- around 22 percent compared with 29 percent of people who only obtained a high school diploma.
A report issued last year by the Trust for America's Health said the percentage of obsese adults more than doubled in the past 25 years across the United States, growing from 15 percent in 1978-80 to 32 percent in 2003-04.
