The Scripps Howard News Service examined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's records of reported cases of foodborne illnesses and discovered that states differ widely in how aggressively they report food-poisoning outbreaks. Kentucky, for example, reported a total of four outbreaks over a five-year period. The District of Columbia, in the same period, reported 138 cases. The strong suspicion is, of course, that Kentucky just hasn't been keeping score.
Why does this matter? Read this introduction to the story package:
More than 50,000 people got sick or died from something they ate in a hidden epidemic that went undiagnosed by the nation's public health departments over a five-year period.
Americans play a sort of food-poisoning Russian roulette depending on where they live, an investigation by Scripps Howard News Service found. Slovenly restaurants, disease-infested food-processing plants and other sources of infectious illness go undetected all over the country, but much more frequently in some states than others.
Scripps studied 6,374 food-related disease outbreaks reported by every state to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from Jan. 1, 2000, through Dec. 31, 2004. The causes of nearly two-thirds of the outbreaks in that period were officially listed as "unknown."
The findings translate into an alarming potential for tragedy. If health officials are unable to connect illness to food, victims who might eat from the same poisoned source cannot be warned. If food is known as the culprit, but the specific disease lurking within is not diagnosed, the victims may get even sicker or die without proper treatment.
The poor track record of so many state labs also raises chilling questions about their ability to spot or deal with a foodborne terrorist attack.
Families of children who got sick during the five-year period in the study tell heart-rending stories of heroic efforts they made to convince the medical establishment they were victims of food illness.
"My daughter's death would have been listed just as a 'stroke' and swept under the rug," said Todd Nelson, a Continental Airlines pilot and father of a 19-month-old girl who died of E. coli. "But I wanted to know what my daughter really died of. And I wanted somebody to blame."
The Nelson family believes Ana Leigh Nelson ate infected hamburger meat from a popular Minnesota restaurant in 2002. The family demanded further private tests that confirmed a rare strain of E. coli and then demanded that the medical examiner change her death certificate to correctly report death from complications of food poisoning.
"We sort of fell through the cracks," Nelson said.
The study found that Kentucky, Oklahoma and Nebraska are virtually blind to outbreaks of food sickness, rarely detecting that scattered illnesses have common food causes.
The New Turkey Temp
The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer's excellent food editor, Kathleen Purvis, tells me the USDA has updated its recommendations on how much to cook a turkey to be sure it's safe. The old rule was 180 degrees -- the new magic number is 165.
Here is Kathleen's story explaining the change. Keep this one for Christmas dinner season. People do serve turkey at Christmas, right?
A Year After Sago
As we approach the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 2 Sago mine disaster, it is a good time to look back on mine safety issues.
The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette reports:
Two hundred eighty-six of the miners killed on the job in the last decade died alone.
Most of these coal miners also died for the same reason: Their employers ignored safety rules.
Almost every single one of the 320 workers killed in U.S. coal mines in the last decade didn’t have to die, according to a six-month investigation of coal mine safety in America.
Nearly nine of every 10 fatal coal-mining accidents in the last decade could have been avoided if existing regulations had been followed, according to a Sunday Gazette-Mail study of MSHA reports.
The Gazette-Mail analysis found:
- Mine operators were faulted for not performing -- or incorrectly performing -- required safety checks in nearly one-fourth of the mining deaths between 1996 and 2005.
- More than one-quarter of the fatal accidents involved mining equipment that operators had not maintained in safe working condition.
- Mine operators violated roof control, mine ventilation or other required safety plans in 21 percent of the coal-mining deaths examined.
- Mine managers did not train or provided inadequate training to miners in more than 20 percent of those accidents.
"We haven't invented new ways to kill people," said mine safety advocate Davitt McAteer, who ran MSHA during the Clinton administration. "People are dying because we haven’t kept up with particular statutes and rules."
Check out the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health for more mine safety information.
Women Go Hunting
Across the country, it is hunting season, and women are heading into the forests and fields in droves.
Reuters says:
"During the 1980s, we saw a pretty good increase in women hunting, which flattened out in the 1990s," said Mark Damian Duda, executive director of Responsive Management, a research firm specializing in outdoor recreation trends. "And now there seems to be an increase in the past three or four years."
One recent study by the National Sporting Goods Association estimates more than 3 million women now hunt, accounting for about 16 percent of the nearly 21 million active hunters in the United States.
That translates into big money. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates that Americans spend $2.1 billion on firearms and ammunition each year.
Click here to read Responsive Management's Women in the Outdoors Program 2005 Survery Results [PDF].
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