I awoke at 1:20 a.m. to the sound of two possums apparently raping each other.

They prefer to do it on the tin roofs that grace the homes in Brisbane.

It’s not like cats in Kansas, it’s louder and sounds more violent.

But they’re so cute.

A helicopter sounded like it was investigating the possum-love and about to land on the roof; then a train went by; then another helicopter.

My semi-toilet-friendly daughter interrupted another night of Blade-Runner lite with an exceedingly wet bed.

I did laundry; at 3 a.m.

The Queenslander style of house favored by Brisbanites is on wooden stilts (because the river has a 100-year flood every 30 years) with a large balcony to capture cool breezes. Washing machines and clotheslines are on the balcony.

So are possums.

The possums piss and crap everywhere, every night, and are fearless: they will run into the house if the balcony door and several windows are not strategically closed.

Anyone know of zoonotic possum diseases I should be concerned about?

Basketball is mind-numbingly dull to watch. But it can be mildly entertaining if players are vomiting.

A new study describes a 2010 outbreak involving several NBA teams (that’s the professionals, the ones who aren’t playing and no one notices), the first known report of a norovirus outbreak in a professional sports association.

Published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and available online, the study highlights unique circumstances for spreading this highly contagious virus among players and staff on and off the court.

Author Rishi Desai, MD, MPH, and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that as many as 13 NBA teams located in 11 different states were affected by a norovirus outbreak from November to December 2010. "We confirmed that norovirus spread within at least one team and possibly from one team to another," said Dr. Desai. "Overall, 21 players and three staff from 13 teams were affected."

Rigorous sports schedules and close interactions between athletes and staff put them at increased risk for norovirus infection, the study authors note. Athletes and staff spend a lot of time together in closed spaces—in buses and airplanes, locker rooms, and on the court. Norovirus can spread easily and quickly in such spaces -- through the air and on objects and surfaces where it can be infectious for days or weeks. Infected persons can shed billions of virus particles, making it very infective. Even the best hygiene and cleaning may not get rid of the virus since it resists common disinfectants.

Teams can limit norovirus transmission by keeping ill athletes off the court during games and practice, the study suggests, and by avoiding contact with athletes and staff when they are ill and up to 24 hours after recovery. Strict personal hygiene, including handwashing with soap and water, disinfecting common spaces with a sodium hypochlorite solution, and early reporting are critical for limiting transmission.

Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel won the inaugural Formula One Indian Grand Prix on Sunday, finishing 8.4 seconds ahead of McLaren's Jenson Button, whose team had to fly in replacements from Britain after four members fell sick days before the race.

While teams have sourced some of their food locally, much of it has been flown out from Europe and drivers are being careful about what they eat in a land famed for fiery curries and consequent stomach upsets.

Sauber had a team PR fall sick but none of the other teams approached by Reuters reported any problems.

Any time I write anything marginally critical of food safety auditors, my in-box is flooded with comments about how auditors aren’t inspectors, they’re just doing a job, I’m a propeller-head, and how unfair it all is.

If those audits are really worth something, market them at retail so consumers can choose.

Here are some other voices:

Tom Karst of The Packer writes that given the failure of third-party audits to pinpoint potential food safety problems in recent cases involving German sprouts, Georgia peanuts and Colorado cantaloupe, some primary handlers of produce might be considering sending in their own teams to inspect suppliers.

“I am hearing from a few of the larger produce organizations (first handlers) is that is what they are going back to,” said Dave Gombas, senior vice president for food safety and technology for the Washington, D.C.-based United Fresh Produce Association. “They are not trusting the third-party audits and they are going out and doing their own inspections as well to verify if the third-party (inspectors) are doing a good job.”

My group has been saying that since about 1998.

In light of recent outbreaks, some growers question the value of audits, said Chris Schlect, president of the of the Northwest Horticultural Council, Yakima, Wash.Gombas said the services auditors offer vary greatly — one of the biggest issues to resolve in the industry.

While the FDA is charged with developing a process to accredit third-party auditors in foreign countries under the new Food Safety Modernizaton Act, Gombas predicts FDA will find it hard to rely on third-party audits.

“Everyone is looking for FDA to come up with a solution, but I don’t know if they have any better answers than we do,” he said.

He noted the United Fresh effort to harmonize Good Agricultural Practices did not address third-party auditor certification.

“We knew that the harmonzied standard was a tough enough goal to achieve.”
The Global Food Safety Initiative which begin in 2000 and was designed to harmonize audit standards in Europe — still hasn’t solved that issue.

Ed Beckman, president of California Tomato Farmers and Scott Horsfall president and CEO of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, wrote to the Packer to say it has become very clear that a truly effective food safety program is about much more than the score you receive from your food safety inspector and that the true measure of success does not come from an audit score but is achieved when an entire commodity group or industry adopts a culture of food safety that is designed to identify risks, strives for continual improvement and always seeks to learn more.

Jim Crawford wrote to the Denver Post to say that the private-sector food safety auditor who gave a near-perfect score to Jensen Farms’ listeria-contaminated cantaloupe-packing process is subject to no Food and Drug Administration oversight, or to any other regulatory accountability. The article notes that this is the case with the entire third-party food-safety auditing industry.

A 2-year-old Cleveland County boy remained hospitalized Friday as state officials work to pinpoint the cause of an apparent outbreak of E. coli that has sickened the toddler and many others across North Carolina.

Hunter Tallent of Shelby underwent a third day of dialysis treatments in Charlotte on Friday. His is one of 26 E. coli-related cases the state is investigating. North Carolina health officials said all but three people had visited the state fair in Raleigh.

Hunter is the only victim reported from the Charlotte region, and one of five hospitalized on Friday, according to state health officials.

Hunter and his parents, Lindsay and James Tallent, went to the fair Oct. 15. A few days later, their youngest son fell ill with nausea and diarrhea. He wouldn't move around much.

Tests have confirmed that 10 of the 26 suspected cases were caused by E. coli; the rest remain under investigation, Division of Public Health officials said in a statement. Public health officials say they consider the State Fair to be the probable cause for the outbreak and plan to talk with some attendees to try to determine the specific source.

A petting zoo was the source of a 2004 E. coli outbreak at the N.C. State Fair that sickened 108 people.

Lindsay Tallent says the family strolled through the barns to look at cows and other animals but says they did not touch any animals. Hunter ate a hot dog, corn dog, some pizza and ice cream, and drank lemonade, his mom said.

Doctors are not sure how long Hunter will remain in the hospital.

As Indiana State Police find more shocking cases of spoiled and contaminated food heading to Indiana restaurants, 13 Investigates has discovered how food distribution companies get away with it. A six-month Eyewitness News investigation reveals the people who are supposed to be protecting you from this dangerous food have been looking the other way, putting millions of families at risk.

Hundreds of miles from Indiana, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health sits in his Capitol Hill office, shaking his head.

"Enough is enough. I want action now!" says Joseph Pitts (R-Pennsylvania).

Pitts comments came after he watched WTHR video showing truckloads of spoiled and dangerous food heading to Indiana restaurants and grocery stores.

The powerful Congressman says seeing graphic video of contaminated food in transport makes him angry, but he is even more aggravated that more hasn't been done to stop it.

Last week, Trooper David Eggers stopped a truck that was speeding near the town of Kentland in northwest Indiana. Inside the truck, he found boxes full of contaminated food.

"Fluids from chicken and beef and pork were running onto the floor, and we found fluids from beef on vegetables," Eggers told Eyewitness News.

WTHR was there to see the contaminated load up close. Eyewitness News cameras captured blood on the floor of the delivery truck – so much blood that it was flowing out onto the street below.

"These boxes are soaked through from blood," complained Newton County environmental health officer Jill Johnson as she inspected the load. "There's raw meat together with vegetables – all moisture damaged – and the potential for cross contamination is very great," she said.

A policeman in Evesham, Pennsylvania who found body hair in his bagel sandwich last year has sued the deli where he bought it and the cook who admitted sabotaging it as payback for a previous run-in with the officer.

Jeremy Merck, 30, a six-year veteran of the department, alleged in the suit that Good Foods to Go was negligent for failing to keep its premises safe and for failing to properly examine the sandwich that Ryan J. Burke served him on Feb. 20, 2010.

Burke confessed to police on the day of the incident that he put hair from his chest and pubic area in Merck's egg, turkey, and cheese sandwich in retaliation for a 2009 traffic arrest by the officer, according to records.

The New Jersey State Police lab found the hairs contained Burke's DNA.

Mount Holly attorney Bruce Zamost, who represents Merck, said customers are protected by a state law that makes restaurants liable for serving contaminated food.

Mark R. Sander, an attorney for Good Foods, said Wednesday the eatery was not responsible for Burke's action.

"Ryan Burke was a 27-year-old man who acted outside the scope of his employment," Sander said.

Burke was fired immediately after he was arrested and Merck and others in the Police Department continued to patronize Good Foods, Sander added.

People who forgot to mention they had eaten sprouts may have thrown disease trackers off the trail as they sought to trace the source of the deadly strain of E. coli that sickened more than 4,300 people and killed at least 50 in Europe this year, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

While a definitive genetic link remains elusive, three separate lines of investigation point to sprouts as the means by which the deadly O1O4:H4 strain of the bacteria was spread, researchers led by Udo Buchholz at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany’s disease-control agency.

Buchholz and colleagues wrote, “The one dish that frequently exposed guests to sprouts was the side salad, which contained tomatoes, cucumbers, three sorts of leaf salads, and sprouts. Sprouts may have been the ingredient that visitors recalled least in such a mixed salad.”

Buchholz and colleagues conducted three studies in parallel. The first involved asking patients hospitalized with E. coli infection about their recent food consumption, and comparing that with food eaten by uninfected people. It found that “the only significant variable was sprouts.”

The second study identified 10 groups of diners who ate at a restaurant in Luebeck between May 12 and 16. It found that among 115 people who had been served sprouts, 31 fell ill, compared with none of those who had not eaten sprouts.

The third investigation traced 41 clusters of infections to a producer in Lower Saxony, who grew sprouts from seeds that came from a “supplier X,” Buchholz and colleagues wrote, without identifying either the producer or the supplier. A European Commission task force said in July that the sprouts were probably grown from fenugreek seeds imported from Egypt in 2009. The researchers still don’t know whether the seeds were contaminated before, during or after export from Egypt.

In an accompanying editorial, Martin J. Blaser, M.D. from the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology, New York University, writes the chain of transmission appears to have begun in Egypt, with fecal contamination of fenugreek seeds by either humans or farm animals during storage or transportation, perhaps as long ago as 2009. The seeds then went to a European distributor and from there to farms in several countries. During sprout germination, bacteria multiplied and moved from farm to restaurants and consumers, as Buchholz et al. extensively detail in their study. The evidence for such a series of events is compelling, even though the organism was not identified at the earliest steps, since the trail often is cold in point-source outbreaks by the time investigators are able to conduct trace-back investigations.

German outbreak of Escherichia coli O104:H4 associated with sprouts
26.oct.11
The New England Journal of Medicine
Udo Buchholz, M.D., M.P.H., Helen Bernard, M.D., Dirk Werber, D.V.M., Merle M. Böhmer, Cornelius Remschmidt, M.D., Hendrik Wilking, D.V.M., Yvonne Deleré, M.D., Matthias an der Heiden, Ph.D., Cornelia Adlhoch, D.V.M., Johannes Dreesman, Ph.D., Joachim Ehlers, D.V.M., Steen Ethelberg, Ph.D., Mirko Faber, M.D., Christina Frank, Ph.D., Gerd Fricke, Ph.D., Matthias Greiner, D.V.M., Ph.D., Michael Höhle, Ph.D., Sofie Ivarsson, M.Sc., Uwe Jark, D.V.M., Markus Kirchner, M.D., M.P.H., Judith Koch, M.D., Gérard Krause, M.D., Ph.D., Petra Luber, Ph.D., Bettina Rosner, Ph.D., M.P.H., Klaus Stark, M.D., Ph.D., and Michael Kühne, D.V.M., Ph.D.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1106482?query=featured_home
Human infection with Shiga-toxin–producing Escherichia coli is a major cause of postdiarrheal hemolytic–uremic syndrome. This life-threatening disorder, which is characterized by acute renal failure, hemolytic anemia, and thrombocytopenia, typically affects children under the age of 5 years. Shiga-toxin–producing E. coli O157 is the serogroup that is most frequently isolated from patients with the hemolytic–uremic syndrome worldwide.1
In May 2011, a large outbreak of the hemolytic–uremic syndrome associated with the rare E. coliserotype O104:H4 occurred in Germany.2-5 The main epidemiologic features were that the peak of the epidemic was reached on May 21 and May 224,5 and that the vast majority of case subjects either resided or had traveled in northern Germany. Almost all patients from other European countries or from North America had recently returned from northern Germany.2,6,7 Of the affected case subjects, 90% were adults, and more than two thirds of case subjects with the hemolytic–uremic syndrome were female.4
Early studies in Hamburg suggested that infections were probably community-acquired and were not related to food consumption in a particular restaurant. A first case–control study that was conducted on May 23 and 24 suggested that raw food items, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, or leaf salad,3 were the source of infection. The consumption of sprouts, which was previously implicated in outbreaks of Shiga-toxin–producing E. coli in the United States8 and Japan,9 was mentioned by only 25% of case subjects in exploratory interviews, so consumption of sprouts was not tested analytically.
This report describes the investigations that were conducted by the federal agencies under the auspices of the German Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection, as well as by the respective state agencies, to identify the vehicle of infection of this international outbreak.

Who doesn’t like a pine nut; an excellent addition to sauted spinach, fresh salad or pesto.

Except when the nuts are carrying salmonella, posing a raw consumption and cross-contamination risk in the kitchen.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced today it is collaborating with public health and agriculture officials in New York and other states and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis infections linked to Turkish pine nuts purchased from bulk bins at Wegmans grocery stores.

A total of 42 individuals infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella Enteritidis have been reported from 6 states.

Among 42 persons for whom information is available, illnesses began on or after August 20, 2011. Ill persons range in age from <1 to 94 years, and the median age is 43 years old. Fifty-seven percent of patients are female. Two patients were hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.

Epidemiologic and laboratory investigations conducted by officials in local, state, and federal public health, agriculture, and regulatory agencies linked this outbreak to eating Turkish pine nuts sold in bulk bins at Wegmans grocery stores. Some Turkish pine nuts were consumed as an ingredient in prepared foods, such as Caprese salad or asparagus with pine nuts, sold at Wegmans stores. These pine nuts are imported from Turkey, but may not have originated there.

Early in the investigation, shopper card information was collected and used to identify which specific products to suspect as sources of illness. Ill persons gave permission for public health officials to retrieve shopper card purchase information. A review of shopper card records identified that ill persons had purchased the same type of Turkish pine nuts from bulk bins at different locations of Wegmans grocery stores before becoming ill.

Laboratory testing conducted by the Virginia Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services isolated the outbreak strain of Salmonella Enteritidis from Turkish pine nuts that were purchased from bulk bins at Wegmans stores and collected from an ill person’s home. The Virginia Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services also isolated the outbreak strain of Salmonella Enteritidis from retail samples of Turkish pine nuts collected from a Wegmans store where ill persons reported shopping. Laboratory testing conducted by the New York State Department of Health, Wadsworth Center Laboratory, isolated SalmonellaEnteritidis from two separate samples of homemade pesto containing Turkish pine nuts from two unrelated ill persons' homes, and from Turkish pine nuts which were purchased from bulk bins at a Wegmans store and collected from another ill person’s home. Both samples of homemade pesto have been tested and it is determined the Salmonella in these pine nuts is also the outbreak strain.