FDA flexes new muscles, shuts down peanut plant

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration halted operations of the country's largest organic peanut butter processor Monday, cracking down on salmonella poisoning for the first time with the new enforcement authority the agency gained in a 2011 food safety law.

FDA officials found salmonella all over Sunland Inc.'s New Mexico processing plant after 41 people in 20 states, most of them children, were sickened by peanut butter manufactured at the Sunland plant and sold at Trader Joe's grocery chain. The FDA suspended Sunland's registration Monday, preventing the company from producing or distributing any food.

The food safety law gave the FDA authority to suspend a company's registration when food manufactured or held there has a "reasonable probability" of causing serious health problems or death. Before the food safety law was enacted early last year, the FDA would have had to go to court to suspend a company's registration.

Sunland had planned to reopen its peanut processing facility on Tuesday and a spokeswoman said before the FDA's announcement Monday that the company hoped to be selling peanut butter again by the end of the year. The spokeswoman didn't have immediate comment on the suspension.

The company now has the right to a hearing and must prove to the agency that its facilities are clean enough to reopen.

Michael Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for foods, said the FDA's ability to suspend a registration like this one is a major step forward for the agency.

"Consumers can be assured that products will not leave this facility until we determine they have implemented preventive measures that are effective to produce safe products," Taylor said.

Sunland Inc. is the nation's largest organic peanut butter processor, though it also produces many non-organic products. The company recalled hundreds of organic and non-organic nuts and nut butters manufactured since 2010 after Trader Joe's Valencia Creamy Peanut Butter was linked to the salmonella illnesses in September.

In addition to Trader Joe's, Sunland sold hundreds of different peanut products to many of the nation's other large grocery chains, including Whole Foods, Safeway, Target and others.

In a monthlong investigation in September and October, after the outbreak linked to processor Sunland and to Trader Joe's, FDA inspectors found samples of salmonella in 28 different locations in the plant, in 13 nut butter samples and in one sample of raw peanuts.

The agency also found improper handling of the products, unclean equipment and uncovered trailers of peanuts outside the facility that were exposed to rain and birds.

The FDA said that over the past three years, the company shipped products even though portions of their lots, or daily production runs, tested positive for salmonella in internal tests. The agency also found that the internal tests failed to find salmonella when it was present.

FDA inspectors found many of the same problems — including employees putting their bare fingers in to empty jars before they were filled, open bags of ingredients, unclean equipment, and many other violations — in a 2007 inspection. Similar problems were recorded by inspectors in 2009, 2010 and 2011, though government officials didn't take any action or release the results of those inspections until after the illnesses were discovered this year.

In a statement earlier this month, Sunland officials denied that they knowingly shipped tainted products.

"At no time in its 24-year history has Sunland, Inc. released for distribution any products that it knew to be potentially contaminated with harmful microorganisms," Sunland president and CEO Jimmie Shearer said in a statement on the company's website. "In every instance where test results indicated the presence of a contaminant, the implicated product was destroyed and not released for distribution."

A separate peanut butter outbreak in 2009 not related to Sunland was linked to hundreds of illnesses and nine deaths.

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Find Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mcjalonick

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Online:

FDA updates on Sunland and list of recalled items: http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodSafety/CORENetwork/ucm320413.htm

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Dog days in Cuba: from shih tzus to schnauzers

HAVANA (AP) — The Cuban capital has played host to political summits and art festivals, ballet tributes and international baseball competitions. Now dog lovers are getting their chance to take center stage.

Hundreds of people from all over Cuba and several other countries came to a scruffy field near Revolution Plaza this past week to preen and fuss over the shih tzus, beagles, schnauzers and cocker spaniels that are the annual Fall Canine Expo’s star attractions. There were even about a dozen bichon habaneros, a mid-sized dog bred on the island since the 17th century.

As dog lovers talked shop, the merely curious strolled the field, checking out the more than 50 breeds on display while carefully dodging the prodigious output of so many dogs.

The four-day competition, which ended Sunday, included competitions in several breeding categories, and judges were flown in from Nicaragua, Colombia and Mexico.

“This is a small, poor country, but Cubans love dogs,” said Miguel Calvo, the president of Cuba’s dog federation, which organized the show. “We make a great effort to breed purebred animals of quality.”

Winners don’t receive any trophy or prize money, but that doesn’t mean the competition is any less fierce.

Anabel Perez, owner of a cocker spaniel named Lisamineli after the U.S. actress, spent more than half an hour coifing the dog’s hair in preparation for the competition, while the owner of a shih tzu named Tiguer meticulously brushed his coat nearby.

“I’m a hairdresser for humans,” explained Tiguer’s owner, Miguel Lopez. “So it’s easy for me. I like shih tzus because they are a lot of work to keep well groomed.”

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ChannelAdvisor says eBay sales up 57 percent early on Cyber Monday

(Reuters) – ChannelAdvisor said client sales on eBay Inc‘s online marketplace jumped 57 percent from a year before early on Cyber Monday.

The sales growth rate was five times higher than during the same period last year, said ChannelAdvisor, which helps merchants sell more on websites including Amazon.com Inc and eBay.com.

Client sales on Amazon.com were up 52 percent during the first part of Cyber Monday, ChannelAdvisor also reported.

(Reporting By Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Actor: CBS comedy ‘Two and a Half Men’ is ‘filth’

NEW YORK (AP) — The teenage actor who plays the half in the hit CBS comedy “Two and a Half Men” says it’s “filth” and through a video posted by a Christian church has urged viewers not to watch it.

Nineteen-year-old Angus T. Jones has been on the show since he was 10 but says he doesn’t want to be on it. He says, “Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth.”

The video was posted by the Forerunner Christian Church in California, where Jones says he went to meet his spiritual needs.

Show producer Warner Bros. Television has no comment. CBS hasn’t responded to a request for comment left Monday.

The show stars Jon Cryer as Jones’ uptight dad and originally featured Charlie Sheen as his hedonistic philandering uncle, but Sheen was replaced by Ashton Kutcher.

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U.S. kids getting recommended amount of sleep: study

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Children in the U.S. appear to be getting as much shut-eye as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends, according to a new study.

“We can’t say this is the amount that they should be sleeping,” said Jessica Williams, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“All we could really do is compare our estimated norms with what is recommended, and it seems like it falls pretty well in line with the recommendations,” she told Reuters Health.

Williams and her colleagues point out in their study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, that there has been concern that U.S. kids are getting too little sleep.

Insufficient sleep has been tied to all sorts of issues in kids and teens, from behavior problems to heart health risks (see Reuters Health reports of October 2, 2012 and October 16, 2012).

But there isn’t a lot of hard evidence on how much shut-eye children typically get, Williams said, so the group set out to get an estimate of average sleep duration from birth to age 18.

The researchers gathered data from a nationwide survey that has tracked families for decades.

For this study, they focused on parents’ reports of their children’s sleep, beginning in 1997.

At the time, 2,832 children were included. In 2002 and 2007 the families were surveyed again and there were 2,520 and 1,424 children included, respectively.

Dr. Maurice Ohayon, director of the Stanford Sleep Epidemiology Research Center in Palo Alto, California, said one of the big strengths of the study is that it tracked changes in sleep among the same children as they aged.

“We have an evolution of the sleep during the childhood,” said Ohayon, who was not involved in the study. “That is the unique thing.”

Williams’s team found that until their second birthday, babies in the study slept an average of 12 to 14 hours during each 24-hour period.

By age four that had dropped to about 11 hours of sleep and by age 10, to 10 hours. By age 16, kids were getting an average of about nine hours of sleep per night.

The findings suggest most kids’ sleep habits are in step with government guidelines.

According to the CDC, toddlers should be getting 12 to 14 hours of sleep. Preschoolers should get 11 to 13 hours of sleep, and adolescents age 10 to 17 should get 8.5 to 9.5 hours.

The researchers didn’t find any differences in the amount of sleep between boys and girls, and only a slight gap between white and Hispanic kids.

Hispanic children tended to sleep 19 minutes longer than white children after age nine, but Williams said that difference is too small to matter for individual kids.

Parent reports of how much sleep their kids get are not perfectly accurate, and they often can’t describe the quality of sleep, such as whether kids wake up in the night. Williams said it’s still possible individual children aren’t sleeping enough, because the study could only measure reports of sleep duration, and not sleep quality.

Tracking sleep in a laboratory is more precise, but would cost too much for a study this size, said Ohayon.

He told Reuters Health the study still offers a good sense of how much sleep children typically get, which is valuable in helping to gauge whether a child has a sleep disorder.

“What we are hoping to do with these norms is give some sort of reference to be used by clinicians and parents to see if children fall far from average,” said Williams.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/KEGTVv Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, online November 26, 2012.

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Violence, economic unrest as Egypt's political foes dig in their heels

CAIRO (AP) — Supporters and opponents of Egypt's president on Sunday grew more entrenched in their potentially destabilizing battle over the Islamist leader's move to assume near absolute powers, with neither side appearing willing to back down as the stock market plunged amid the fresh turmoil.

The standoff poses one of the hardest tests for the nation's liberal and secular opposition since Hosni Mubarak's ouster nearly two years ago. Failure to sustain protests and eventually force Mohammed Morsi to loosen control could consign it to long-term irrelevance.

Clashes between the two sides spilled onto the streets for a third day since the president issued edicts that make him immune to oversight of any kind, including that of the courts.

A teenager was killed and at least 40 people were wounded when a group of anti-Morsi protesters tried to storm the local offices of the political arm of the president's Muslim Brotherhood in the Nile Delta city of Damanhoor, according to security officials.

It was the first reported death from the street battles that erupted across much of the nation on Friday, the day after Morsi's decrees were announced. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, identified the boy as 15-year-old Islam Hamdi Abdel-Maqsood.

The tensions also dealt a fresh blow to the economy, which has suffered due to the problems plaguing the Arab world's most populous nation since Mubarak's ouster.

Egypt's benchmark EGX30 stock index dropped 9.59 percentage points Sunday in the first trading session since Morsi issued his decrees. The losses were among the biggest since the turbulent days and weeks immediately after Mubarak's ouster in a popular uprising last year. The loss in the value of shares was estimated at close to $5 billion.

The judiciary, the main target of the edicts, has pushed back, calling the decrees a power grab and an "assault" on the branch's independence. Judges and prosecutors stayed away from many courts in Cairo and other cities on Sunday.

But the nation's highest judicial body, the Supreme Judiciary Council, watered down its opposition to the decrees on Sunday. It told judges and prosecutors to return to work and announced that its members would meet with Morsi on Monday to try to persuade him to restrict immunity to major state decisions like declaring war or martial law or breaking diplomatic relations with foreign nations.

Morsi supporters insist that the measures were necessary to prevent the courts, which already dissolved the elected lower house of parliament, from further holding up moves to stability by disbanding the assembly writing the new constitution, as judges were considering doing. Both the parliament and the constitutional assembly are dominated by Islamists. Morsi accuses Mubarak loyalists in the judiciary of seeking to thwart the revolution's goals and barred the judiciary from disbanding the constitutional assembly or parliament's upper house.

Opposition activists, however, have been adamant since the crisis first erupted that they would not enter a dialogue with Morsi's regime before the decrees are rescinded.

Protesters also clashed with police at Cairo's Tahrir Square, the birthplace of the mass protests that toppled Mubarak, and in the side streets and avenues leading off the plaza. The Interior Ministry, which is in charge of the police, said 267 protesters have been arrested and 164 policemen injured since the unrest began a week ago, initially to mark the anniversary of street protests a year ago against the nation's then-military rulers. Forty-two protesters were killed in those demonstrations.

The ministry did not say how many protesters were injured in the latest clashes in Tahrir, but security officials put the figure at 260.

Hundreds of protesters staging a sit-in in Tahrir have vowed not to leave before Morsi rescinds his decrees. The two sides also have called for massive rival protests Tuesday in Cairo, signaling a protracted struggle.

Morsi's office issued an English-language statement late Sunday defending his decrees and repeating the argument he used when addressing supporters Friday outside his Cairo palace — that they were designed to bolster the country's transition to democratic rule and dismantle Mubarak's old regime.

"The presidency reiterates the temporary nature of the said measures, which are not meant to concentrate powers," it said. The statement also pledged Morsi's commitment to engaging all political forces on the drafting of a new constitution. Secular and Christian members withdrew from the panel drafting the document, alleging that the Islamists who dominate the body have hijacked the process to produce a charter with an Islamist slant.

Nader Omran, of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party, said any changes to the decrees were "out of the question" but Morsi might "make pledges, vows or addendums explaining his position to clarify the decrees."

He said Morsi would hand over his legislative powers to parliament's upper chamber once a new constitution is adopted in a nationwide referendum and ahead of parliamentary elections. The presidency did not confirm the claim, but doing so would leave the Egyptian leader with the state's executive and legislative powers until around April.

The move also has caused some internal discord among the Morsi camp, with one aide, Samer Marqous, already resigning to protest the "undemocratic" decree.

Another Morsi adviser Ayman al-Sayyad wrote on his Twitter account that the president met Sunday for the second time in as many days with his 17-member advisory council and three of his assistants.

"I think it (the meeting) produced a genuine realization of the gravity of the situation ... We were candid today in our meeting with the president and we now expect practical steps on the ground." He did not elaborate.

Leading Egyptian democracy advocate Mohammed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Laureate and a former director of the U.S. nuclear agency, warned Saturday of increasing turmoil that could potentially lead to the military stepping in unless Morsi rescinds his new powers.

Egypt's liberal and secular groups — long divided, weakened and uncertain as Islamist parties rose to power in the months after the revolution — are seeking to rally in response to the decrees as the stakes are high. The fractured opposition came together as the engine of the 18-day uprising that forced Mubarak to step down after 29 years in power, bringing millions out on the streets, but they have failed to recapture that energy after months of setbacks.

Morsi, meanwhile, already has backed down twice in high-profile battles with the judiciary in the five months he's been in office. The U.S.-trained engineer failed to challenge the court ruling dissolving parliament's powerful lower chamber and had to rescind his decision to fire the country's attorney-general, Mubarak-era appointee Abdel-Maguid Mahmoud, in October. He fired him on Thursday as part of his edicts.

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Associated Press writer Aya Batrawy contributed to this report.

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Israel successfully tests missile defense system

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel successfully tested its newest missile defense system Sunday, the military said, a step toward making the third leg of what Israel calls its “multilayer missile defense” operational.

The “David’s Sling” system is designed to stop mid-range missiles. It successfully passed its test, shooting down its first missile in a drill Sunday in southern Israel, the military said.

The system is designed to intercept projectiles with ranges of up to 300 kilometers (180 miles).

Israel has also deployed Arrow systems for longer-range threats from Iran. The Iron Dome protects against short-range rockets fired by militants in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. Iron Dome shot down hundreds of rockets from Gaza in this month’s round of fighting.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the success of Iron Dome highlighted the “immense importance” of such systems.

“David’s Sling,” also known “Magic Wand,” is developed by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and U.S.-based Raytheon Co. and is primarily designed to counter the large arsenal of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon.

The military said the program, which is on schedule for deployment in 2014, would “provide an additional layer of defense against ballistic missiles.”

The next generation of the Arrow, now in the development stage, is set to be deployed in 2016. Called the Arrow 3, it is designed to strike its target outside the atmosphere, intercepting missiles closer to their launch sites. Together, the two Arrow systems would provide two chances to strike down incoming missiles.

Israel also uses U.S.-made Patriot missile defense batteries against mid-range missiles, though these failed to hit any of the 39 Scud missiles fired at Israel from Iraq In the first Gulf War 20 years ago. Manufacturers say the Patriot system has been improved since then.

Middle East News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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U.S. musician Marcus Miller hurt in Swiss bus crash

ZURICH (Reuters) – U.S. jazz musician Marcus Miller was injured on Sunday along with members of his band when their bus crashed in Switzerland, killing the driver, police said.

The two-time Grammy winner was travelling with 10 members of his band from Monte Carlo in Monaco to Hengelo in the Netherlands when the bus crashed on the highway near the town of Schattdorf in central Switzerland.

A Swiss police spokesman said the driver died from his injuries. The reserve driver, Miller and the members of his band were all injured but not seriously, he said, declining to give further details.

Miller, who plays keyboard and clarinet as well as electric bass, has collaborated with Miles Davis and Luther Vandross and was on tour to promote his album Renaissance.

Earlier this year, 22 children and six adults returning from on a ski trip organized by a Belgian school were killed in a bus crash in Switzerland.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson; Editing by Jon Hemming)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Detecting Cancer…With a Cellphone?

Smartphone technology is often seen as much of nuisance as it is a convenience, but having that kind of communicative power at our fingertips has a surprising advantage; it’s serving as a bridge, bringing  healthcare to third world countries that had previously been too remote and too costly to reach.

The Kilimanjaro Cervical Screening Project is spearheading one use of smartphone technology in a way that’s surprisingly simple, but could end up saving thousands of women’s lives.

Armed with screening kits, treatment tools and cellphones, teams of non-physician medical workers will visit remote locations in rural Tanzania to screen women for cervical cancer. Instead of the swab method used in the typical Pap smear, workers will use their cellphones to photograph a patient’s cervix, text the image to a physician and then receive back a diagnosis and treatment recommendation.

But can it really be that simple? Dr. Karen Yeates of Queen’s University, who is the lead investigator of the project, told CNN, “That’s the beauty of it — for early grade cancers, those will be able to be treated right in the field, right in the rural area.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), rates of cervical cancer in Africa are up to ten times those in developed countries, and among those diagnosed, about 50,000 women die from it annually.

Though cervical cancer has very low mortality rates in developed countries like the U.S., that’s generally due to regular screenings which catch the disease in its earliest and most treatable incarnations. However, in countries like Tanzania, women in remote villages obviously don’t have access to those types of preventative measures. Subsequently, the WHO estimates that by the time most African women are diagnosed with the disease, they’ve already advanced into its latest fatal stages. But regular screenings could put a stop to that. 

In addition to addressing reproductive healthcare, cellphones are as of late becoming facilitators of cardiac care in developing countries as well. Earlier this year, high school student Catherine Wong discovered how to turn her cellphone into a portable ECG machine, bringing heart monitoring capabilities to the most remote locations with results that could be beamed to doctors no matter how far away.

The Kilimanjaro Cervical Screening Project is gaining some notoriety because it’s recently become one of the 68 finalists in Canada’s Grand Challenges, a fund awarded to medical innovators who’ve invented new systems or products to bring healthcare to the poorest parts of the world. As a finalist, the Kilimanjaro Project has been granted $ 100,000, allowing it to begin its initial trials.

So much of good healthcare rests on the early detection of illness and now that geography and cost aren’t the impediments they once were, patients in developing countries have real opportunities to survive illnesses once believed to be fatal. 

Do you expect that “mobile healthcare” may eventually become the standard method of care in countries like the U.S. as well? Let us know what you think about it in the Comments.

Related Stories on TakePart:

• Student Athletes Shouldn’t Be Dying

• That Figures: Life-Saving CPR                   

• Cardiac Arrest? An iPhone App Might Save Your Life

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A Bay Area native, Andri Antoniades previously worked as a fashion industry journalist and medical writer.  In addition to reporting the weekend news on TakePart, she volunteers as a web editor for locally-based nonprofits and works as a freelance feature writer for TimeOutLA.com. Email Andri | @andritweets | TakePart.com

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Massachusetts natural gas explosion damaged 42 buildings

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) — Preliminary investigations show more than 40 buildings were damaged in a natural gas explosion in Massachusetts that injured 18 people, building inspectors said Saturday.

A strip club was flattened and a day care center was heavily damaged in the massive explosion Friday night in Springfield, one of New England's biggest cities.

No one was killed in the explosion.

Investigators were trying Saturday to figure out what caused the blast that could be heard for miles, left a large hole in the ground where the multistory brick building housing Scores Gentleman's Club once stood and scattered debris over several blocks.

Officials already had evacuated part of the entertainment district after responding to a gas leak and odor reported about an hour before the explosion. Gas workers venting a gas leak got indications that the building was about to explode and they ducked for cover behind a utility truck — along with firefighters and police officers — just before the blast, said Mark McDonald, president of the New England Gas Workers Association.

Most of the injured were in that group, and the truck that saved their lives was essentially demolished, he said.

"It really is a miracle and it's an example of our public safety officials, each and every day, putting themselves in harm's way, taking what could have been considered a very routine call of an odor of gas, but they took the proper precautions," State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan said. "And thanks to God that they did."

Officials also marveled how the 5:30 p.m. blast occurred when a day care center next door was closed. The center's building was heavily damaged.

Lt. Gov. Tim Murray and Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno were attending a tree-lighting ceremony when the explosion occurred. Sarno said some people mistakenly thought the boom was part of the holiday event.

The explosion blew out windows in a three-block radius, leaving at least three buildings irreparably damaged and causing emergency workers to evacuate a six-story apartment building that was buckling, police said. Pieces of broken glass littered streets and sidewalks. It was unclear how many residents had been evacuated. A shelter was set up at a school, but city officials said no one stayed there overnight.

Omar Fermin, manager of the Punta Cana Restaurant two blocks from the explosion site, found the floor-to-ceiling windows blasted out when he came to check on the property Saturday morning.

"It looks like an earthquake hit," said Fermin, a native of the Dominican Republic. "I've never seen anything like it."

He said he was waiting for someone to come and assess the damage. He worried the restaurant would remain closed for weeks while the owner seeks to replace the massive custom-made windows.

Authorities cordoned off the center of the explosion Saturday as building inspectors worked to identify unsafe structures. Anxious residents gathered at the perimeter, waiting for permission to visit their buildings.

Preliminary reports show the blast damaged 42 buildings housing 115 residential units, said Thomas Walsh, spokesman for Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno.

Three buildings were immediately condemned, and 24 others require additional inspections by structural engineers to determine whether they are safe, Walsh said.

Dogs trapped in abandoned buildings barked loudly Saturday as building inspectors fanned out across the area. One inspector said he wished he could get a ladder and permission to retrieve a dog that was barking in the upper floor of one building sealed off from residents.

Authorities are opening an animal shelter for pets affected by the explosion, Walsh said.

Coan, the fire marshal, said his office is investigating the cause of the blast and its possible origin. The state's Department of Public Utilities was also investigating.

Sheila Doiron, a spokeswoman for Columbia Gas of Massachusetts, said the company will continue to monitor for any potential leaks within several blocks of the blast site. So far, she said, the company hadn't yet found any measurable readings.

The utility will keep at least 30 workers at the scene, along with a so-called sniffing car mounted with sophisticated gadgets capable of detecting low levels of gas leaks, Walsh said.

Doiron said the company also didn't find in its records any gas odor calls to the area where the strip club was located.

Authorities also deployed police officers throughout the area to prevent looting, Walsh said.

The victims were taken to two hospitals in the city. Those injured were nine firefighters, two police officers, four Columbia Gas workers, two civilians and another city employee.

Springfield, which is 90 miles west of Boston and has about 150,000 residents, is the largest city in western Massachusetts. It's known as the home of the Basketball Hall of Fame, which is not near the blast site.

The city has been rebuilding from damage caused by a tornado in June 2011.

Wayne Davis, who lives about a block from the destroyed building, said he felt his apartment shake.

"I was laying down in bed, and I started feeling the building shaking and creaking," he said.

The Navy veteran said the boom from the explosion was louder than anything he'd ever heard, including the sound of a jet landing on an aircraft carrier.

The blast was so loud it was heard in several neighboring communities. Video from WWLP-TV showed the moment of the explosion, with smoke billowing into the air above the neighborhood.

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Associated Press writers Rodrique Ngowi, Bridget Murphy and Bob Salsberg in Boston and Jessica Hill in Springfield contributed to this report.

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