Found this article in Reuters, and it talks about the need for paediatricians to discuss obesity and its health issues with their young patients. May this become a truth in the very soon of now, and continue on in the future!
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By Genevra Pittman
NEW YORK |
Mon Jul 18, 2011 4:19am EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Pediatricians often miss important opportunities to talk about nutrition, exercise, and emotional issues with overweight teens, suggests new research from California.
Focusing on these issues in overweight adolescents may give doctors a chance to stop unhealthy behavior that could be setting kids up for obesity before it's too late, said study author Dr. Carolyn Bradner Jasik.
"Once kids are obese, these behaviors are entrenched, and it's much more difficult," she told Reuters Health.
Her new research hints that while doctors may take the time to ask obese teens about diet and physical activity, and to help them work through ways to improve their health, they may overlook opportunities to have the same conversation with overweight teens.
"There's increased recognition that obesity is a problem and physicians are starting to do more with the population that is defined as obese," said Dr. Randall Stafford, who has studied obesity counseling at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "But they still are neglecting this population that is on a trajectory toward developing obesity."
Recent recommendations from the United States Preventive Services Task Force and the American Academy of Pediatrics say that this type of "preventive screening" can have a real benefit on kids' weight and health.
To see if pediatricians were already having these conversations with their patients, Jasik and her colleagues from the University of California, San Francisco looked at data from a statewide telephone survey of adolescents age 12 to 17.
In 2003, 2005, and 2007, researchers asked more than 9,000 teens about their height and weight, and whether their pediatricians had talked to them at their last appointment about nutrition, physical activity, and emotional issues like anxiety and depression.
By calculating their body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight in relation to height, the researchers were able to determine whether the teens were of normal weight, overweight, and obese.
Depending on the year, between six and eight of every 10 adolescents said they had discussed physical activity and nutrition at their last visit. Only two or three in 10 said they had talked about "emotional distress" with their pediatricians, according to findings published in Pediatrics.
While obese teens were more likely to say they talked with their doctors about diet and exercise, that wasn't the case for overweight teens. And over the course of the survey years, pediatricians became less likely to talk to their patients -- including the obese teens -- about any of those issues.
Jasik said that in an appointment with a normal-weight teen, pediatricians might just ask a few questions about food, exercise, and family history of obesity. Ideally, "with an overweight kid, they might spend 15 to 20 minutes really looking at what their diet and physical activity looks like," she said.
But with pediatricians' already busy schedules, Jasik said that it might not be realistic to expect them to sit down and talk with every overweight and obese kid -- especially now that as many as one-third of U.S. kids are obese or overweight.
"Pediatricians don't have 20 minutes during a preventive visit to do this kind of counseling," she said, and in most cases, insurance companies won't pay for them to bring kids back for a follow-up appointment related to weight issues.
"It's not like physicians don't want to do these things," Stafford, who was not involved in the new study, told Reuters Health. "But whether they have the tools, have the time, and get reimbursed for these things makes a lot of difference."
He said the findings likely apply to the whole country, not just California, and that many overweight and obese adults also aren't getting enough weight-related counseling from their primary care doctors.
Preventive screening rates may have gone down in recent years party because there are simply more obese kids for doctors to screen, but no more time for them to do it, Jasik explained. Also, pediatricians may be frustrated by a lack of places such as sports leagues and supermarkets with healthy foods to send kids who need to get healthier.
She's hopeful that with new guidelines published since her team's research was conducted, the trend may reverse and pediatricians may get better about talking to overweight and obese patients. But, she said, preventing obesity "needs to be a lot bigger than that" and has to require efforts from the whole healthcare system and in the community.
SOURCE: bit.ly/jsoh2P Pediatrics, online July 18, 2011.
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Taken from Reuters.com; source article is below:
Heavy teens need more health talks: study
Posted: 03 June 2011
WASHINGTON - Thirty years after the AIDS epidemic first surfaced, more people than ever before in the United States - more than 1.1 million - are living with HIV, the Centers for Disease Control said Thursday.
The longevity of AIDS patients is widely attributed to the success of antiretroviral drugs which became widespread in the 1990s, but the rise in cases presents new risks for spreading HIV, the CDC said.
"Currently, more than 1.1 million people in the United States live with HIV, and as this number increases, so does the risk of HIV transmission," said CDC chief Thomas Frieden.
"Today, the most infections are among people under 30 - a new generation that has never known a time without effective HIV treatments and who may not fully understand the significant health threat HIV poses."
The CDC's latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report was issued three decades after its June 5, 1981 edition that described unusual cases of pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma in five young men in Los Angeles.
"This report later was acknowledged as the first published scientific account of what would become known as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)," the CDC said.
According to the most recent figures, at the end of 2008, a total of 1,178,350 people in the United States were living with HIV, the CDC said.
About 33.3 million people were living with HIV worldwide at the end of 2009.
Since the epidemic first surfaced, nearly 600,000 people have died of AIDS in the United States, the CDC said.
"Over the last three decades, prevention efforts have helped reduce new infections and treatment advances have allowed people with HIV to live longer, healthier lives," said Frieden.
"But as these improvements have taken place, our nation's collective sense of crisis has waned. Far too many Americans underestimate their risk of infection or believe HIV is no longer a serious health threat, but they must understand that HIV remains an incurable infection."
The number of new AIDS cases reported annually peaked in 1992, with 75,457 that year.
Three years later, in 1995, the United States saw its highest number of deaths - 50,628 - in a single year from AIDS.
After that, antiretroviral drugs were introduced and fatalities began to fall, levelling out at an average of 38,279 AIDS diagnoses and 17,489 deaths per year from 1999 to 2008, the CDC said.
In the United States, gay men continue to account for the majority of new cases at more than half of all new infections, mainly among whites.
However, African-American men are disproportionately affected by new HIV infections at a rate of six times that of white men and three times more than Hispanic men.
Among women, HIV is 15 times as common among blacks as it is among whites.
- AFP/al
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Longevity of AIDS patients presents new risks
Now this looks more like it!
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Posted: 03 June 2011
WASHINGTON - The US government on Thursday ditched its two-decade old pyramid model for healthy eating and introduced a new plate symbol half-filled with fruits and vegetables to urge better eating habits.
The colourful design, called MyPlate, was unveiled by First Lady Michelle Obama and the Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack.
"When mom or dad comes home from a long day of work, we're already asked to be a chef, a referee, a cleaning crew. So it's tough to be a nutritionist, too," said Obama, who is a mother of two daughters, Sasha and Malia.
"But we do have time to take a look at our kids' plates. As long as they're half full of fruits and vegetables, and paired with lean proteins, whole grains and low-fat dairy, we're golden. That's how easy it is."
The plate is sectioned into four parts, with fruits and vegetables making up one half and grains and proteins filling the other half. A dairy drink is included alongside.
Nutrition and You with 2010 Dietary Guidelines, DRIs and MyPlate Update Study Card (2nd Edition)
"Enjoy your food, but eat less," the USDA said, urging people to "avoid oversized portions", choose fat-free or low-fat milk and "make at least half your grains whole grains".
The graphic replaces the food pyramid, released in 1992, which showed that fats and oils were located at the upper tip and should be used sparingly, while whole grains made up the base of the diet with six to 11 servings daily.
The pyramid design was modified in 2005 to include slices of colour and a figure climbing stairs to suggest the importance of exercise, but critics maintained it was too hard for the general public to understand.
"MyPlate is an uncomplicated symbol to help remind people to think about their food choices in order to lead healthier lifestyles," said Vilsack.
"This effort is about more than just giving information, it is a matter of making people understand there are options and practical ways to apply them to their daily lives."
A total of 26.7 percent of the US population is obese, and no single state has been able to meet the 15 percent obesity limit set by the US government, according to 2009 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- AFP/al
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
US replaces food pyramid with "healthy plate"
Posted: 02 June 2011
JOHANNESBURG - HIV infections among the world's youth dropped by 12 percent over the last decade, but fell short of the 25 percent target set by world leaders, a UNICEF report said on Wednesday.
"Is it progress? Yes. Is it enough? Absolutely not," said Elhadj As Sy, UNICEF director for eastern and southern Africa, at the launch of the report in Johannesburg.
Five million people aged 15-24 have HIV, down 12 percent from 2001, but with 2,500 new infections daily, the report said.
Young women are hardest hit, representing more than 60 percent of all young people living with HIV - a figure that jumps to 72 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.
African youth generally bear a staggering share of the burden and risk: close to four of the five million young people living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa, it said.
As Sy said early sexual debut, pregnancy and drug use are driving the spread of HIV among youth, and called on communities to address issues of teen sex and drug use.
"For too long, communities have turned a blind eye to some of the most difficult determinants of risk," he said.
"Here is now the time that we have the collective responsibility... to address these very difficult issues head-on."
The study also found most adolescents living with HIV do not know their status - particularly troubling after a new research last month found that HIV-positive people who take anti-retroviral drugs cut their risk of spreading the virus by 96 percent.
Researchers said the report is the first study to look at HIV among young people.
It was published by seven international organisations including UN children's organisation UNICEF, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank, and comes a week before a UN high-level meeting on AIDS that will review progress in fighting the disease 30 years into the epidemic.
- AFP/al
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
HIV infections down 12% among world's youth: UNICEF
I was going to crack a joke, that cell phones are bad for your health, and you would say, says who?
Okay, small letter who isn't the same as the capital letters WHO, so that is actually a joke, really!
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Posted: 01 June 2011
PARIS: The use of cell phones and other wireless communication devices are "possibly carcinogenic to humans", the World Health Organisation's cancer research agency said on Tuesday.
The radio frequency electromagnetic fields generated by such devices are possibly cancer-causing "based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer," the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said in a statement.
A group of 31 experts meeting in the French city of Lyon over the past eight days "reached this classification based on its review of the human evidence coming from epidemiological studies," said Jonathan Samet, president of the work group.
Two studies in particular, the largest conducted over the last decade, provided evidence that cell phone use was associated with higher rates of glioma, "particularly in those that had the most intensive use of such phones," Samet said.
A number of individuals tracked in the studies had used their phones for 10 to 15 years.
"We simply don't know what might happen as people use their phones over longer time periods, possible over a lifetime," he said.
There are about five billion mobile phones registered in the world.
Both the number of phones in circulation, and the average time spent using them, have climbed steadily in recent years, the working group found.
The IARC cautioned that their review of scientific evidence showed only a possible link, not a proven one, between wireless devices and cancers.
"There is some evidence of increased risk of glioma" and another form of brain cancer called acoustic neuroma, said Kurt Straif, the scientist in charge of editing the IARC reports on potentially carcinogenic agents.
"But it is not at the moment clearly established that the use of mobile phones does in fact cause cancer in humans," he said in a telephone press conference.
The IARC does not issue formal recommendations, but pointed to a number of ways consumers can reduce risk.
"What probably entails some of the highest exposure is using your mobile for voice calls," Straif said.
"If you use it for texting, or as a hands-free set for voice calls, this is clearly lowering the exposure by at least an order of magnitude," or by ten-fold, he said.
A year ago the IARC concluded in a major report that there was no link between cell phones and brain cancer, but the review was widely criticised as based on out-of-date data that did not correspond to current usage levels.
The new review, conducted by a panel of 31 scientists from 14 countries, was based on a "full consensus," said Robert Baan, in charge of the written report, yet to be released.
Exposure data, studies of cancer in humans, experiments on animals and other data were all evaluated in establishing the new classification.
The IARC ranks potentially cancer-causing elements as either carcinogenic, probably carcinogenic, possibly carcinogenic or "probably not carcinogenic." It can also determine that a material is "not classifiable".
Cigarettes and sunbeds, for examples, are rated as "group 1", the top threat category.
- AFP/de
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Cell phone use 'possibly carcinogenic to humans', say WHO
Posted: 01 June 2011
WASHINGTON - A major study in 2009 that claimed a mouse virus was the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome was wrong, and its findings were likely based on contaminated lab samples, US researchers said Tuesday.
"There is no evidence of this mouse virus in human blood," said Jay Levy of the University of California, San Francisco, senior author of the study to be published this week in the journal Science.
Instead, the mouse virus XMRV that was picked up in samples from chronic fatigue patients probably got there because "chemical reagents and cell lines used in the laboratory where it was identified were contaminated with the virus," the university said in a statement.
The 2009 study was hailed as a breakthrough for the estimated one to four million Americans who suffer from the elusive but debilitating illness, and led to many being treated with antiretroviral drugs used against HIV/AIDS.
The study authors said experts need to keep searching for the cause of the disease, which can last for years and cause memory loss, muscle pain, extreme tiredness and possibly insomnia.
"Individuals with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome need to know that taking antiretroviral therapies will not benefit them, and may do them serious harm," said co-author Konstance Knox of the Wisconsin Virus Research Group in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
"Physicians should not be prescribing antiviral compounds used in the treatment of HIV/AIDS to patients on the basis of a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome diagnosis or a XMRV test result."
The 2009 study was conducted by researchers in Nevada and Maryland who found xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) in about two-thirds of blood samples taken from 101 patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Levy, a prominent HIV/AIDS researcher, said he was contacted by the original team to try to replicate its findings by examining blood samples from other chronic fatigue patients.
Using similar procedures to examine the blood of 61 patients, "Levy and colleagues found no evidence of XMRV or any other mouse-related virus," UCSF said.
They also determined that it was highly unlikely that humans could become infected with the mouse virus in the first place, because "human serum quickly kills it."
Other scientists involved in the follow-up research came from the Wisconsin Viral Research Group in Milwaukee, the Blood Systems Research Institute in San Francisco, the Open Medicine Institute in Mountain View and Abbott in Abbott Park.
"With this extensive study, we could not confirm any of the results of the earlier papers," Levy said.
- AFP/al
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
No evidence that mouse virus causes chronic fatigue
Posted: 31 May 2011
GENEVA - As the war on AIDS heads into its fourth decade, the need for funds is spiralling relentlessly higher, prompting a quest for new resources, from consumer levies to contributions from developing giants.
"We currently have around 16 billion dollars available for the global fight against aids," said Bernhard Schwartlander, who heads the strategy and results department at the UN agency UNAIDS.
"But we estimate that in 2015, even if we are most efficient ... we will need at least 22 billion dollars, so (there's) over six billion dollars (in) shortfall between now and ramping up the response in 2015," he told AFP.
Drugs to curb HIV are now being rolled out to millions of poor people, especially in Africa.
But these drugs are not a cure and they have to be taken for the rest of one's life.
As a result, the more lives that are saved, the more the bill goes up.
Yet funding has levelled out over the past three years as Western donors - who shoulder almost all of the financial burden - deal with the aftermath of the financial and economic crises.
"The problem right now is, with the fiscal crisis there is not only a squeeze on AIDS drugs but there is (also) a huge squeeze on AIDS research," said Seth Berkley, who heads the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).
Campaigners are turning to innovative sources to try to plug the gap.
In 2006, 15 countries imposed tiny taxes on air tickets, a move which reaped two billion dollars over four years, while Schwartlander suggested a new levy on tobacco sales.
At the next G20 summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is expected to push for a new tax on financial transactions to fund development.
The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a public-private partnership, has launched a mechanism called the Dow Jones Global Fund 50 index.
The barometer measures the financial results of companies that support the fund's mission. Part of the revenues generated through licensing this index for investors goes to the fund.
"It has been launched on the London, Frankfurt stock markets and soon Abu Dhabi," said Michel Kazatchkine, who heads the fund.
The fund is also proposing other methods like deals between poor countries, rich countries and the organisation.
"A rich country could agree to cancel 50 percent of the debt of an indebted country if the latter agrees to invest the remaining 50 percent of its debt in the fund's programmes," said Kazatchkine, noting that the first of such deals was set up in 2008 between Germany and Indonesia.
"The money from this debt will be turned into money for health," he said.
Kazatchkine has been discreetly urging cash-rich emerging giants, including the Gulf states and China, to dip into their pockets, although insiders say that the returns so far have been meagre.
According to the Global Fund's website, 230 million dollars has been disbursed to China for AIDS since 2003.
Yet China now has more than three trillion dollars in foreign exchange reserves and spent tens of billions on staging the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai Expo.
Peter Piot, former head of UNAIDS, acknowledged that China has pockets of entrenched poverty and a still-low per capita income.
Even so, it was time for wealthier emerging countries to fund their own needs to help free up resources for far poorer countries, he said.
"I don't see why the Global Fund should give all that money to China, I mean they can pay for that themselves," said Piot, now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
"There's a new world order that's emerging, and except for what I would say many sub-Saharan countries and a few other countries, the rest can pay for themselves.
"You have to put the resources where the risk of infection is, and in the countries that are the poorest."
- AFP/al
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
New resources needed for AIDS campaign
This may be the last of the historical archiving...
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Posted: 27 May 2011
BERLIN - More than 270 people in Germany have fallen seriously ill because of potentially deadly bacteria, which has been found in imported Spanish cucumbers, officials said Friday.
The Robert Koch Institute, the national disease centre, said more than 60 new cases of haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) had been reported in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number to 276. Two people have died.
The Ministry of Consumer Affairs said a nationwide special warning had been issued, adding that investigations were underway to track the origin of contaminated vegetables which have been ordered withdrawn from the market.
German authorities have identified organic cucumbers from Spain as a source of the bacteria, a strain of E. coli, which has also led to food poisoning in Sweden, Denmark, Britain and the Netherlands.
Consumer Affairs Minister Ilse Aigner was to speak by telephone with her Spanish counterpart about the issue later Friday, her spokesman told a regular news conference.
"The European Union internal market has very strong safety rules and we expect all EU states to observe them," he said, adding that, for the present, "one can only speculate about the causes" of the outbreak.
A spokesman for the health ministry said that the number of infections was still growing.
In Spain, a spokesman for the AESA food safety agency said investigations were also underway.
"The Andalusian authorities are investigating to find out where the contamination comes from and when it took place," he said.
"This type of bacteria can contaminate at the origin or during handling of the product," he added.
There has been no report of contamination within Spain, AESA said.
Enterohaemorrhagic E. coli causes haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), which can result in acute renal failure, seizures, strokes and coma.
In the German state of Saarland, near the French border, officials announced they had banned the sale of all cucumbers from Spain.
Some supermarket chains, including the giant Rewe, also said they had withdrawn all Spanish-imported cucumbers from their shelves nationwide.
German officials meanwhile defended themselves against charges, mainly from farmers in northern Germany, that they had acted rashly in their warnings to the public.
Initial warnings had spoken of possible contamination in tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers grown in northern Germany, where most cases of food-poisoning have been reported.
"The protection of the consumer must always take precedence over economic interests," the consumer ministry spokesman said.
German vegetable growers have suffered losses of some two million euros (US$2.8 million) per day since the middle of the week, a spokesman for the German Farmers' Association said Friday.
"Trading is completely flat on the vegetable market in Hamburg," Germany's second city, according to Jochen Winkhoff, who heads the Association of German Vegetable Growers.
All growers are hard hit and "we have to destroy their produce because there is no demand," he added.
Denmark's veterinary and food products agency said Friday it had found contaminated cucumbers from Spain in the stocks of two wholesalers in the west of the country and ordered them withdrawn.
It advised consumers not to eat raw cucumbers from Spain or tomatoes and lettuces from northern Germany.
- AFP/al
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
E. coli outbreak spreading in Germany
Posted: 27 May 2011
WASHINGTON - Warnings on cigarette packets about the dangers of tobacco push smokers to kick the habit, and graphic images depicting human suffering are the most effective, a study released on Thursday shows.
Nearly all adult smokers in countries where a World Health Organization (WHO) convention requires health warnings on tobacco products noticed the warnings, and more than half of smokers in six of 14 countries in the study said the warnings made them think about quitting, says the study.
In the remaining eight countries, with the exception of Poland, more than one in four poll respondents said the warning labels prompted them to consider kicking the habit, the study published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.
For the study, researchers analyzed data collected between 2008 and 2010 for smokers in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay and Vietnam for a poll called the the Global Adult Tobacco Survey.
They found that warnings that are most likely to get someone to consider quitting stand out prominently on the package and use pictures or graphics to describe the harmful effects of smoking.
Graphic warnings not only reach smokers who either cannot read or do not read text-only warnings, but could also be better at evoking an emotional response from a smoker and motivating them to quit, the CDC study says.
Brazil and Thailand both had "numerous prominent and graphic pictorial warnings in rotation" and also had some of the highest rates of smokers thinking about quitting because of the warnings, the study says.
But for reasons that are unclear, thinking about quitting was also high in Bangladesh and Vietnam, where warnings cover less of the package and were text-only, it says.
The CDC wants to see further research to try to find out how many smokers who think about quitting because of a warning on a packet actually do, and to determine what other factors come into play in getting someone to stop smoking.
According to the WHO, tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death, and is estimated to kill more than five million people a year worldwide, mostly in low- and middle-income countries.
Health warnings on tobacco product packages are considered by the WHO to be a key tool in combating the global tobacco epidemic, along with price hikes, smoke-free policies, and advertising and sponsorship bans.
- AFP/al
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Cigarette health warnings push smokers to quit: study
I have nothing to say about this one...
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Posted: 26 May 2011
NEW YORK - A coalition of consumer groups filed a federal lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration over the use of human antibiotics in animal feed, saying it creates dangerous superbugs.
The suit alleges that the regulatory agency concluded in 1977 that the practice of feeding healthy animals low doses of penicillin and tetracycline could lead to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in people.
"However, despite this conclusion and laws requiring that the agency act on its findings, FDA failed to take any action to protect human health," the groups said in a statement.
The lawsuit aims to "compel FDA to take action on the agency's own safety findings, withdrawing approval for most non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracyclines in animal feed."
Groups included in the filing include the Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Animal Concerns Trust, Public Citizen, and Union of Concerned Scientists.
The drugs are added to feed or mixed into water given to cows, turkeys, chickens, pigs and other livestock.
However, they are administered at such low levels that they do not treat disease, but leave surviving bacteria stronger and more able to resist them.
"Accumulating evidence shows that antibiotics are becoming less effective, while our grocery store meat is increasingly laden with drug-resistant bacteria," said Peter Lehner, NRDC executive director.
FDA did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.
Last year, the FDA authorities pressed farmers to give fewer antibiotics to livestock and poultry to reduce the risk of potentially harmful resistance to antimicrobial drugs.
Yet FDA officials stressed the drugs could play a key role when used properly.
- AFP/ir
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Groups sue US over antibiotics in farm feed
This is article 2 of 2 about the E coli outbreak in Germany...
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Posted: 27 May 2011
BERLIN - More than 270 people in Germany have fallen seriously ill because of potentially deadly bacteria, which has been found in imported Spanish cucumbers, officials said Friday.
The Robert Koch Institute, the national disease centre, said more than 60 new cases of haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) had been reported in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number to 276. Two people have died.
The Ministry of Consumer Affairs said a nationwide special warning had been issued, adding that investigations were underway to track the origin of contaminated vegetables which have been ordered withdrawn from the market.
German authorities have identified organic cucumbers from Spain as a source of the bacteria, a strain of E. coli, which has also led to food poisoning in Sweden, Denmark, Britain and the Netherlands.
Consumer Affairs Minister Ilse Aigner was to speak by telephone with her Spanish counterpart about the issue later Friday, her spokesman told a regular news conference.
"The European Union internal market has very strong safety rules and we expect all EU states to observe them," he said, adding that, for the present, "one can only speculate about the causes" of the outbreak.
A spokesman for the health ministry said that the number of infections was still growing.
In Spain, a spokesman for the AESA food safety agency said investigations were also underway.
"The Andalusian authorities are investigating to find out where the contamination comes from and when it took place," he said.
"This type of bacteria can contaminate at the origin or during handling of the product," he added.
There has been no report of contamination within Spain, AESA said.
Enterohaemorrhagic E. coli causes haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), which can result in acute renal failure, seizures, strokes and coma.
In the German state of Saarland, near the French border, officials announced they had banned the sale of all cucumbers from Spain.
Some supermarket chains, including the giant Rewe, also said they had withdrawn all Spanish-imported cucumbers from their shelves nationwide.
German officials meanwhile defended themselves against charges, mainly from farmers in northern Germany, that they had acted rashly in their warnings to the public.
Initial warnings had spoken of possible contamination in tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers grown in northern Germany, where most cases of food-poisoning have been reported.
"The protection of the consumer must always take precedence over economic interests," the consumer ministry spokesman said.
German vegetable growers have suffered losses of some two million euros (US$2.8 million) per day since the middle of the week, a spokesman for the German Farmers' Association said Friday.
"Trading is completely flat on the vegetable market in Hamburg," Germany's second city, according to Jochen Winkhoff, who heads the Association of German Vegetable Growers.
All growers are hard hit and "we have to destroy their produce because there is no demand," he added.
Denmark's veterinary and food products agency said Friday it had found contaminated cucumbers from Spain in the stocks of two wholesalers in the west of the country and ordered them withdrawn.
It advised consumers not to eat raw cucumbers from Spain or tomatoes and lettuces from northern Germany.
- AFP/al
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
E. coli outbreak spreading in Germany
I've seen the news on this, and was seeing how it progressed: all pointed to Germany, then to some vegetables... eaten raw.
I will post the 2 articles here for history keeping.
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Posted: 25 May 2011
BERLIN - Worries grew in Germany on Tuesday about infections caused by a strain of the E. coli bacterium after authorities reported the death of an 83-year-old and a "very unusual" number of cases.
The health ministry in the northern state of Lower Saxony said that an autopsy was being carried out on the woman who died on Saturday after suffering from bloody diarrhoea for a week.
The woman was confirmed to have been infected with enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC), but tests were being carried out to see if this led to her death, the ministry said in a statement.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the national disease-control and prevention agency, said that over the past two weeks, more than 80 cases of potentially fatal haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), caused by EHEC, have been recorded.
"The number of serious cases in such a short time period is very unusual, and the age groups affected is also untypical," the RKI said in a statement.
Currently it is mostly adults, in most cases women, who have been affected, whereas previous outbreaks have been in children, the RKI said. The majority of the cases are in northern Germany so far.
In 2010, for example, there were 65 cases of HUS, of which only six were aged 18 years or over. There were two fatalities.
According to the World Health Organization's website, HUS is characterised by acute renal failure and blood problems, with a fatality rate of between three and five percent. It can also cause seizures, strokes and coma.
Around 10 percent of patients infected with EHEC could develop HUS, the WHO said. Every year, there are around 1,000 suspected EHEC infections in Germany, the RKI said.
It added that the source of the EHEC outbreak had not yet been identified and advised people to heat food and observe proper standards of hygiene.
- AFP/al
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
E coli outbreak worries Germany
