One dead every one hour and 46 minutes!

According to a 2005 post, Foodborne Illness, by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States) there were 37 people hospitalized in the States every hour, with one person dying from food poisoning every one hour and 46 minutes when this report was released. 76,000,000 Americans were being made ill every year from foodborne pathogens.

Those numbers would be unbelievable if they were not from the CDC.

I'm not a vegetarian. I eat meat. I like meat or should I say I used to like meat. I'm having second thoughts. As I continue my investigation of our food supply I am shocked to discover that it is not just meat that can carries pathogens.

Today a Nestlé USA plant in Danville, Virginia, which was producing cookie dough was closed after the Toll House product tested positive for E. coli bacteria. Flour is the suspected source of the contamination.

It is important to note: The tainted dough did not leave the factory; No recall was necessary.

This was not the story last June when Nestlé issued a huge recall of the refrigerated, ready-to-bake cookie dough. It was linked at the time to an outbreak of foodborne illness in which at least 72 people in 30 states became ill after it is believed they ate raw dough.

All this made me think about sprouts, a food that I loved for decades. Then in 1996 an outbreak of foodborne illness in Japan sickened 6000 and killed 17 after they had eaten radish sprouts contaminated with E. Coli O157:H7. The same bacteria was also implicated in outbreaks involving sprouted seeds in several U.S. states between 1997 and 2004.

Sprouts! When I first read about contaminated sprouts, I thought how is this possible? According to Health Canada, Risks Associated with Sprouts:

"Scientists believe that the most likely source of contamination is the seeds that are used to grow the sprouts. Seeds may become contaminated by animal manure in the field or during storage, and the conditions required to grow sprouts (e.g, warmth and humidity) are ideal for the rapid growth of bacteria."

Since many sprouts, such as alfafa sprouts, are only eaten raw, they are not exposed to the high cooking temperatures necessary to kill dangerous bacteria if present. But even sprouts, such as mung bean, that are cooked are not heated sufficiently. An outbreak of salmonellosis in Ontario in 2005 was linked to lightly-cooked, stir-fried mung bean sprouts.

Health Canada takes this problem so seriously that it  has a site devoted to Sprouted Beans and Seeds.

What initially attracted my interest in doing a take on food was a couple of articles in The New York Times examining a little know ingredient in much of the ground beef sold in the United States - ammonia.

It seems a rather creative fellow, Eldon Roth, devised a way to turn fatty slaughterhouse trimmings into what a U.S.D.A. microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called 'pink slime.' Roth's product is used as a ground beef filler in much of the hamburger sold throughout the United States. It was, at one time, even found in Big Macs.



As I read the article, I wondered, "What's in Canadian ground beef?" The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) lists Canada as the second biggest consumer of American beef and veal.

And I found this on Smart Brief:

"Beef Products, Inc. (BPI) has ground beef down to a science. A top US provider of boneless lean beef, the company grinds more than seven million pounds of meat a week. Its customers include fast-food chains, restaurants, food service operators, meat packers, food processors, and the USDA's school lunch program. Its 60-pound blocks of frozen meat chips are used in hamburger patties, ground beef, hot dogs, beef snacks lunch meat, sausages, meatballs, and frozen entrees. The company touts food safety as a priority. It uses two metal detectors to scan beef before and after processing at its Sioux City, Iowa, manufacturing facility. Outside of the US, Beef Products' customers are located in Canada, Mexico, and Japan."
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As the lawsuits concerning some of the food products mentioned mount, I have edited all my posts on food and food production.

I visited Monsanto in St. Louis

Years ago John Miner, a fine reporter at The London Free Press, and I flew to St. Louis to visit the Monsanto plant. They were still developing their genetically modified seed at the time. We were there to investigate FrankenFood.

There have always been questions about the safety of the Monsanto product and now two online papers are carrying stories casting serious doubt on the safety of the Round-up Ready corn seed. At least, I believe this is the corn seed under question.

The two online new sources are: The Huffington Post and the Digital Journal.

I wonder if The London Free Press will be able to find the staff to investigate this latest FrankenFood story?

I would write more but I have no time. My little sister, she's older than I but I always had a protective brotherly attitude towards her, has taken a fall and broken her hip.

She fell last Thursday evening and was taken to the nearby hospital in the big city - my sister lives in a small town. Friday they operated. Now, she is in a facility focused on rehab. Why some Americans are so against a Canadian-style medicine is beyond me.

I joked with my sister that she is lucky the death panels didn't refuse her treatment on account of her age. Sarah Palin would be surprised.

Cheers,
Stay away from ground beef if you're a Yank,
We may all have to worry about corn,
And carry a cane if you totter,
Rockinon

Experimenting with a kerfuffle causer

I'm playing with the "citizen journalist" stuff that seems to have the MSM all in a kerfuffle. The other day I posted a story on Digital Journal and now I am sitting back and seeing how it does. I'm counting hits and checking its earnings.

I had to make two trips to the UWO to gather the information, conduct the interview and obtain some art. This cost me at least four litres of gas and more than four dollars in parking. It will be interesting to see if I even break even on the story.

The story concerned research at the UWO calling into question the way foot injuries are handled. If you injure a shoulder, the physio does not tell you to brace the injured joint, refrain from using the affected muscles and do this indefinitely. No, you exercise the muscle and joint and encourage healing with strength and mobility.

But with foot injuries, it is another story. We bind them up in shoes, fit othotics to brace and support them, and we prevent the foot muscles and joints from moving freely. We weaken the feet; We don't strengthen them.

The above, by the way, is a much better summary of what is being done than what I wrote in my Digital Journal piece. (Maybe I can do some rewriting later.)

One difference, out of many, between the DJ and the MSM, say a paper like The London Free Press, is that the reporter can add images to the story itself. If something would be best illustrated with a photo, a graphic, or some other piece of art, it is easy to do. No separate from the story slide show.

Also, going back and changing info is easy. Notice an error after publication and click, click and you have corrected it. I notice that errors made in the paper make their way to the online site and then stay there forever. I find this very odd.

If the talented people who gather the news for the MSM today ever found a way to write for an online paper that could pay them adequately for their work, the debt-heavy monsters ruling the news roost now would be plucked.

The monthly food budget is back!

It's late and I'm going to bed. But first a quick note. We spent too much at Christmas and my wife is on her monthly food budget kick. She says she can get through the month on less than $150 for the two of us. (She may have a harder time this year as I've already bought some organic ground beef. It was sold by folk who had never heard of Cargill and I liked that.)

It looks like I'll be eating a lot of stuff like the pizza on the right.

Cheers,
Rockinon.

The LFP, Sun Media and Quebecor are letting down the team.

Media companies like The London Free Press, Sun Media and Quebecor love to take credit for the work they publish. I think we can all understand that, but in truth the publisher only publishes. Without the work of an excellent staff, they would have nothing. Their presses would sit silent.

I think it's a safe bet that Pierre Karl Peladeau knows nothing about Robert Vanier and Onco, nor should he. PKP's job is to supply the best possible paper in which to bundle the news. The actual news is the responsibility of the thousands of journalists toiling daily for him in the trenches.

At this point I had to look up the special report on the ex-Onco boss. I went to The London Free Press online page and found nothing. This story is yesterday's news and so is no longer anywhere on the homepage. Not a mention. Not a link. Nothing.

Oh well, I typed "onco" into the search field and got the result shown below.

I clicked on the first linked page. I immediately found myself back at today's Free Press homepage, the one I had just left, the one with nothing on Onco. I hit the back button.

I clicked on the second link. I noted that this link appeared to take me to: http://www.lfpress.com/home.html. I thought this is going to take me right back to today's homepage; The one with nothing on Onco. I was right. I hit the back button.

I clicked on the third link. I noted that this link appeared to take me to: http://www.lfpress.com/news/london/2010/01/08/12397921.html. This took me to another Chip Martin story but not the Special Report. I hit the back button.

This time I looked for a link with special report in it. I found it. This looked good. This must be the link to Chip Martin's Special Report on Onco.

Nope! I got a special report on school cash shortages. I clicked on the big blue words "Special Reports." Nothing. I clicked on "Full series." This gave me the full series on the high cost of school incidentals.

I gave up.

Which bring me right back to my original premise. The publisher provides the wrapper for the news. If they provide a great wrapper - an enticing wrapper - one that attracts readers, then they are doing their job and can take a small bow.

So far our publisher is failing miserably. But, this is online. As Dan Brown the senior online editor at The London Free Press likes to point out this is a stodgy old company with its feet placed firmly in the past. I'm sure they do better with their old paper product.

Well, hold onto your money - unless you're about to bet against the house. The Free Press is not doing much better with their paper wrapper. Take the comics.

Starting late last year the comics started appearing as grey on grey rather than black on white. It was very hard to read the dark grey words printed on a dark grey background. The paper got complaints.

At the end of December a letter to the editor said about the change, "I have poor vision and it is very difficult for me to read them now. It's not clear to me (pardon the pun) why you would make such a change."

Days later the paper was still running these hard to read comics. A St. Thomas reader wrote in to say, "I'm not a senior yet but I had been skipping over some of my favourite comics because they were just too difficult to read."

But the comics are not all The Free Press can't print.

Check out this image, right, from the London paper.

To save money, certain news pages are being done centrally by Sun Media in their Centres of Excellence and delivered electronically in a press-ready state to all company papers. Some of the pictures are no more than black rectangles on a page.

My guess is the pictures are being prepared for publication by a computer running some automatic image toning software. I ran tests on some software for the paper years ago. The results looked horrid - rather like the stuff now being run by the paper. On the plus side, a publisher can use this software and reduce the payroll by laying off some expensive pre-press people.

Chip Martin did his job. He supplied the paper with a great story. The kind of work that sells papers and keeps the citizen journalist wolves at bay. He can take a bow.

My premise for this post was: Newspapers are a cooperative effort with news the main driver behind the success of a paper. Reporters, like Chip Martin, supply the paper with the all important quality journalism. No journalism; No paper. In return, the newspaper is supposed to supply Martin with a professional looking paper in which to package his work.

Martin is keeping his end of the bargain.
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Since writing this the London paper has gone back to printing the comics with the usual contrast. The comics are again legible.

And the bright pictures that accompanied Martin's story - why so bright? My guess is the staff at The Free Press did the toning for those images.

A really funny commercial_Do these come as dual-flush?

This ad from Europe is a few years old, you may be familiar with it if you keep abreast of popular stuff on the Web. Me? I just saw it for the first time the other night and thought it was quite witty and would like to share it with you.

(My wife wasn't as positive as I. She thought the little video made snorting coke seem glamorous and everyday all at the same time. She wasn't sure if it was only promoting clean toilet seats. She saw a subtext)

Oh well, can't please everyone. Wonder how this has influenced sales?

Cheers,
Rockinon


Cheers,
Rockinon!

CanWest newspapers seek bankruptcy protection

There were at least a couple of big media stories this weekend.

In the States, the LA Times cut 80 jobs. Read about it in the Digital Journal.

Closer to home, CanWest Global Communications - a media giant - put most of their newspaper business under bankruptcy protection. Well respected papers such as the Ottawa Citizen and the Vancouver Sun are among the papers affected. The new kid on the block, the National Post, is not included in the bankruptcy filing according to a story in the Globe and Mail.

An interesting twist to this story is that this move by CanWest may make the Scotiabank Canada's biggest publisher. Read all about it in the Globe and Mail online.
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This all comes as no surprise to those of us who believe many of the giants in today's newspaper business got there on too much borrowed money and not brilliant media acumen.

I called my take on this whole thing: Too big to succeed. My other post that dove-tails nicely with TBTS is: Michael Moore on the State of Newspapers.

The big question on the lips of many of us, who once worked for media giant Quebecor, is how long till PKP's media mess collapses. One year? Five years? A decade? How deep are PKP's pockets.