Health & Wellness
Federal officials said Thursday that they might never learn which farms produced tainted tomatoes that have now sickened 228 people in 23 states with a rare form of salmonella.
"At this stage of the investigation there is no guarantee that we will be able to trace the outbreak back to the farm level, although that is the goal," David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's associate commissioner for foods, told reporters Thursday.
The agency is still unsure of the geographic area that is the source of the contaminated fruit, though it has focused its probe on growing regions in central Florida and Mexico.
For the study, published in the June 18 Journal of the American Medical Association, diabetes expert Sherita Hill Golden, M.D., M.H.S., and her colleagues took advantage of data generated by the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), which examined risk factors for atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, in an ethnically diverse group of 6,814 men and women between ages 45 to 84. Participants in the MESA study identified themselves when they enrolled as white, black, Hispanic or Chinese.
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Cell phone researchers not in the pay of mobile phone corporations agree on three things:
The study appears in the June 18 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Lead study author Giulio Pasinetti, MD, PhD, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and colleagues found that the grape seed extract prevents amyloid beta accumulation in cells, suggesting that it may block the formation of plaques. In Alzheimer's disease, amyloid beta accumulates to form toxic plaques that disrupt normal brain function.
The subcommittee in May asked 10 labs for records dating back to 2002, but just one, in Miami, complied. The other labs, according to the subcommittee, refused to turn over records, arguing that the documents belong to their clients, food importing companies.
In one such experiment involving the controversial anti-smoking drug Chantix, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took three months to alert its patients about severe mental side effects. The warning did not arrive until after one of the veterans taking the drug had suffered a psychotic episode that ended in a near lethal confrontation with police.
I'd heard about Chantix, a relatively new drug from Pfizer that blocks nicotine from attaching to your brain receptors. That way, you stop receiving any pleasure from cigarettes at all. The drug, snuggling up to those receptors the same way nicotine does, reduces withdrawal cravings and unleashes a happy little wash of dopamine to boot. Wonderful things they can do nowadays.
My doctor wished me luck as he wrote out the prescription, telling me it was the single most important decision I'd ever make. I had the medication that night, 35 minutes after dropping into a pharmacy. While waiting, I gleefully chain-smoked Parliament Lights. One of Chantix's big perks is that you can smoke for the first seven days you're on it (most people take it for 12 weeks) more than enough time, I thought, to say goodbye to an old friend.








Comment: See:Mind over matter: Anti-smoking drug linked to suicide and The Brain Trauma Vets.