April 13th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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The recent death of hundreds of beloved pets was traced back to a wheat gluten factory near Shanghai, China. The wheat gluten, a thickener used in pet food, was contaminated with melamine (a chemical used in plastics, fertilizers, and flame retardants). It is believed that the melamine may have been processed or stored in the same containers used for the gluten.
How did the contaminated gluten make it into over 100 brands of US pet food? Chinese ingredients are less expensive than American ones, and so large companies purchase many plant and animal products from China to save on costs. The fact that over 100 brands were recalled speaks to the pervasiveness of Chinese agricultural products contained within American food products.
A very alarming article was published by Forbes Magazine, describing the serious quality control problems that China has been having, and America’s limited ability to screen incoming goods:
Over the past 25 years, Chinese agricultural exports to the U.S. surged nearly 20-fold to $2.26 billion last year, led by poultry products, sausage casings, shellfish, spices and apple juice.
Inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are able to inspect only a tiny percentage of the millions of shipments that enter the U.S. each year.
Even so, shipments from China were rejected at the rate of about 200 per month this year, the largest from any country, compared to about 18 for Thailand, and 35 for Italy, also big exporters to the U.S., according to data posted on the FDA’s Web site.
Chinese products are bounced for containing pesticides, antibiotics and other potentially harmful chemicals, and false or incomplete labeling that sometimes omits the producer’s name.
The problems the [Chinese] government faces are legion. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are used in excess to boost yields while harmful antibiotics are widely administered to control disease in seafood and livestock. Rampant industrial pollution risks introducing heavy metals into the food chain.
Farmers have used cancer-causing industrial dye Sudan Red to boost the value of their eggs and fed an asthma medication to pigs to produce leaner meat. In a case that galvanized the public’s and government’s attention, shoddy infant formula with little or no nutritional value has been blamed for causing severe malnutrition in hundreds of babies and killing at least 12.
Assuming that Forbes has not overstated the case, Americans have good cause for concern about the safety of food that includes ingredients from China – is it only a matter of time before the pet food debacle is played out in humans? I don’t know, but I’m worried. Do you know of any other credible reports about this problem? Please share!
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 24th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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In my last blog post I was describing how adversity can be used for good, and as I was reading the medical news this morning I found another great example. While gardening, a British man was bitten on the neck by a spider. Now, the report doesn’t say exactly what type of spider this was, but judging from the outcome it was probably not a black widow or brown recluse. I’m assuming that the insect was some sort of common garden spider, though it must have had “fangs.” (Imagine my sister recoiling in horror here.)
As it turned out, the spider bit the man right next to a growth on his neck that he hadn’t noticed before. When he went to the doctor’s office to have the bite inspected, they found the growth and decided to biopsy it. The growth was cancerous, and the medical team was able to remove it before it had spread anywhere.
The little spider inadvertently saved a man from cancer. As he weaves his web, nestled between the coarse, hairy leaves of turnip plants, this tiny creature may never understand his contribution to humanity. Small actions can have a positive ripple effect, and a seemingly bad experience can save a life.
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 22nd, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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Growing up in Canada, my family spent a lot of time in the car. While my European friends would tell me how they could drive through 4 countries in a matter of hours, in Canada I couldn’t get part of the way through our smallest province in the same time period. Canadians have to travel long distances to get anywhere, which is part of the reason why they’re such a tolerant and patient lot.
So on these long drives (long before the days of portable entertainment devices) my family would have to think of ways to pass the time. Our favorite game was inspired by “20 questions.” We called it “the animal guessing game.”
It basically worked like this – you thought of the most unusual animal you knew of (perhaps something you’d seen on Animal Kingdom or in an animal encyclopedia) and the rest of the family would ask yes and no questions until they guessed what it was, or all agreed to being stumped.
Now, most of us would systematically narrow the field of possibilities by asking typical questions related to size, territory, habitat, skin type (fur, scale etc.) and so on. But my younger sister would always begin by asking the same question:
“Does it have fangs?”
At the time I thought she was hopelessly silly and incapable of systematic analysis. So few animals, after all, would fall into that category. Surely that wasn’t a good lead question.
But as I reflect on my sister’s perseverance on fangs, I realize that she was using an emotive hierarchy. To her, animals with fangs were so frightening, that she wanted to get it out of the way first thing – to be sure that we weren’t going to be spending time reviewing the life cycle and eating habits of animals with sharp teeth.
You know, it may seem funny, but I think that when it comes to matters of medicine some patients feel the way my sister did about the animal guessing game. They’re in unfamiliar territory, they are afraid of a real or perceived threat of a painful test or procedure, and they are internally focused on that threat to the exclusion of the big picture.
Doctors have the natural tendency to be removed from the emotional priorities of patients. We think that the patient is most interested in the evidence behind certain tests, the statistics, the technical aspects of a procedure – but sometimes as they try to comprehend the details of your informed consent, they really have one burning question:
Does it have fangs?
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 21st, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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As spring approaches, we can expect a new onslaught of pollen, bugs, and mud puddles. Mosquito eggs will hatch in stagnant water, and a new generation of hungry little disease vectors will be lurking in wooded areas, awaiting their first meal.
Luckily for those of us who live in North America, those annoying mosquito bites are unlikely to infect us with malaria.
A team of scientists committed to eradicating malaria (one of my personal favorite parasites) has taken a new approach to reducing transmission rates: creating a strain of malaria-immune mosquitoes.
I had been under the mistaken impression that mosquitoes lived in perfect harmony with malaria parasites, but apparently the organisms can make them quite ill as well. Not ill enough to die immediately (hence their ability to spread the disease) but ill enough to die prematurely.
So if we could create a malaria immune mosquito, we could give them a survival advantage over their peers, thus slowly influencing the mosquito population in favor of the new strain. This could result in a new population of mosquitoes who could not harbor malaria.
In humans, malaria parasites have learned how to attach themselves to red blood cell proteins and incubate inside the cells. In mosquitoes, the parasites latch on to a protein (called SM1) on the surface of epithelial cells of their gut lining. Through the miracle of genetic engineering, we’ve managed to alter the SM1 proteins in certain mosquitoes, making them immune to invasion by parasites they ingest through infected blood.
Although the immune mosquitoes are not ready for prime time release in malaria endemic countries (the research only showed that the scientists could genetically engineer resistance to one strain of malaria), it sure would be interesting to see if we could use mosquitoes themselves to fight a disease that claims the lives of over one million people per year.
This is a rare case of a problem becoming the solution!
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 13th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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For those who are faint of heart, please do not click on this link (via KevinMD). This poor man living in Eastern Europe developed a rare disorder (called Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia) where he had growths appear on his hands and feet starting at age 14. Many years later the growths are quite disfiguring and difficult to remove.
Some speculate that this may be similar to a warty disorder in rabbits. Either way, it is a little disturbing to me that this condition could be triggered by a virus. Viruses, of course, can be quite contagious…
Any dermatologists out there want to weigh in?
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
