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Farmers Resist Push for Workers to Wear Protective Gear Against Bird Flu Virus
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended this week that dairy and poultry farms with infected animals supply protective gear to workers in a bid to stave off human transmission of the H5N1 virus. The challenge now is making it happen.
The CDC has no legal authority to order those protective measures, and health officials in some of the nine states with reported outbreaks in cattle have had little luck getting farmers to take them up on offers of free personal protective equipment for their workers, even as the virus continues to spread. Six additional infected herds were reported yesterday — in Michigan, Idaho, and Colorado — bringing the total to 42.
Texas, the one state with a confirmed human case, in a worker exposed to infected cows, has sent protective gear to some farms — four, to be exact. The state’s health department began offering gloves, masks, goggles, and gowns to dairy farms at the beginning of April, shortly after the state’s first cases were identified. A handful of sites in the Texas panhandle — each with sick cows — accepted them. The state has reported 12 infected herds so far.
“We offered PPE to any interested dairy and only four took us up on the offer. The offer still stands,” Texas Department of State Health Services press officer Lara Anton told STAT in an email.
The barrier before health officials is who would launch a drive to broadly mask and goggle at dairy farms, let alone potentially require safety measures. State and federal health agencies do not have that authority. Multiple state health departments told STAT that their staffs have not stepped foot on farms with confirmed cases, citing “privacy and biosecurity reasons.”
Lawmakers Target Heavy Metals in Baby Food With New Legislation
A pair of Democratic senators introduced new legislation to limit the levels of harmful metals in commercial baby food, they announced Thursday. The bill, called “The Baby Food Safety Act of 2024,” would give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) new authority to enforce higher safety standards for commercial baby food and imported products.
It also increases safety standards and requires more complete testing by manufacturers for toxic heavy metals — including lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury — allowed in baby food. The legislation follows a series of efforts to call on the FDA to address reports showing high levels of heavy metals in baby foods.
Three years ago, the Democratic duo introduced a similar bill in response to a House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy report showing that “some baby foods are tainted with dangerous levels of lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium.” The bill focused on “holding manufacturers accountable” for reducing heavy metals in baby food.
Multiple times in the years since, lawmakers have called on the FDA to do more to address high levels of heavy metals. They wrote to the FDA after a report documented “high levels of the neurotoxin inorganic arsenic in 3 popular rice cereal baby foods,” and also after hundreds of children showed “extremely high blood levels of lead” that led to the recall of some apple cinnamon puree pouches.
If Pigs Get Bird Flu, We Could Be in for a Real Nightmare
The bird flu outbreak among dairy cows continues to generate alarm, despite reassuring news that pasteurized milk is unlikely to infect anyone with H5N1. Scientists can’t stop worrying about a nightmare scenario: that the virus will get into pigs and, from there, spark a human pandemic.
Pigs “are the perfect vessels through which an even more virulent strain could emerge,” said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at a May 2 briefing by the Council on Foreign Relations.
U.S. to Provide Nearly $200 Million to Contain Bird Flu Spread on Dairy Farms
The Biden administration said on Friday it will provide nearly $200 million to fight the spread of avian flu among dairy cows, in the government’s latest bid to contain outbreaks that have fueled concerns about human infections with the H5N1 virus. The virus has been detected among dairy cattle in nine states since late March. Scientists have said they believe the outbreak is more widespread based on U.S. Food and Drug Administration findings of H5N1 particles in about 20% of retail milk samples.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will make $98 million available to provide up to $28,000 per dairy farm for efforts to contain the spread of the virus between animals and humans and for testing milk and animals for the virus, the agency said on Friday.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would provide $101 million through the FDA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to protect public health and the nation’s food supply.
The money includes $34 million through the CDC for testing efforts and supporting public health labs, $8 million for vaccines, and $3 million for wastewater surveillance.
More Poultry Associations Join International Effort to Cut Antimicrobial Use in Poultry
Seven more groups involved in poultry production have signed on to an international effort to reduce the use of antimicrobials on poultry farms.
The organizations, which include poultry associations from several European countries and fast-food giant Yum! Brands, announced yesterday that they’ll adopt principles developed by the Transformational Strategies for Farm Risk Output Mitigation (TRANSFORM) project to ensure the proper use of antimicrobials on poultry farms.
Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the project is led by a consortium that includes Cargill, Heifer International, and the International Poultry Council (IPC) and uses antimicrobial stewardship principles developed by the IPC.
The principles encourage adopters to commit to taking action in four key areas: (1) taking a risk-based approach around each instance of antimicrobial use, (2) adopting farm management practices that improve animal health and reduce the need for antimicrobials, (3) using antimicrobials only in compliance with national authorizations, and (4) using medically important antibiotics only under a supervising veterinarian’s diagnosis and oversight.
What Is ‘Big Ag,’ and Why Should You Be Worried About Them?
You’ve likely heard of Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, and have a pretty good understanding of what they represent. But what do you think of when you hear the term “Big Ag”? For a long time, a villain that came to many people’s minds was Monsanto, but we stopped hearing about that company in 2018 after German pharmaceutical and chemical giant Bayer paid $66 billion to buy Monsanto and erase its much-reviled name.
And therein lies a big part of the Big Ag problem: mergers and acquisitions across the food and agriculture industry have enabled big companies that touch every corner of our food system to keep getting bigger and more powerful.
Just as with Big Tech, a small number of giant corporations have amassed monopoly or near-monopoly power over pieces of our food and agriculture system in recent decades — and many are still seeking to get bigger by gobbling up other companies. Corporations across the food system increasingly have the power, by virtue of their size, market domination, political connections, and deep pockets, to set prices, meddle with science, evade regulation, and write the rules to benefit themselves.
If anything in our lives is essential, it’s food and the means of producing it. The average U.S. household spent more than 10% of their disposable income on food in 2022. But food is not just essential to each of us as individuals. It’s also a major chunk of the U.S. economy, accounting for 5.6% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and employing more than 22 million people. So, corporate control of our food system has an outsized impact on our lives.
Adding Salt to Your Food May Significantly Increase Stomach Cancer Risk
Over-salting your food might be putting you at risk of certain cancers, researchers have found. People who add salt to their food are 40% more likely to develop stomach cancer than those who don’t, according to a new study in the journal Gastric Cancer.
This study confirms other studies that have found links between high salt consumption and stomach cancer in Asian countries, where saltier foods are commonly eaten. “Our research shows the connection between the frequency of added salt and stomach cancer in Western countries too,” study author Selma Kronsteiner-Gicevic, a researcher at MedUni Vienna’s Center for Public Health, said in a statement.
The researchers — hailing from the Medical University of Vienna in Austria — analyzed data collected from over 470,000 adults across the U.K. between 2006 and 2010. The participants had been asked a number of questions, including “How often do you add salt to your food?” They then compared the questionnaire answers with levels of salt detected in urine from cancer patients.
They discovered that people who often or always added salt to their food were 39% more likely to develop stomach cancer over an 11-year period than those who added little to no salt.
