Prussia is the next Elvis.
ooc;; Forever lol.
XD
Berlin Police Arrest Suspected Car Arsonist
A man suspected of being behind a recent string of arson attacks on cars in the German capital, Berlin, has been detained by police. The city has been hit by dozens of vehicle burnings, usually targeting high-end cars.
(via Deutsche Welle)
Posted via email from pictures ohne sin | Comment »
°°Mathilda°° on Flickr.
In my loneliest moments always someone sitting next to me.
Super cool chef Mark Bittman had a great op-ed in the Times last week on the E. Coli outbreak in Germany. He illustrated how easy it is for food to become contaminated, and how difficult it has been for the Germans to follow the outbreak back to its source.
…it’s likely that most of the thousands of people sickened in Germany ate a vegetable that was contaminated in its handling: manure got into the growing or rinsing water; or it was on the hands of a picker; or it got dropped on a veggie by a bird, or brushed onto it by a wandering animal; or it was in a truck that took the sprouts to the packager, or some other innocent accident, the kind we must do our best to prevent, the kind that’s magnified by combining huge lots of food from dozens of different sources and handling them all together. Remember, 50 STEC are enough to make you sick; one head of lettuce with a few hundred thousand bacteria, tossed together with a few tons of uncontaminated greens, then sold in thousands of packages, can mess up a lot of people.
Bittman puts the outbreak in perspective, but he also highlights how important it is to have systems in place to handle—and if possible prevent—foodborne illness.
The STEC that caused the infamous Jack in the Box outbreak of 1993is formally called E. coli O157:H7. The U.S. has zero tolerance for that STEC, because in 1994 — against the predictable protests of the meat industry — O157 was labeled an “adulterant,” which means that any food in which it’s discovered is recalled; happens all the time, though sometimes too late. There are, as I said, other STEC just as murderous, and we have a much more lenient policy about their presence in food: they’re unregulated. Their presence in food is, legally speaking, just fine.
In theory, if the German thing happened here and the culprit were O157, it might have been prevented. But if the German thing happened here and the culprit were a non-O157 STEC, as it was in Germany (for those of you keeping score at home, that one has been labeled O104:H4), we’d be in the same boat — er, hospital — as our Saxon cousins.
Perhaps the most salient information in his article is that other types of e. coli are just as dangerous as O157—but they aren’t currently considered “adulterants” by the FDA or USDA. According to Bittman, the meat industry is particularly unwilling to acknowledge this.
The fact is that a huge and powerful lobby would rather see a few thousand annual underreported deaths and the occasional high-visibility outbreak than submit to further regulation and smaller profits.
Bad form, meat industry.
