Tuesday, 21 May, 2013

Drafts of two hefty food-safety regulations are released. What are the fundamentals of ensuring safety in the giant American food system? Where is the room for improvement? Who will (and maybe should) escape regulation?

2009 has been a big year for food recalls, largely because salmonella-contaminated dried milk, pistachio nuts and peanut products affected thousands of items in a wide variety of food products, says Kathleen Glass, associate director of the Food Research Institute. “If you have a single whole food, from one manufacturing plant or one farm, the [...]

Bacteria have vastly different survival abilities, says Jeri Barak, an assistant professor of plant pathology at UW-Madison. Many species normally live in soil or water, but some of those that live in the human intestinal tract display extreme longevity outside the body. Salmonella, which causes what we sometimes call “food poisoning,” can live more than [...]

Just months after contaminated spinach causes grave diarrhea, another outbreak. What is E. coli O157:H7, and why is it so dangerous? Got any bright ideas for constraining this killer bug?

Edible vaccines offer cheap, easy solution to halt disease in developing countries, but roadblocks remain. Is this an acceptable type of gene-modified food?

Treating cow manure with carbonate reduces threat from dangerous E. coli bacteria. Should this treatment be used more widely?