UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

Peanut butter recalled in salmonella scare

SALON, Ohio, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- An Ohio distributor recalled its creamy peanut butter after Minnesota health authorities linked it to a wave of salmonella infections in the state.

King Nut Cos. -- which distributes to universities, restaurants, hospitals and other institutional food services, but not to retail stores -- recalled all peanut butter under its King Nut and Parnell's Pride brands with a lot code that begins with the numeral "8" and said it canceled orders with the manufacturer, Peanut Corporation of America of Lynchburg, Va.

The manufacturer expressed its "deep regret" over the "apparent finding," but said the contamination was in an open container "in a large, institutional kitchen," raising the possibility of cross-contamination.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration did not conclusively link the peanut butter to the salmonella strain that has sickened at least 30 people in Minnesota.

Additional test results were expected later Monday.

One salmonella-infected Minnesota woman in her 70s died, but state health authorities were unsure if other medical conditions caused or contributed to her death, state Health Department spokesman Doug Schultz told The Wall Street Journal.

The Typhimurium salmonella strain matches the type that has sickened at least 399 people in 41 other states since early September, but Minnesota authorities haven't connected the peanut butter to the national outbreak.

Report: FDA lax in oversight in trials

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does little to oversee doctors' financial conflicts of interest in clinical trials, government inspectors said Monday.

The inspector general's report from the Department of Health and Human Services also said its investigators were told by FDA officials trying to protect patients from such conflicts was essentially a waste of time, The New York Times reported.

The agency received no forms disclosing doctors' financial conflicts in 42 percent of clinical trials of drugs and medical devices, and regulators did nothing about the problem, the inspector general said.

In 31 percent of the trials in which the agency did receive the required forms, FDA reviewers gave no indication they'd looked at the information, the inspector general said.

And in 20 percent of the cases in which doctors admitted significant financial conflicts, neither the FDA nor the sponsoring companies did anything to deal with the conflicts, the investigators found.

An FDA spokeswoman told the Times the agency did not review doctors' financial conflicts before trials because the conflicts represented only one possible source of bias.

Studies have found that 20 percent to 33 percent of all doctors who help oversee clinical trials have financial conflicts, the Times said.

Widespread use of illegal organs alleged

BERKELEY, Calif., Jan. 12 (UPI) -- Reputable U.S. medical centers transplant kidneys and other human organs they get illegally through the black market, a university anthropologist asserts.

Surgeons take black-market kidneys from people in the world's most impoverished slums and put them into wealthy dialysis patients from the United States, Europe and Israel, Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California at Berkeley told Newsweek.

She did not identify any hospitals, but Newsweek said she cited "a big Philadelphia hospital" as "a good place to go for brokered transplants."

Scheper-Hughes -- who spent more than a decade tracking the illegal sale of human organs across the globe -- also said patients told her they got transplants "at top hospitals, with top surgeons" in New York and Los Angeles.

The organ trafficking is negotiated by an elaborate network of criminals, Scheper-Hughes said.

For about $150,000, an organ broker connects a buyer and seller to a "broker-friendly" U.S. hospital, where surgeons are either complicit in the scheme or willing to turn a blind eye, she told Newsweek.

The organ seller typically gets a few thousand dollars, plus a chance to see a U.S. city, she said.

Buying and selling human organs is illegal in every country except Iran, Newsweek said.

Yet organ trafficking -- mostly of kidneys, but also of half-livers, eyes, skin and blood -- is flourishing, Newsweek said.

The U.N. World Health Organization estimates one-fifth of the 70,000 kidneys transplanted around the world each year come from the black market.

Lasker winner: Humans to blame for HIV

STANFORD, Calif., Jan. 12 (UPI) -- Humans are responsible for creating conditions that change harmless germs into infectious diseases, the winner of U.S. Lasker Award for medical research said.

"The enemy is us," Stanley Falkow said, paraphrasing a famous quotation from Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip.

Human behavior often has changed germs that minded their own business for millennia into serious troublemakers, Falkow told USA Today.

Examples include Legionnaire's disease, the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, and the SARS virus, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, he said.

Legionnaire's disease was caused by bacteria put into the atmosphere by air-conditioners, Jacuzzis and supermarket produce irrigators, he said. HIV and SARS leaped to humans from wild animals butchered for their meat.

A growing threat is a human-made epidemic of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, Falkow said.

Falkow, who received the 2008 Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Science, said microbes are not inherently dirty or dangerous.

"There are 10 times more microbial cells in humans than there are people cells," he told the newspaper.

"If you're a bacteriologist like me, you view people as a platform for carrying bacteria around," he said.

But for all his research and honors, Falkow doesn't take himself too seriously, USA Today observed.

He said that may be the influence of his mother, who still asks, "Still with the germs, Stanley?"