Phto by Pharma

No one knows the precise number of these brazen thefts because shippers of the goods are not required to report the crimes, but experts say the crimes have been increasing every year, especially over the past three years. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration thinks it’s a major issue and has sounded alerts to all players who manufacture, ship, store or sell these regulated items.

It’s not just the cash value of the larceny that’s at issue. Security experts from FDA, insurance investigators and state health departments are worried about the contraband being contaminated by mishandling; or mixed and sold with counterfeit drugs.

“There have been several cases where patients experienced adverse reactions from stolen drugs, reactions that were most likely due to improper storage and handling. We do not want to see this increase in thefts continue,” Michael Chappell,
 FDA’s acting Assistant Commissioner for Regulatory Affairs wrote in a letter to manufacturers, wholesalers and trade associations last week.

He reminded those whose shipments of FDA-regulated items were targeted by the thieves that these crimes threaten the public health because a product that has been taken from the “legitimate supply chain poses potential safety risks to consumers.”

In March alone, FDA reported several major thefts:

• On March 14, Eli Lilly and Company reported one of the largest known drugs thefts.  Cases of antidepressants and anti-psychotics were stolen from a Lilly distribution center located in Enfield, Conn., when thieves cut through a warehouse roof and rappelled down, deactivated a sophisticated alarm, picked up drugs valued at about $75 million and fled.
• The day before,  5,000 cases of Mead Johnson Nutrition’s infant formula products were stolen from a truck stop in Richwood, Ky.
• On March 3,  generic over-the-counter products worth $400,000 were stolen from a truck near Dallas.

It is not just the cargo movers and warehouse that are targeted.

Last year, Orlando, Fla., police busted 21 people for stealing millions of dollars of baby formula – worth $25 to $46 a can – off the shelves of grocery, drug, big-box and discount stores in four counties. What’s worse, according to police statements at the time, the thieves changed the expiration dates on many of the cans before selling them at flea markets and on eBay.

Some of the stolen loot is intercepted by Customs agents and major U.S. ports, but more frequently nefarious brokers will offer the bogus goods on the internet.

The biggest worry is that these stolen products, once reintroduced into the legitimate supply chain, are often accompanied by counterfeit products or products with improperly extended expiration dates.

It’s a frequent occurrence, says Benjamin England, a former FDA special agent and FDA lawyer, who now runs a consulting group called FDAimports.

He explains how the con is run: “Say I steal 250 bottles of an AIDS drug, but sell 500 bottles into the market, with the additional bottles being counterfeit or relabeled with an extended expiration date,” says England. “The stolen product acts as cover for the counterfeit or expired product.” (England said he saw this quite frequently when he was a federal investigator in Miami.)

Many of the criminal gangs in this line of work have concluded that it’s safer than pushing heroin and cocaine.

For a longer version of this story see what I wrote today for AOLNews.

Nine women from California, Oregon and Washington found out that was just what happened, but they learned it after their babies were born.

They were participants in a first-of-its-kind study that tested their blood and urine during their second trimester of pregnancy to find out whether their unborn offspring were being exposed to toxic chemicals found in common consumer products.

The study concluded that children spend their first nine months in an environment that exposes them to known toxic chemicals.

“Our tests measured levels of five chemical groups, including phthalates, mercury, perfluorinated compounds or bisphenol A, and the flame retardant tetrabromobisphenol A,” said Erika Schreder, staff scientist for the Washington Toxics Coalition, one of the three West Coast environmental health organizations who conducted the study.

Thirteen toxic chemicals were found in the bio-fluids of the pregnant women and that research has proven that exposure to some of these chemicals has been linked to serious health problems like asthma, childhood cancers, diabetes, infertility and learning disabilities.

However, the report does not offer a correlation between the levels of the chemicals found in the mothers and any health problems the newborns were expected to encounter.

“We cannot say with certainty whether these particular babies were harmed by the toxic exposures in the womb because of the complexity of their exposures…,” Schreder told me in an interview.

“We do know that they were exposed during the very most vulnerable time in their lives to chemicals associated with cancer, learning disabilities, and infertility,” she added.

Most of the mothers were stunned and angered at the results of the testing.

Amanda Estrada-Guzman, a nurse from Richland, Wash.,  said “The results were shocking and eye opening. I was scared and worried how this will affect my baby.”

Alma Feldpausch, an environmental scientist from Seattle said that “I would indeed expect our government agencies to work to reduce these chemicals.”

Kim Radtke, a program manager in a Seattle breast feeding advocacy program, said “Babies deserve to grow and develop in a healthy environment, in utero and out.”

The three groups that produced the report and other public health and environmental activists across the country say that to adequately protect not just pregnant women, but all of the public, immediate steps must be taken by the government beginning with the passage of laws that protect the most vulnerable.

Here is a link to a longer version of this story on AOL’s Sphere.com.

What makes the fate of this group of patients even more puzzling is that they are victims of trauma and thought to be protected by federal law that demands that people with this level of life-threatening injuries must receive equal treatment regardless of their ability to pay.

Every year, uninsured trauma victims – aged 18 to 30 – die at a rate 89 percent greater than victims with equally severe injuries, but who have health insurance, said Dr. Heather Rosen, a research fellow at Children’s Hospital Boston and her colleagues from three other hospitals.

Photo Virginia Department of Health

In the study, published today in the Archives of Surgery, the researchers examined who survived and who didn’t out of 2.7 million patients brought to about 900 U.S. trauma centers between 2002 and 2006.

The researchers analyzed patients suffering from penetrating trauma, such as knife-and-gun-club injuries, or blunt trauma from vehicle crashes and falls. Earlier studies found that there were 18,000 extra deaths a year among the uninsured trauma victims.

Rosen and the other researchers chose to examine those younger patients, 18 to 30, because they had fewer other diseases – comorbidity – to muddy the evaluation of the cause of death.

There is “pervasive evidence of disparities in screening, hospital admission, treatment and outcome due to insurance status,” the study concluded.

It is common knowledge backed by numerous peer-reviewed studies that the absence of insurance has led to preventable deaths of patients with cancer, diabetes, respiratory and other chronic diseases.

But with victims of trauma and other acute medical events, where instant medical intervention or the withholding of it means survival or death, this isn’t suppose to happen because it’s illegal.

The relationship between trauma deaths and lack of health insurance has also been studied at length, but Rosen said this study is different because they used a national trauma database and included about 690,000 patients. She says this “makes it one of the largest studies of its kind.”

In 1986, in response to widespread dumping of uninsured, critically injured or ill patients onto the street or on lesser hospitals, Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.

The law demanded that hospitals and ambulance services provide care to anyone who needed emergency treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.

“The main point of the study is that uninsured patients in the United States have a higher risk of dying after trauma even though there is universal access to emergency care,” Rosen told me in an email interview Sunday.

Overall, uninsured patients had the highest rate of death following admission for trauma, even after controlling for age, sex, race and severity and mechanism of injury, the  surgeon said.

The study also discussed that non-white patients had a higher chance of death than white patients with the same injuries. That older had higher death rates than young, and that penetrating injuries were more lethal than blunt trauma.

Rosen and her colleagues also concluded that even when everything else was equal, “uninsured patients received significantly fewer radiographic studies and were less likely to be admitted compared with insured patients with similar diagnoses.”

Trauma is well studied and the mechanism of death among those gravely injured is well known, as are the specific steps that must be taken to keep the lethal dominoes from falling.

Dr. R Adam Cowley, acknowledged by most as the father of trauma medicine, told me years ago, right after he opened the nation’s first trauma center in Baltimore, that teams trying to stall “the cascade of death” that accompanies almost all serious trauma don’t have time to wait while hospital bean-counters and insurance companies debate over who’s going to pay to save the patient’s life.

He sermonized on the “Golden Hour’’ that exists between the injury and the receiving of definitive trauma care and often said “who’s paying the bill is the last thing we have time to worry about.”

Cowley told all who would listen and hundreds who wouldn’t that “If you are critically injured – be it a car wreck, gunshots or falls – and you want to survive, you have, at the most, 60 minutes to be in the hands of people with the right skills, the right equipment and the right motivation to save you ­– a trauma center.”

The model for a trauma center that Cowley established 40 years ago has been honed and refined across the country.

For level I trauma centers  – the top of the four categories of programs ­– there is a collection of highly trained specialists in the hospital or immediately available, including nurses, emergency physicians, surgeons of all specialties, anesthesiologists, radiologists, infectious disease experts, intensivists, technicians and social workers.

These teams fight life-and-death battles one after another and often develop a camaraderie usually found only on a battlefield. I have spent hundreds of days reporting from trauma centers across the country and I’m convinced that the survival of the patient comes way before hospital payment policies.

The cost of trauma care and the intensive-care unit follow up can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single patient. Trauma centers in Los Angeles, Miami and other urban areas have been brought to the edge of bankruptcy, so the pressure to cut costs is enormous.

I interviewed members of five trauma teams this weekend who had read the study and to a person, they all said “not in my shop.”

“They will tell you they don’t even know the funding status of most of their patients until after they’ve been hospitalized for some time. They take and treat all comers equally as required by their ethics and the law, and certainly don’t actively discriminate on the basis of insurance status,” said Dr. Harold Sherman, who retired as a trauma surgeon after 15 years in Pittsburgh.

He said that all the surgeon’s claims are probably true, and then added, “Post-discharge care certainly does vary with insurance status.  It is a constant irritant to trauma surgeons and does lead to disparities.”

Some that I spoke with this weekend recalled representatives from the hospital billing departments sometimes hovering at the fringes of the bloody ballet to save a life.

“They would never be foolish enough to tell a trauma surgeon to not order this or that test, or cancel a scan or expensive lab work because they found no insurance card in the patient’s wallet,” said a trauma social worker from Washington, DC, who declined to allowed her name to be used because she wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters.

“What surgeon, ER doc or nurse would risk their license and violate federal law to keep the billing office happy?” the social worker added.

On the other coast, Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center says it’s the only level one trauma center serving Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

Dr. Gregory Jurkovich, Harborview’s chief of trauma said, “We have not seen this disparity (described in Rosen’s report) in the Pacific Northwest.

“We find no difference between any strata of insurance status with regards to care, types of testing, amount or number of procedures,” Jurkovick said Friday. “However, there is decreased access to rehabilitation and chronic care services in the underinsured.”

He says that each of the possibilities Rosen and her colleagues raise for the difference in mortality “will need to be more carefully examined.”

Rosen cautions that the definitive cause for the higher death rate for uninsured remains to be determined. Still, the hard number ­– the nearly 90 percent jump in mortality rates for uninsured accident victims ­– speaks loudly on its own.

“Although the lack of insurance may not be the only explanation,” she says, “the accidental costs of being uninsured in the United States today may be too high to continue to overlook.”

For another version of this story here is a link to AOL’s sphere.com

Forgetting the exquisite culinary joy that comes with the almost magical liquid, the medicinal prowess of balsamic vinegar is legend. It was thought to be good for everything from heart palpitations and labor pains to a cure for the plague.

Photo from Italiam Food Net

Well now we’re told that some balsamic vinegars may be tainted with lead, a highly toxic heavy metal.

Jane Kay
writes in the Environmental Health News that “although the amount of lead in vinegar is small, experts say regularly consuming it may pose a risk, particularly to children.”

She says that eating one tablespoon a day of some balsamic or red wine vinegars can raise the lead level in a young child by more than 30 percent.

Some imported brands had so much lead that  people who consumed one tablespoon per day would be exposed to seven to 10 times the maximum daily level of lead set by California, the EHN story reported.

Opinions vary widely on the source of the lead.

Some toxicologists blame heavy metals in the Italian soil. Others hypothesize that production and storage — not the soil — are the main sources of lead contamination.

Seven years ago, the Environmental Law Foundation tested about 60 vinegar products. Forty-seven had lead, all red wine or balsamic red wine vinegars.

They found that the more expensive vinegars – those aged 12 or more years and costing from $25 to more than $300 – contained more lead than the quick-brewed, much cheaper types.

It has long been known that lead can damage people’s neurological systems, especially the developing brains of young children’s.

Lead also is a carcinogen, and in adults, it is linked to cardiovascular, kidney and immune system effects, Kay writes in her very detailed piece.

Of additional concern is that vinegars are acidic and make the metal fully soluble so it’s more easily absorbed into the bloodstream.

Warning signs are posted in the vinegar sections of some California groceries. This, because of the state’s Proposition 65, that requires consumers to be notified when products contain chemicals tied to cancer, birth defects or reproductive toxicity.

Vinegar industry lawyers have challenged the consumption figures used to determine whether the products violate the state guideline, Kay wrote.

There is no dispute that for most children, the biggest risk of lead exposure comes from old, deteriorating house paint and tap water, not from vinegar, Kay writes.

But Prof. Bruce Lanphear, a professor of children’s environmental health at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, says that even the smallest amounts of lead aren’t known to be safe for a child’s developing brain.

“So, we should, whenever possible, minimize or eliminate exposure,”
Lanphear told Kay.

Balsamic has become far too important to too many cooks to do without.

Its thick concentrated flavor comes not from boiled-down wine as many believe, but rather the must, the juice, skin and seeds from freshly pressed Lambrusco or sweet white Trebbiano grapes.

These are then boiled down to a dark syrup and aged in succession of different sized wooden barrels. The oak, chestnut, cherry wood, ash, mulberry and juniper each adds its own charm and characteristics to the brew.

I spoke to a pediatric nutritionist who believes it’s “highly unlikely” that children – those most at risk from lead – will consume a tablespoon of vinegar a day. But it’s good, she said, that people understand the potential hazard.

However, it appears easy for parents to avoid the risk by switching to a vinegar that’s not balsamic nor red.

Here is a link to the very comprehensive ENS report.

11/10/09 7:56 AM

At first glance, there is little to distinguish Yuanfeng from any other village amid the vast urban sprawl that makes up China’s factory-scape of Dongguan.

This clump of brick farmhouses and small shops sandwiched between clothing, plastics and electronics factories is one of China’s dozens of “cancer villages,” – small towns where industrial pollution and other toxins have created cancer clusters. At least a dozen of the village’s 400 residents have died of cancer here in recent years,

Landfill at Yuanfeng

many of them young, many of them felled by very rare cancers. Higher-than-average cancer rates have also been reported in nearby villages.

Villagers blame the massive factory dump that looms on the hill behind Yuanfeng, spewing acrid smoke into the air and apparently leaking toxins into the groundwater. The locals don’t know what has contaminated their water, but they have stopped drinking the local water and truck in supplies from neighboring wells. Higher-level governments have denied their requests for health exams and compensation, but have closed off the landfill and are working strange-sounding plans to turn the area into a power plant.

Yuanfeng is just another Chinese village poisoned by the dark side of China’s economic miracle. Breakneck speed development and industrial production over the past three decades have left scores  of places like this with hazardous environmental catastrophes and no resources to clean them up. Still, Yuanfeng might have a fighting chance: Mayor Deng Zhihong, who lost his 59-year-old father to cancer, has become an outspoken advocate for cleaning up the area.

While many of the cancer-stricken families are reticent to talk, Yuanfeng has made headlines in heavily censored China media, becoming a highly publicized example of industrial contamination. Regional and national newspapers have picked up on the story, adding pressure on local officials to act. Even so, day-to-day life remains bleak and education about how toxic chemical can infiltrate food is absent.

On the road leading up to the dump behind Yuanfeng, pig farmers feed and water their animals amid a haze of burning plastic. They don’t drink the water, they said. But the pigs do.

However, vaccine for the regular seasonal influenza is widely available.

And, by tomorrow, almost 1.4 million doses of the new nasal-spray Live Attenuated Influenza Vaccine for H1N1 should be delivered to the 47 U.S. states and jurisdiction that had ordered them last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

The spray, FluMist®, is approved for use in healthy people from 2 to 49 years of age who are not pregnant, according to the agency. The first shipment will most likely be given to health care workers.

However, some in the health professions are balking at being ordered to get the preventative treatment.

Throughout New York State last week, hundreds of protestors gathered in several locations chanting “No forced shots.”

They loudly opposed an “emergency regulation” which demands that all New York hospitals, hospice, and home healthcare workers be inoculated.

Unions and nursing associations have called the order an “issue of workers’ rights.” Press reports say hospitals have allegedly told workers to get the flu shots or get fired.

For the rest of us, the injectable H1N1 vaccine is also on the way. CDC says it can be ordered now by state health agencies and should begin arriving within about 10 days.

Twenty-seven states reported geographically widespread influenza activity, Guam and 18 states reported regional influenza activity, two states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico reported local influenza activity, Vermont reported sporadic influenza activity, and the U.S. Virgin Islands and Montana and Nevada did not report

Here is a link to more information on the nasal spray.

This slogan should be printed on banners hanging over every meat purveyor in the business and on T-shirts worn by everyone responsible for food safety.

Microphoto by Eduweb UK

The government says it cannot pin down how many  of the estimated 80 million cases of food poisoning each year are attributable to E. coli bacteria.

The predictions are almost useless, says one investigator from the Centers for Disease Control, because guesstimates swing widely between 40,000 to as many as 20 million.

I have several acquaintances in the food industry, including cooks, food scientists and safety inspectors. A handful are vegetarians, a couple are even vegans, but most eagerly savor hunks of skillfully cooked beef.

Even the carnivores tell me, however, that they will not buy or use ground beef for burgers, meatballs or meatloaves unless they know who ground it and from what cut of the cow the meat came.

This probably sounds excessive to many, but these are people who know what Escherichia coli is and what it can do to the human body.

For years I have been reporting on the inability of government and private food inspectors and public health activists to get meat processors – from slaughterhouses to your grocer’s meat counter – to protect the consumer from E. coli in beef.

These people on the frontlines have repeatedly offered up evidence to Congressional committees and regulatory agencies on the collusion within the meat processing industry to block the required safety inspections of E. coli.

In the past, these whistleblowers have given the investigators proof that there is excessive use of trimmings, fat and low-cost waste meats, often contaminated with feces, sold as quality grade beef. Even those companies that want to do it properly and legally find themselves stymied by the meat suppliers.

If you really want to understand how this insidious food safety roulette is being played out and the personal destruction that comes from doing it wrong, I urge you to read this story in Sunday’s New York Times.

Reporter Michael Moss offers up an amazingly well written and thoroughly documented examination of this sinister side of food safety, how profit comes first and consumers suffer and sometimes die.

To illustrate how devastating E. coli can be, Moss tells the story of Stephanie Smith, 22, who was left paralyzed  after eating a burger tainted by E. coli.

I’ve studied the food industry for years and I thought I knew it well, but this reporter lays out a level of collusion that amazes and frightens even me.

If you don’t read Moss’s story, here are a just a few basic facts about this potentially lethal food toxin.

• E. coli, which has contaminated hundreds of food products including spinach, lettuce, cookie dough or beef, comes from feces.

• E. coli is an incredibly resilient organism. Food safety experts have reported that amazingly low numbers of E. coli bacteria can cause infection and can survive – sometimes for months or longer – on work surfaces, chopping boards, knives and other implements

• Disease detectives at the CDC worry that antibiotic resistance appears to be increasing in some strains of E. coli, in part, they speculate, because of soaring overuse of antibiotics in animals.

E. coli is just one of the foodborne pathogens that government disease detectives say cause more than 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the U.S. alone.

These estimates are obscenely high for a country that brags about being the world’s leader in food safety.

Some food poisoning is unavoidable. Most is not. Government and industry experts know how food-borne pathogens can be controlled, but the will to do so is often absent.

Many observers of the USDA call the agency gutless when it comes to initiating or enforcing rules on food processors that make what we eat safer.

In the past, it was easy to blame it on the Bush Administration’s pro-industry stand on everything.

Congressional oversight committees repeatedly blamed the Republican majority for thwarting improvements in safety regulations.

A logical question is who’s to blame now?

Food safety lawyer and activist Bill Marler, who represented the victims in the notorious Jack in the Box E. coli cases in Seattle, is distributing T-shirts this week to every member of the U.S. Senate. The message: “Put a trial lawyer out of business.”

“Millions of Americans needlessly become ill and too many businesses lose billions due to contaminated food,” Marler said.

He is pushing Congress to enact stronger laws this fall. “It can be stopped if proper laws are passed and fully enforced,” he said.

The reason is that lead from the bullets or shotgun pellets can leach into the meat and then accumulate in the bodies of those who eat the game.

For decades, the government has tried to eliminate all sources of lead exposure, most visibly targeting paints and gasoline.

Almost two decades ago, lead shotgun pellets were banned for hunting waterfowl, but lead bullets and shotgun slugs remain in wide use for hunting game.

But now, another comprehensive study by scientists from the Centers for Disease Control has confirmed the risk from eating meat shot with lead ammunition.

They took blood from 736 people  – aged 2 to 92 years – from six North Dakota cities and tested it for lead.

The results, reported by Environmental Health News, showed that significantly higher blood lead levels were found in those who ate more wild game and who ate it more often.

The CDC warns that no organ is immune to the harmful effects of lead, but the heavy metal can cause the most damage to the nervous, circulatory and reproductive systems. Children are especially vulnerable due to their developing brains and nervous system.

While the study group said it consumed meat from elk, bear, moose and birds, venison was the most popular game meat consumed, with some eating it weekly.

Hunters can lower the risk of lead exposure in those by using bullets without lead or by carefully removing the bullet bits when butchering the game. However, the researchers allow that even experienced butchers have a difficult time removing every lead fragment.

For more information, here is a link to the report on the study.

Drawing by Stephen Templeton Art Director/Cartoonist for flatheadbeacon.com

“I don’t touch anybody or anything or let anybody touch me,” said one youngster, and then quickly backed up to prevent his friends who heard the comment from touching him.

“Stay away from pigs. They started all this you know,” said a young woman in the fourth-grade, smarter than her years.  “You never want to eat them,” she added, paused for a moment and asked “Does bacon count?”

Talking about sneezing into the crook of their arms generated an immediate chorus of “Gross,” “Eeeew,” and “Yuckee.”

“So you have snot all over your clothes all day. How bad is that?” asked a girl.

A fifth-grade boy said he was puzzled: “My mom used to scream at me for wiping snot on my sleeve. Now she yells when I don’t. What’s up with this?” he asked.

Several reached into their pockets or backpacks to show me their little bottles of antibiotic lotion or spray.

“I know why it kills the bugs,” said one boy, “it’s because it stinks.”

Another added, ”It’s icky, worse than snot. “

As their bus arrived, all agreed that they were not looking forward to their vaccination next month.  As an aside, some kids really have foul mouths.

Regardless of their lack of unbridled enthusiasm, trial testing a 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine in children look promising, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Here’s a link for more details on the initial testing

In addition to death and illness, researchers for the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council said in a report issued today that the economic losses attributed to these diseases have exceeded $200 billion in economic losses worldwide over the past 10 years.

For example, the U.S. beef industry alone lost $11 billion over three years after the detection of one cow with “mad cow disease,” the scientists reported.

The noses of hundreds of pigs were swabbed by Dr, Tara Smith and her team as they tried to document the spread of MRSA in swine.

The World Health Organization has identified more than 200 zoonotic diseases, some going back centuries. They involve all types of agents: bacteria, parasites, viruses and unconventional agents.

In addition to Swine flu or H1N1, the world of animals, bugs and birds have shared with humans everything from anthrax, avian flu, cholera, mad cow, Dengue fever, Ebola, rabies, plague to West Nile virus.

“Zoonotic diseases are like wildfires, which flare up unexpectedly and can take a significant toll on human and animal health and damage household livelihoods as well as national economies,” said Marguerite Pappaioanou, of the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges and co-chair of the group doing the report.

She said that all too often, the public health reaction to these outbreaks has been to try containing a wildfire after it has gotten out of control.

“We need a system that enables us to prevent the conditions for these disease flare-ups to occur in the first place and to spot them earlier when we can take more effective and measured actions to limit the damage,” she added.

The report said that significant weaknesses undermine the global community’s abilities to prevent, detect early, and respond efficiently to potentially deadly species-crossing microbes, such as the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus sweeping the globe.

In addition much greater coordination between physicians and veterinary medicine specialists, the team said there must be a detailed plan for establishing and funding a comprehensive, globally coordinated system to identify novel zoonotic disease threats as early as possible.

This is vital so appropriate measures can be taken to prevent significant numbers of human illnesses and deaths.

The report also calls for more honesty in reporting these outbreaks.

Greater transparency could improve control of animal diseases before they decimate livestock or wildlife or make large numbers of people sick, the report said.

The report, called “SUSTAINING GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE AND RESPONSE TO EMERGING ZOONOTIC DISEASES,” is 300 pages long.  But here is a link to a summary of the report.

For more information on Zoonotic diseases, here is a link to the WHO website.

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