Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced new and stricter testing standards for use by chicken and turkey farmers to reduce Salmonella and Campylobacter in their flocks.

The Food Safety Inspection Service says after the standards have been in play for two years there will be 39,000 fewer cases of Campylobacter and 26,000 less people who contract Salmonella.

The standards announced today are the first-ever for Campylobacter and revises earlier standards for chicken and turkey. The new standards set a maximum percentage level of poultry samples that can test positive for a given pathogen.
“There is no more important mission at USDA than ensuring the safety of our food,” said Vilsack. “The new standards mark an important step in our efforts to protect consumers by further reducing the incidence of Salmonella and opening a new front in the fight against Campylobacter.”

Today’s standards to slash foodborne pathogens also included a guide on practices to reduce E. coli O157:H7 contamination in cattle.

The new standards ”represent the most significant food-safety development from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 15 years,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal, Food Safety Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit national health advocacy group.

“These long-awaited changes will push poultry processors to improve the safety of their products,” she says.
The Centers for Disease Control says Campylobacter is the most commonly reported bacterial cause of foodborne infection in the United States.

Most retail chicken is contaminated with the jejuni strain of the pathogen, says the Atlanta-based food illness specialists and that one study reported finding it in 98 percent of retail chicken meat. In addition to the usual unpleasant side effects of food poisoning CDC says it also is linked to Guillain-Barré syndrome.

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.

Prof. Vaughn Bryant

For the first time, a U.S. lab is able to conduct such tests on the golden nectar.

Texas A&M University announced last week that Vaughn Bryant, a palynologist and an anthropology professor, is now the only person in the U.S. doing melissopalynology – the study of pollen in honey that allows identification of its country of origin.

Performing isotopic studies, Bryant says he has examined more than 100 honey samples for importers, exporters, beekeepers and producers with his DNA-based analysis. Many of the samples he analyzed contained labels from other countries when in fact they originated in China. They were reportedly re-routed to avoid tariffs of up to 500 percent.

Some foreign exporters get around the tariff by mixing honey from different sources, others infuse up to 50 percent high fructose corn syrup into the honey.  It is becoming common now for smugglers to use a process called ultra-filtration which removes the pollen and makes it almost impossible for any laboratory to determine its origin.

“The beekeepers of the U.S. have been pleading with the Food and Drug Administration to enact stricter guidelines about accurate labeling for honey, but that is a long, slow process,’’ Bryant said. “Meanwhile, I’m trying to help out here and there, but it’s almost impossible to keep up.”

“We estimate that millions of pounds of Chinese honey continue to enter the U.S. from countries that do not have commercial honey businesses,” said Jill Clark, vice president for marketing of Dutch Gold Honey, of Lancaster, Penn.

“For example, countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and Mongolia raise few bees and have no history of producing honey in commercial quantities, yet have recently exported large amounts of honey to the United States,” Clark added. In the same in statement she announced the creation of a website which tells consumers, honey companies, food manufacturers and retailers what actions to take to eliminate illegally imported honey.

The site, called “HonestHoney.com,” is supported by Dutch Gold, Golden Heritage Foods of Hillsboro, Kan., Burleson’s Inc. from Waxahachie, Texas, and Odem International from Rosemere, Ont., one of North America’s largest honey suppliers. The site offers guides for consumers, honey brokers, packers and sellers suggesting ways to avoid the illegal honey.

Although the group said they notified most of the big players in the U.S. honey market of the initiative, no others joined in, which is bit puzzling.

Take Sue Bee, formally known as Sioux Bee Honey, which says it’s the country’s largest supplier of honey – about 40-million pounds each year.  The company did not respond to e-mail messages asking why they chose not to participate.

For more than three years, federal investigators have had hit-or-miss successes trying to intercept boxcar-sized loads of illegally labeled honey coming into ports on both coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. More than a dozen arrests have been made of honey launderers and reportedly “active investigations” are targeting a number of other major players in the international scam.

Almost all have centered on honey actually from China that is intentionally mislabeled to avoid paying stiff import tariffs–and often contaminated with illegal animal antibiotics as well.

Those behind the initiative to alert the public say the illegal sales of honey have cost the U.S. up to $200 million in uncollected import duties in the past two years while continuing to threaten the domestic honey business and the future of America’s beekeepers.

“When honey is imported illegally, no one can be confident of its true source and quality. Some products are not 100 percent honey and have other quality issues,” said Clark.

While many consumers only think about honey as the golden liquid in plastic honey bears, in reality most of the honey imported into the U.S. is delivered in 250-gallon or tanker car-sized loads and ends up as an ingredient in cereals, breads, cookies, crackers, breakfast bars, meats, salad dressings, barbecue sauces, mustards, beverages, ice creams, yogurts and candies.

Investigators say that some of the food processors are prime, often-willing, targets for brokers trying to offload lower-cost, bogus honey.

The group says it hopes all the players will accept the provisions of this pledge:

THE HONEST HONEY PLEDGE
We pledge to protect our customers and consumers, as well as the global reputation of honey products, by ensuring to our utmost ability that honey is ethically sourced in a transparent and traceable manner from known beekeepers and brokers; that honey moves through the supply chain in full accordance with U.S. law and without circumvention of trade duties; that it carries truthful labeling as to its source, has been tested to ensure quality, and has been handled in a safe and secure manner from hive to table. We endeavor to do business with companies that share our concern for food safety and security. We pledge to stand against the collection, processing or sale of adulterated honey or honey that has been obtained in circumvention of U.S. law. We espouse a global standard for high-quality honey that does not allow for adulteration with added syrups or other sweetener extenders, or use of inappropriate additives in honey production. We actively support U.S. beekeepers, including supporting research to help beekeepers maintain the health and high quality of U.S. honey production and to fight colony collapse disorder.

For a longer version of this story, see what I wrote today for AOL News.

I’m not talking about just something to hold your glasses on to your face, but rather a device packed with a carefully woven maze of man-made chemical sensors that can detect and recognize odors.

Electronic noses – also known as eNoses — have been around for about a decade. They are instruments linked to analytical equipment such as gas chromatographs that would analyze air samples and report the intensity and quantity of an odor without the help of a human nose.

The older versions of the eNose could be trained or calibrated to identify a single specific aroma, such as a rose or skunk scent, and then electronically unleashed to ferret out that particular odor in different surroundings.

It has long been believed that the like or dislike of a specific odor is completely subjective, and can’t be quantified. But a group of Israeli scientists has done just that, according to this month’s Journal of Computational Biology.

The researchers, from Weizmann Institute of Science and the Edith Wolfson Medical Center, wanted to develop a nose that could detect and characterize a wide range of odors and could function as an environmental and safety monitors.

Using a device called a MOSES II eNose, with 16 metal-oxide and quartz sensors, they trained the “nose” to smell like a human or animal can and differentiate the aromas into pleasant and rally unpleasant.

National Honey Board

“The objective of the meeting will be a frank discussion of issues affecting the domestic honey industry, primarily transshipment of foreign honey and adulteration of honey,” said a note to all participants from the National Honey Packers & Dealers Association.

The meeting comes as federal investigators and the offices of the U.S. attorney in at least four states continue to search for  packing companies, honey brokers and importers allegedly involved in facilitating or purchasing intentionally mislabeled or bogus honey.

The crime, which some major suppliers say may involve 50 percent or more of all imported honey, centers on foreign hucksters and shady importers taking cheap, but abundant Chinese honey, moving it to a country with a reputation for a quality product, changing the country-of-origin on the shipping papers and then marketing the bogus load to brokers in the U.S.

There are two reasons for this illegal global bait-and-switch. First, the U.S. has set a tariff on each pound of Chinese honey brought into the U.S. – higher than any other nation – to protect domestic honey producers from the cheaper Chinese honey flooding the market.

But more importantly, Chinese honey often contains traces of an illegal animal antibiotic called chloramphenicol.  This drug, purchased from India, was first used years ago to stem an epidemic of disease that was laying waste to most of  China’s bee colonies.

The drug still taints most of the Chinese honey, some importers say and the Food and Drug Administration and the Canadian government found the contaminate in imported honey in January.

For the rest of this story, see what I wrote today for AOLNews.com.