Word: outbreaks
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...pictures of the swine flu outbreak in Mexico...
Despite the toll - 5,000 deaths and 325,000 hospitalizations a year - Congress has typically been unwilling to strengthen controls on the growing, manufacturing and handling of food in the face of powerful industry resistance. But as profits and consumer confidence have plummeted with each new outbreak, the political climate has changed - so much so that earlier this week, a House panel reached unusual bipartisan consensus on the most sweeping reform of the food-safety system in at least 50 years...
...legislation is an effort to transform a slow and reactive government apparatus into a preventive food-safety system. Every processor or importer would have to implement plans to identify biological and chemical hazards in its products, like the salmonella discovered at a Georgia peanut plant linked to a national outbreak of the infection in 2008. Firms would be required to maintain strategies and procedures to prevent or stop such dangers. The FDA would set minimum requirements for plans and audit them, a government tool that may have headed off the peanut-borne bacteria that resulted in 700 reported illnesses...
...Tuesday the World Health Organization (WHO) updated the numbers on the spread of the H1N1 flu: 26,563 cases in 73 countries, including a growing outbreak in Australia, where over 1,000 cases have been recorded in the state of Victoria alone. That state also saw the disease spread in the community - outside schools and hospitals - which until now has happened most clearly in the U.S. and Mexico, the two nations that have so far been hit hardest by the H1N1 virus. (See pictures of soccer in the time of swine...
...experts go, Osterholm has been a doomsayer, predicting that the world was far from ready for a new flu virus. But in the early days of the H1N1 outbreak, he was full of praise for the WHO's quick reaction. Now, however, he thinks that the global body, perhaps under pressure from governments that are worried about the economic impact of a full pandemic declaration, may be abandoning science-backed decision-making. "The public reaction and the media should not drive the science," he says...