Mattel Exempted Itself from Lead Testing

Via Purple Pawn: The LA Times reported late last month that Mattel had lobbied itself out of third-party lead testing of its products.

"It's really ironic that the company that was a principal source of the problem" is now getting favorable treatment from the government, said Michael Green, executive director of the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland.
Mattel is getting a competitive advantage, Green said, because smaller companies must pay independent labs to do the tests. Testing costs can run from several hundred dollars to many thousands.

Beware of Green Food

Via Universal Hub: the FDA advises against the consumption of tomalley from Maine lobsters due to the risk of Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP).

The FDA advisory applies only to tomalley, the soft, green substance found in the body cavity of the lobster that functions as the liver and pancreas. Cooking does not eliminate the PSP toxins. However, studies have shown that, even when high levels of PSP toxins are present in lobster tomalley, lobster meat itself is typically unaffected.

Also on the green food watch, the CDC reports a couple of smoking jalapeños:

An FDA laboratory detected Salmonella Saintpaul with the outbreak strain fingerprint pattern in a sample of jalapeño pepper obtained from a distribution center in McAllen, Texas. The distributor is working with FDA to recall the contaminated product in the United States. The peppers were grown in Mexico; investigators are working to determine where they were contaminated.
The Laboratory Services Division of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment detected Salmonella Saintpaul with the outbreak strain fingerprint pattern in a jalapeño pepper provided by an ill individual. The state health department is working with the FDA to determine the origin of the jalapeño pepper.

Plagueblog recommends eating locally-grown produce (unless you are local to Mexico) and ruminants. In no case should you be eating any part of an animal whose internal organs can be described as a "soft, green substance [...] that functions as both liver and pancreas."

Birthwort and Balkan Nephropathy

Via ProMED-mail: New Scientist reports on the likely solution to a longstanding mystery.

Since it was first formally recognised in 1956, the disease called endemic Balkan nephropathy has perplexed experts, who have considered various explanations, including groundwater contamination.
Unlike most patients with kidney failure, people with the Balkan illness often have healthy blood pressure. Nonetheless, as their kidneys begin to fail they require dialysis and about half of them eventually develop a rare cancer of the upper urinary tract.
Arthur Grollman, at the University at Stony Brook, New York, US, did not expect to discover birthwort as the cause of this kidney disease when he set out for the region a few years ago. Instead, he had hypothesised that herbal remedies were to blame for this nephropathy.
[... H]e surveyed patients in dialysis clinics in the region on whether they had taken any herbal medicines. But none reported taking such supplements.
Disappointed his theory had proved wrong, Grollman headed for home – but not before killing a final afternoon in a library in Zagreb, the Croatian capital.
There, he came across a striking description from the 1930s about how horses in the region had developed kidney failure after grazing on a plant known as Aristolochia clematis, also known as birthwort. Grollman immediately cancelled his flight and set off to meet Balkan farmers.
A survey of their fields and mills revealed that some of their wheat was indeed contaminated with Aristolochia clematis seed. Back in the lab, Grollman and his colleagues examined kidney samples from Croatian nephropathy patients. They found the same telltale signs of DNA damage linked to Aristolochia clematis as seen in animal studies.

PlagueBlog recommends weeding the wheat.