FAT BITCH

MONTREAL, Quebec (AP) -- A provincial health official says that an unusually high number of people have fallen ill with salmonella food poisoning across Quebec.

Horacio Arruda, a director with Quebec's public health department, said Friday that 87 cases of salmonellosis have been reported and one death has been linked to the outbreak.

He said that there were as many cases in one week this month in the eastern province than there are during the average year.

The bacteria can cause diarrhea, fever and vomiting. The Food and Agriculture Ministry has issued recalls of some brands of cheese that are a suspected source of the outbreak.

The Food and Agriculture Ministry has issued recalls of three different types of cheese throughout the province that are a suspected source of the salmonella outbreak. Spokesman Guy Auclair said the salmonella outbreak is not connected to a recent listeria outbreak in Canada linked to the 15 deaths.

A recent salmonella outbreak in the United States sickened at least 1,440 people.

© 2008 The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad cow disease, a federal appeals court said Friday.

The dispute pits the Agriculture Department, which tests about 1 percent of cows for the potentially deadly disease, against a Kansas meat packer that wants to test all its animals.

Larger meat packers opposed such testing. If Creekstone Farms Premium Beef began advertising that its cows have all been tested, other companies fear they too will have to conduct the expensive tests.

The Bush administration says the low level of testing reflects the rareness of the disease. Mad cow disease has been linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Great Britain. Only three cases have been reported in the U.S., all involving cows, not humans.

A federal judge ruled last year that Creekstone must be allowed to conduct the test because the Agriculture Department can only regulate disease "treatment." Since there is no cure for mad cow disease and the test is performed on dead animals, the judge ruled, the test is not a treatment.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned that ruling, saying diagnosis can be considered part of treatment.

"And we owe USDA a considerable degree of deference in its interpretation of the term," Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote.

The case was sent back to the district court, where Creekstone can make other arguments.

© 2008 The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Drunken-driving deaths fell in 32 states in 2007, the government reported Thursday, but alcohol-related fatalities increased among motorcycle riders in half the states.

Nearly 13,000 people were killed in crashes in which the driver had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08, the legal limit in the United States, or at higher levels.

Overall, alcohol deaths were down nearly 4 percent compared with 2006, when nearly 13,500 people died on the highway.

Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said she was disappointed by the increase in deaths involving drunk motorcycle riders. A total of 1,621 motorcyclists were killed in alcohol-impaired crashes in 2007, an increase of 7.5 percent.

Motorcycle riders have been featured in the government's $13 million advertising campaign surrounding the Labor Day holiday. Law enforcement agencies are increasing their enforcement against drunken driving during the end of the summer.

Dean Thompson, a spokesman for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, said riders who conduct training courses always stress the dangers involved in drinking alcohol before riding.

"The skill set you need in terms of the coordination and balance and things like that, you cannot choose to drink and ride. It's just the wrong choice to make," he said.

Among the states, California had 117 fewer alcohol-impaired driving deaths last year, the largest decrease in the nation. Texas had 108 fewer deaths and Arizona's fatalities dropped by 63 deaths.

California conducted more than 1,000 sobriety checkpoints during the year and encouraged motorists to dial 911 on their cell phones if they spot a potentially drunken driver, said Christopher Murphy, who leads the state's traffic safety office.

"Our vision is really toward zero deaths - everyone counts, so we're not exactly celebrating these numbers," said Murphy, who leads the Governors Highway Safety Association.

North Carolina had 66 more deaths, the most among states, followed by South Carolina with 44 fatalities.

In addition to North Carolina and South Carolina, alcohol-impaired deaths increased in Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

The latest data followed calls from dozens of college presidents to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, arguing that the laws lead to binge drinking on campus.

Mark Rosenker, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said Thursday he opposed the administrators' effort.

"Age 21 drinking laws have been proven time and again effective in preventing deaths and injuries," Rosenker said. "Repealing them is a terrible idea."

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On the Net:

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov

© 2008 The Associated Press.

CHICAGO (AP) -- As New Orleans residents warily track another threatening storm, a new report presents the clearest picture yet of deaths from Katrina in Louisiana. Of the nearly 1,000 who died, almost half were 75 or older, according to researchers.

Most died on the day of the storm - August 29, 2005 - and drowning was the leading cause of death. More than one-third died in homes.

The results present a tragic portrait of elderly residents who may have thought the warnings were a false alarm, who feared that abandoning their homes would lead to looting, or who simply didn't want to leave their familiar surroundings for the unknown.

The high death toll in the elderly was likely due to those factors along with older people being more vulnerable and frail and unable to fight the catastrophic storm, the report said.

The report provides the most comprehensive details yet of Katrina's deaths in Louisiana and "just shows us where we need to direct our disaster preparedness effort," said Joan Brunkard, the lead author and a researcher at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We must reach these populations" before, during, and after storms, and provide the assistance and reassurance they need to be willing to evacuate, she said.

The study was published online Thursday and will appear in the October print edition of the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness.

"The findings in this report will aid public health and emergency preparedness efforts and may help reduce the mortality burden in future natural disasters," the researchers wrote.

Dr. Raoult Ratard, Louisiana's state epidemiologist and a co-author of the report, said plans are under way to help New Orleans' residents including the elderly prepare for the current storm, Gustav, which some projections say could hit Louisiana with hurricane strength in coming days.

"We're in the waiting period right now," Ratard said.

The new report focuses on deaths directly related to Katrina in Louisiana, and on deaths of Louisiana residents who fled to other states. It's based on death certificates listing Katrina as the main or contributing cause and data from a federal disaster response team. The researchers counted 971 Katrina-related deaths in Louisiana, mostly in New Orleans, and 15 deaths among residents who fled out of state.

The time period was Aug. 27 to Oct. 31, 2005, which includes deaths in car crashes on evacuation routes and from injuries suffered during the storm.

The previously reported death toll for all Katrina victims has been put at 1,698. That includes bodies collected in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and Louisiana residents who died in other states in the month after Katrina.

Among the findings:

- 40 percent of victims drowned.

- Just under half of all victims were 75 or older; the average age was 69.

- Only 2 percent were younger than 18.

- 51 percent were black; 42 percent were white.

Information on place of death was available for 877 victims; 36 percent died in homes, 22 percent in hospitals and 12 percent in nursing homes. More than 25 percent were found elsewhere, including the Superdome and Convention Center, where masses of people were housed during the storm.

After drowning, injury/trauma was the second-leading cause and accounted for about 25 percent of the deaths. There were four suicides and two slayings blamed on Katrina.

An editorial in the journal praises the report but says it likely underestimates the disaster's true toll because many more deaths were indirectly related to the storm.

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On the Net:

Journal: http://www.dmphp.org/pap.dtl

© 2008 The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Almost 12 percent of the deaths among American Indians and Alaska Natives are alcohol-related - more than three times the percentage in the general population, a new federal report says.

The report released Thursday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found 11.7 percent of deaths among American Indians and Alaska Natives between 2001 and 2005 were alcohol-related, compared with 3.3 percent for the U.S. as a whole.

Dwayne Jarman, a CDC epidemiologist who works for the Indian Health Service and is one of the study's authors, said it is the first national survey that measures American Indian deaths due to alcohol. It should be a "call to action" for federal, state, local and tribal governments, he said.

The researchers obtained their statistics by analyzing death certificates over the four-year period.

The two leading causes of alcohol-related deaths among Indians were traffic accidents and alcoholic liver disease, each of which cause more than a quarter of the 1,514 alcohol-related deaths over the four-year period.

Also listed are homicide (6.6 percent of alcohol-related deaths), suicide (5.2 percent) and injuries in falls (2.2 percent).

There may be many more alcohol-related deaths than the study shows, in part because the CDC analysis did not count deaths related to some diseases for which alcohol is believed to be an important risk factor, such as tuberculosis, pneumonia and colon cancer.

The greatest number of tribal alcohol-related deaths - about a third of the total - occurred in the Northern Plains, where reservations are remote and often destitute, the study said. The lowest number of deaths were in Alaska.

Jarman said the study did not look at why there may be more deaths in the Plains but said it is consistent with previous studies.

"It may be a function of social perceptions of alcohol in that particular region," he said. The report did not break down the numbers by tribe.

The study said more than 68 percent of the Indians whose deaths were attributed to alcohol were men, and 66 percent were people younger than 50 years old. Seven percent were less than 20 years old.

The study recommends "culturally appropriate clinical interventions" to reducing excessive drinking and better integration between tribal health care centers and tribal courts, which often deal with alcohol-related crimes.

Donovan Antelope, a spokesman for the Northern Arapaho Tribe, said alcoholism has been a problem for more than a century with many Indian populations.

"It has had a very negative impact on our day-to day life," he said, adding that the tribe has started promoting alcohol-free events.

In general, American Indians suffer much higher death rates of most leading causes than the rest of the country. Besides alcoholism, drug use, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and suicide also are high.

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On the Net:

http://www.cdc.gov/

© 2008 The Associated Press.