Taco Bell is being blamed for outbreaks of salmonellia in 21 states.

Bill Marler, who is considered, at least by reporters at most major newspapers who eagerly use his  juicy quotes, to be the country’s leading food safety lawyer, is already filing suits on behalf of  victims of the nation’s most recent salmonella outbreak.

A colony of salmonella spores captured by CDC scientists.

His first client is a 45-year-old mother from Kentucky who allegedly contracted the sometimes-lethal pathogen after eating at a Taco Bell.  For Marler, suing the Mexican fast outlet is like a homecoming. His Seattle-based firm litigated two prior food poisoning outbreaks at Taco Bell. In 2000, there was a hepatitis outbreak in green onions and in 2006 an E. coli outbreak sickened many patrons.

“Since the outbreak is so widespread, it’s likely that the contamination was on the vegetables when they arrived at the stores and not something that happened while the food was being prepared,” Marler told me this morning.

The Centers for Disease Control analysis of biological samples collected from food poisoning victims in 21 states say that at least 155 people were proven to have been exposed to the same two rare strains of salmonella. The federal disease detectives that other Mexican food outlets may also be a source of the illness.

Meanwhile, the number of people already sickened by salmonella after possibly eating at Taco Bell and other Mexican fast-food outlets in 21 states may increase beyond the 155 cases already reported.

Although CDC and the Food and Drugs Administration say the reports of illness from these strains appear to have peaked, the is a two week to three week lag from the time a diner gets sick and when take illness popped up on a federal disease database.

In past outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli, the pathogens were linked to lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and green onion, many of which were imported from Mexico but in these outbreaks, disease detectives have been unable to isolate the vegetable carrying the disease.

A Taco Bell spokesman said the chain’s food is “perfectly safe.”

As this point, the salmonella-caused illness have been reported in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North and South Carolina, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.

Here is a link to a longer version of the story that I filed this morning for AOL News.

Never mind Big Brother; your beer’s isotopes knows where you are.

By Andrew Schneider

That mug of microbrew you hoisted after work today tasted good, didn’t it? Would it have gone down as easy if you knew that it left a chemical marker showing what city you were in when you drank it? So do bottled and tap water as well as soft drinks.

It’s true. Your cellphone isn’t the only thing that can tell others your location. Scientists who can precisely measure hydrogen and oxygen isotopes can also tell where a crime victim spent the past year or whether that milk came from the farm down the road or across the country.

Biologists, geologists and analytical chemists at the University of Utah and a Salt Lake City laboratory called IsoForensics, Inc. are using this technology to help test food quality and solve cold cases for detectives around the country.

At the heart of the process is the water that is used in all beverages, from booze to baby formula. The body removes hydrogen and oxygen atoms from water and beverages that contain it and leaves a natural chemical imprint or fingerprint, explained Lesley Chesson and her colleagues in the current issue of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. “What we found is that human hair records the isotopic composition of the water that you drink,” she explained.

Chesson, an analytical chemist and the lead author of the study, explains it this way: The isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen in water vary in ways that can be predicted accurately, and they reveal the latitude, elevation and proximity to coastline.

Lesley Chesson

“A distinct chemical fingerprint in your hair could be used to track your travels,” Chesson says.

There are implications for this beyond tracking human whereabouts. It’s also a way to find fraudulent food.

The Utah team is collecting honeycomb from beekeepers across the country in hopes of tracking where honey originates. If this works, federal criminal investigators from Customs, the Food and Drug Administration and the Border Patrol will finally have a way to stop the smuggling of mislabeled, often unsafe Chinese honey.

It might also be a way to determine if that pricey bottle of wine is really worth it.

Three scientists from the University of Utah and IsoForensics – Jason West, James Ehleringer, and Thure Cerling have used the technique of measuring hydrogen and oxygen stable isotopes to detect and confirm the origin of wine.  They found that the water in the wine does indeed provide a record of where the water came from—meaning the wines were clearly distinguishable by growing region.

The criminal-case uses for this technology is right out of CSI. The first case it was used on was that of a woman whose body was found in 2000 in an old bathhouse on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. It had been converted into a concert hall called Saltair.

Seven years after the woman was found, a few strands of her hair yielded a staggering number of details.

“We were able to get a snapshot of the victim’s life back through time…week by week, determine what she drank and thus her location during the period,” Chesson says.

For example, they found that the victim had made periodic moves in the two years leading up to her death, back and forth between two regions in Idaho and Utah every six or eight months.

Chesson began collecting water and hair samples from across the United States in 2007. Next she collected samples of beverages found in almost every community – Dasani brand bottled water, Coca-Cola Classic soda, and Budweiser beer.

The Utah team collected a database of the chemical characteristics of drinking water in 450 U.S. communities.

Chesson and her colleagues found that the soda, bottled and tap water offer a consistent and accurate database. (They found that Budweiser might not be a good way to track someone—the brewer, Anheuser-Busch Inc., operates 12 breweries in the U.S. A consumer could be tipping a Bud that traveled hundreds of miles to their local market.)

The team also collected milk and cow drinking-water samples from eight locations in six states and Puerility Rico then bought milk from supermarkets in 30 cities within 18 states. Yes, they can track the origin of that milk mustache.

Chesson and the other scientists from IsoForensics have put out the word to beekeepers across the U.S. to send in samples of well-identified honeycomb. so the group can refine a method to accurate identify where the honey originated. I’ve was writing about honey laundering before my former newspaper, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, closed 14 months ago and since I began covering public health for AOL News.

Believe me the bogus honey continues to flow though U.S. and onto store shelves. Honest honey importers and packers, and there are many, are trapped between shady importers who actually bounce Chinese honey from country-to-country, or just falsify the shipping papers, and the inability to actually have the golden nectar tested for country-of-origin by any laboratory outside of Germany.

If the analytical wizards in Salt Lake City can develop and confirm the accuracy of this technique, federal criminal investigators from Customs, the Food and Drug Administration and the Border Patrol will have a long-sought-after tool in U.S. efforts to halt the smuggling of mislabeled and adulterated Chinese honey.

In May, I reported that Texas A&M University palynologist and an anthropology professor Vaughn Bryant said he is doing melissopalynology – the study of pollen in honey that allows identification of its country of origin. From what Chesson told me it sounds like IsoForensics approach could wind up being more accessible and perhaps less costly than the German process.

Once you get beyond the gee-whiz factor, the Utah team’s tracking technology has  big-time implications for making sure any number of food products are safe, and accurately labeled.

Here is a link to a longer version of what I wrote today for AOL News .

(Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett contributed to this report.)

The ratio of isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen differ by geographic region.

A drink to your health? Well, maybe.

By Kathy Egan, RD

Wonder how to make a million in tough economic times? Simple: Sell a consumable repeat-purchase product that implies it will create a sense of well being.

Nutraceuticals and functional food products fit this bill amazingly well.  Consumers will pay $3, $4 or even $5 or more for a 16-ounce (or less) bottle of flavored water or juice mix spiked with dietary supplements –and the actual manufacturing cost is pennies per bottle.

These things go in cycles. First we had energy boosters. Now, drinks that promise to calm us down.

A recent New York Times piece, “Skip the Scotch, Just Have a Swig of Mellowberry” by Stephanie Rosenbloom reported on this latest trend in supplement spiked beverages: relaxation drinks.

Rosenbloom writes:

There are already more than 350 kinds of relaxation drinks on the market, according to Agata Kaczanowska, an analyst with the research company IBISWorld. Instead of slogans like Jolt’s “All the sugar and twice the caffeine,” these new drinks proffer serenity with maxims like Unwind’s “Tired of being wired?” and Drank’s “Slow your roll.”

Yes, many of us could use a slower roll, but can it be proffered in a bottle?

Some of the more than 1, 200 supplement containing beverage on sale in North America

Marketers know just how to launch these products. They know that the initial consumer reaction must be good, but not too good. These products do best flying under the radar long enough to get a group following before the experts have a chance to weigh in on them.  Then, after lots of people are using a product, consumers fall prey to false logic, i.e. it must be okay if so many people are using it.

Yet, as Rosenbloom points out, these drinks are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

What’s a wanna-be slow-roller to do? For starters, eyeball the marketing materials. Careful reading of labels reveals that these product claims are subtly worded to allude to the desired result.  Most companies are savvy enough to avoid legally defined health/ nutrition claims. (For more information on health-claim regulation, go to the FDA website.)

Ultimately, any discussion of functional foods comes back to the two main issues around dietary supplements:

Are they what they say they are? And does the ingredient really perform the desired function?

Consumers are often lulled into a false sense of security when the product is a food or drink.  We’re not suspicious of fortified foods because Americans have been buying them since white flour became “enriched” in the 1940s. Today, an average consumer will swallow a variety of dietary supplements in the form of breakfast cereal, energy bars, juice  and milk.

There are two main resources for those interested in verifying the safety of their supplements: U.S. Pharmacopia. U.S. Pharmacopia will verify supplements and allow them to display the USP mark.  (For a list of approved brands, click here.)

NSF International has a more extensive and searchable listing of dietary supplements deemed safe  .  While USP focuses on the veracity of the ingredients, NSF emphasizes safety.

My advice: if you are interested in taking supplements–make a deliberate, educated choice based on dietary needs, weighing benefits against risks or unknowns.  Talking to a physician or nurse practitioner is wise, of course. But don’t stop there: If you don’t know how to decide what supplements might be beneficial for you, see a Registered Dietitian.

(Kathy Egan is The Food Watchdog’s resident “renaissance dietitian” and senior writer. Click here for more of her bio.)

Who says Gulf seafood is safe?

I watched a shopper and fishmonger at a high-end Seattle grocery debate the safety of a pile of succulent-looking, fresh, jumbo shrimp in the seafood case.

The shrimp weren’t from Thailand, Vietnam or even Mexico.  They were from the Gulf, from the waters off Louisiana or Mississippi. They weren’t frozen, packed months ago before BP’s oil rig blew up, sank, and began spewing millions of gallons of hazardous hydrocarbons over almost everything.

Fish suppliers across the country have sold off much of the frozen Gulf products they were hoarding. But now new, freshly caught, Gulf goodies are again showing up in restaurant kitchens and on the chipped ice of good fishmongers.

Good chefs and persnickety consumers have long coveted the taste of shrimp, crab, oysters and fish from the Gulf.

On Monday, a gaggle of top chefs from around the country went to Grand Isle, La., to confirm for themselves the safety of the Louisiana seafood. Many promised the shrimpers, crabbers and fishers that they would eagerly use what they catch as long as it’s safe.

There is fresh seafood in the pipeline and according to Louisiana State officials the supplies are gradually increasing as more harvesting grounds are declared safe from oil and dispersants.

Everyone knows the threat is real and that availability could change. Things such as the weakening Hurricane Alex, or those storms that will surely follow, can force the still-surging oil back over previously safe breeding ground.

Consumers should be confident in the quality of what’s being offered.  I think that buying seafood from the Gulf is a much safer gamble than consuming the virtually untested imported seafood when inundates our food supply.

While food-safety activists say barely 2 percent of the imports are inspected by understaffed FDA port inspections, there is an elaborate and intricate system for ensuring the safety of food from the Gulf.  If you want more information, here is a link to a story I wrote this week for AOLNews.

–Andrew Schneider

Harmful levels of Bisphenol A found in almost all canned foods, new study reports.

The health hazards of bisphenol A are clearly proven, but scientists now report that the levels of the chemical – used to protect canned food from corrosion and bacteria –  are surprisingly high in the  canned goods found on our kitchen shelves.

To reach this conclusion, 50 different cans of food were collected from pantries in 19 states and Ontario and were analyzed at a top food safety lab in San Francisco. BPA was found in 92 percent of the samples according to a 24-page study called “No Silver Lining,” which was released today by the National Workgroup for Safe Markets.

The highest  level of BPA was 1,140 parts per billion – believed  to be the highest ever found in the U.S. It was detected in Del Monte French Style Green Beans from a pantry in Wisconsin, the report said.

Other high scorers included Wal-Mart’s Great Value Green Peas from a store in Kentucky, and Healthy Choice Old Fashioned Chicken Noodle Soup from a pantry in Montana, said researchers from the coalition of more than 17 public and environmental health organizations .

“Our study details potential exposure to BPA from not just one can, but from meals prepared with canned food and drink that an ordinary person might consume over the course of a day,” Mike Schade, a co-author of the study told AOL News.

The unopened cans of fruits, vegetables, beans, soups, tomato products, sodas, and milk were sent to Anresco Laboratories. In order to determine the concentrations of BPA in the food within the can, only the food, not the packaging, was tested. (more…)

Yes, they taste like chicken but the world may be running out of frog legs.

I know you’ll be saddened to learn that you missed the second annual “save the frog” day. I’m embarrassed to admit that I also missed the first one.

But people in several countries are taking the fate of these jumpy green providers of frogs legs very seriously.

San Francisco-based restaurateur Gary Danko said last week he would stop serving frogs legs in the chi-chi eatery that bears his name.

The chef says his is the first restaurant in the world to remove frog legs from its menus for environmental reasons and he calls for other chefs to join him.

“Americans consume 20 percent of the world’s frog legs, and scientists estimate that over a hundred million frogs are taken out of the wild each year for food,” says Kerry Kriger, executive director of Save the Frogs.

The organization, which is comprised of environmental scientists, lawyers and activists, says the frog populations worldwide have been declining at unprecedented rates, and nearly one-third of the world’s amphibian species are threatened with extinction.

I talked to two menu creators and two food scientists from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Three said that one out of five of the world’s frogs being eaten in the U.S. seemed high. (But one, who said that the number of frog farms was increasing in North America, said she thought that number was low, but had no way of knowing for sure.)

Farming frogs isn’t any better than taking them out of the wild, Kriger said, and adds “farmed frogs are raised in unhealthy, crowded conditions, and are a source of a deadly chytrid fungus that has caused the extinction of up to 100 amphibian species worldwide.”

A study by scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Consortium for Conservation Medicine, Wildlife Trust and three overseas institutions reported last year that frogs “are globally threatened by habitat loss, the wildlife trade and emerging diseases.”

An abundance of garlic and a quick sauté was not mentioned by researchers.

–Andrew Schneider

Feds bust importers of bacteria-laced cheese

Two Hondurans were arrested by federal agents today for allegedly importing more than 170,000 pounds of cheese contaminated with dangerous bacteria that could quickly cause food poisoning.

Special agents from the Food and Drug Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement charged Francisca Josefina Lopez and Jorge Alexis Ochoa Lopez with introducing four shipments of adulterated or tainted food products into interstate commerce.

The cheese, valued at $322,000 was imported from Nicaragua between December 2009 and March 2010, said a statement by the FDA.

Testing in the large FDA laboratory in Atlanta documented that three of the four shipments were contaminated with a food pathogen called Staphylococcus aureus. The fourth shipment was not pasteurized as the importers claimed on customs paperwork.

The onset of Staphylococcal food poisoning can be very rapid, the FDA says, depending on individual susceptibility to the toxin, the amount of contaminated food eaten, and the general health of the victim.

The defendants operated from a company known as The Lacteos Factory in Northwest Miami and reportedly developed an elaborate scam to conceal the hazardous cheese.

On April 1, 2010, Customs & Border Protection inspected a cargo container at the Port of Miami, which had been returned to the seaport from Lacteos, with documents stating the cheese was refused and was being returned to Central America.

CBP Inspectors discovered that the top layer of cartons on each pallet contained small bricks of cheese as labeled, but the bulk of the cargo contained in the lower tiers of boxes contained only buckets of waste water. As a result, the majority of the four-hundred eleven cartons of cheese from the entry were missing

Subsequently, a search warrant was executed at the Lacteos Factory, which revealed that the three other shipments of the cheese product had been sold to over 30 customers, despite the food still being under customs hold, which meant the cheese could not be legally sold.

Apparently, one customer conducted independent testing of the cheese, found it to be contaminated with the bacteria and returned the product. Despite that, the cheese was repackaged and sold to other customers.

The Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act states a food is deemed to be adulterated if, among other reasons, it bears or contains any poisonous or deleterious substance which may render it injurious to health.

Felony convictions under the FDA law carry possible sentences of up to three years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 for each violation. In addition, if the pair is convicted of the anti-smuggling violations, they will also face a sentence of up to five years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 for each violation, and forfeiture of the smuggled goods.

Honey safety back in the news

That cute little bear-shaped honey bottle you grab off the supermarket shelf might not be as healthy as it looks.

For the details, see “Honey laundering bust highlights sticky problem,” a piece I wrote this week for AOL news.

–Andrew Schneider