Brownian Motion

Lainie Kazan Elia Kazan Eliane Elias Elian Gonzalez Peggy Noonan Miss Piggy

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By May 7, 2007 'Poppy Quarter' Behind Spy Coin Alert By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 9:19 a.m. ET WASHINGTON (AP) -- An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a U.S. Defense Department false espionage warning earlier this year about mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters, The Associated Press has learned. The harmless ''poppy coin'' was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as ''anomalous'' and ''filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,'' according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP. The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy -- Canada's flower of remembrance -- inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts. The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead. ''It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source,'' wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. ''Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top.'' The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada. One contractor believed someone had placed two of the quarters in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. ''Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket,'' the contractor wrote. But the Defense Department subsequently acknowledged that it could never substantiate the espionage alarm that it had put out and launched the internal review that turned up the true nature of the mysterious coin. Meanwhile, in Canada, senior intelligence officials expressed annoyance with the American spy-coin warnings as they tried to learn more about the oddball claims. ''That story about Canadians planting coins in the pockets of defense contractors will not go away,'' Luc Portelance, now deputy director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, wrote in a January e-mail to a subordinate. ''Could someone tell me more? Where do we stand and what's the story on this?'' Others in Canada's spy service also were searching for answers. ''We would be very interested in any more detail you may have on the validity of the comment related to the use of Canadian coins in this manner,'' another intelligence official wrote in an e-mail. ''If it is accurate, are they talking industrial or state espionage? If the latter, who?'' The identity of the e-mail's recipient was censored. Intelligence and technology experts were flabbergasted over the warning when it was first publicized earlier this year. The warning suggested that such transmitters could be used surreptitiously to track the movements of people carrying the coins. ''I thought the whole thing was preposterous, to think you could tag an individual with a coin and think they wouldn't give it away or spend it,'' said H. Keith Melton, a leading intelligence historian. But Melton said the Army contractors properly reported their suspicions. ''You want contractors or any government personnel to report anything suspicious,'' he said. ''You can't have the potential target evaluating whether this was an organized attack or a fluke.'' The Defense Security Service disavowed its warning about spy coins after an international furor, but until now it has never disclosed the details behind the embarrassing episode. The U.S. said it never substantiated the contractors' claims and performed an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page published report about espionage concerns. The Defense Security Service never examined the suspicious coins, spokeswoman Cindy McGovern said. ''We know where we made the mistake,'' she said. ''The information wasn't properly vetted. While these coins aroused suspicion, there ultimately was nothing there.'' A numismatist consulted by the AP, Dennis Pike of Canadian Coin & Currency near Toronto, quickly matched a grainy image and physical descriptions of the suspect coins in the contractors' confidential accounts to the 25-cent poppy piece. ''It's not uncommon at all,'' Pike said. He added that the coin's protective coating glows peculiarly under ultraviolet light. ''That may have been a little bit suspicious,'' he said. Some of the U.S. documents the AP obtained were classified ''Secret/Noforn,'' meaning they were never supposed to be viewed by foreigners, even America's closest allies. The government censored parts of the files, citing national security reasons, before turning over copies under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Nothing in the documents -- except the reference to nanotechnology -- explained how the contractors' accounts evolved into a full-blown warning about spy coins with radio frequency transmitters. Many passages were censored, including the names of contractors and details about where they worked and their projects. But there were indications the accounts should have been taken lightly. Next to one blacked-out sentence was this warning: ''This has not been confirmed as of yet.'' The Canadian intelligence documents, which also were censored, were turned over to the AP for $5 under that country's Access to Information Act. Canada cited rules for protecting against subversive or hostile activities to explain why it censored the papers. ------ Associated Press writer Beth Duff-Brown contributed to this story from Toronto.

Wallis Simpson James Sallis Chester Himes Cotton Mather James Woolsey Patsy Mink

Richard Schiff Jrerry Sheff John Shaft Britney Spears Lance Armstrong Arrowsmith

Dock Ellis Charlie Sitton Willow Bay Bay Buchanan Hound Dog Taylor Foxy Brown

Leslie West Felix Pappalardi Corky Laing Corky Corcoran David Corcoran Rupert Holmes

Millions Of Chickens Fed Tainted Pet Food Risk to Consumers Minimal, FDA Says By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, May 2, 2007; A01 At least 2.5 million broiler chickens from an Indiana producer were fed pet food scraps contaminated with the chemical melamine and subsequently sold for human consumption, federal health officials reported yesterday. Hundreds of other producers may have similarly sold an unknown amount of contaminated poultry in recent months, they added, painting a picture of much broader consumption of contaminated feed and food than had previously been acknowledged in the widening pet food scandal. Officials emphasized that they do not believe the tainted chickens -- or the smaller number of contaminated pigs that were reported to have entered the human food supply -- pose risks to people who ate them. "We do not believe there is any significant threat of human illness from this," said David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's chief medical officer. FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach named Acheson yesterday the agency's new "food czar" -- officially, assistant commissioner for food protection. None of the farm animals is known to have become sick from the food, and very little of the contaminant is suspected of having accumulated in their tissue. Thus, no recall of any products that may still be on store shelves or in people's freezers is planned, officials said. Nonetheless, 100,000 Indiana chickens that ate the melamine-laced food and are still alive have been quarantined and will be destroyed as a precautionary measure -- as will any other animals that turn up as the investigation continues to expand. The revelations are the latest in a rapidly widening scandal that started out with reports of a few deaths of pets. It has mushroomed into a major debacle that, even if no human injuries emerge, has exposed significant gaps in the nation's food-safety system. In the first volley of what Hill watchers expect to be a series of proposed fixes, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) yesterday introduced legislation that would give the FDA the power to order mandatory recalls of adulterated foods, establish an early warning and notification system for tainted human or pet food, and allow fines for companies that do not promptly report contaminated products. Meanwhile, the FDA expanded the number of plant-based protein products from China on its "do not import" list, pending the completion of further tests on various kinds of glutens, protein concentrates and other products. At the center of the problem are pet foods spiked with melamine, a mildly toxic chemical that can make food appear to have more protein than it does. Most of the food went to pets, but scraps were sold in February to the Indiana poultry producer, officials said. The contaminated material may have made up about 5 percent of the chickens' total food supply. That small fraction, and the fact that people, unlike pets, do not eat the same thing day after day, suggests that consumers who ate contaminated pork or chicken would probably have ingested extremely small doses of melamine, well below the threshold for causing health effects, officials said. Experts conceded, however, that they know little about how the toxin interacts with other compounds in food. Investigators are tracking streams of the contaminated food through several states. "Our sense is that the investigation will lead to additional farms where contaminated feed may have been fed to either animals or poultry," said Kenneth Petersen of the Agriculture Department Food Safety and Inspection Service. Officials said the FDA has received 17,000 reports of pets that owners believe were sickened or killed by contaminated food. About 8,000 reports, roughly half of them involving animals that died, have been formally entered into the FDA's tracking system for further analysis. U.S. investigators have arrived in China, officials said, but inspections of production facilities there have been hampered by the start yesterday of a week-long national vacation. "Essentially, all the officials are on holiday," said Walter Batts, part of the FDA's China team, adding that one Chinese official had stayed behind to help. Post a Comment View all comments that have been posted about this article. Your washingtonpost.com User ID, birdcrash, will be displayed with your comment. Comments: (Limit 5,000 characters) Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post. © 2007 The Washington Post Company Ads by Google Safe Pet Food CESAR® Canine Cuisine. Approved Safe. Visit the Official Site www.cesar.com/safety Pet Food Recall Find Out The Brands Being Recalled! Get the Latest News on Your Desktop News.Starware.com Healthy Food For Pets Lifes Abundance Premium Pet Food Buy All Natural Dog And Cat Food www.HelpingPetsLiveLonger.com

Gale Sayers Bernard Flood Roger Mudd

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By April 30, 2007 In Ducks, War of the Sexes Plays Out in the Evolution of Genitalia By CARL ZIMMER LITCHFIELD, Conn. — “This guy’s the champion,” said Patricia Brennan, a behavioral ecologist, leaning over the nether regions of a duck — a Meller’s duck from Madagascar, to be specific — and carefully coaxing out his phallus. The duck was quietly resting upside-down against the stomach of Ian Gereg, an aviculturist here at the Livingston Ripley Waterfowl Sanctuary. Dr. Brennan, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University and the University of Sheffield, visits the sanctuary every two weeks to measure the phalluses of six species of ducks. When she first visited in January, the phalluses were the size of rice grains. Now many of them are growing rapidly. The champion phallus from this Meller’s duck is a long, spiraling tentacle. Some ducks grow phalluses as long as their entire body. In the fall, the genitalia will disappear, only to reappear next spring. The anatomy of ducks is especially bizarre considering that 97 percent of all bird species have no phallus at all. Most male birds just deliver their sperm through an opening. Dr. Brennan is investigating how this sexual wonder of the world came to be. Part of the answer, she has discovered, has gone overlooked for decades. Male ducks may have such extreme genitals because the females do too. The birds are locked in an evolutionary struggle for reproductive success. Dr. Brennan was oblivious to bird phalluses until 1999. While working in a Costa Rican forest, she observed a pair of birds called tinamous mating. “They became unattached, and I saw this huge thing hanging off of him,” she said. “I could not believe it. It became one of those questions I wrote down: why do these males have this huge phallus?” A bird phallus is similar — but not identical — to a mammalian penis. Most of the time it remains invisible, curled up inside a bird’s body. During mating, however, it fills with lymphatic fluid and expands into a long, corkscrew shape. The bird’s sperm travels on the outside of the phallus, along a spiral-shaped groove, into the female bird. To lean about this peculiar organ, Dr. Brennan decided she would have to make careful dissections of male tinamous. In 2005 she traveled to the University of Sheffield to learn the art of bird dissection from Tim Birkhead, an evolutionary biologist. Dr. Birkhead had her practice on some male ducks from a local farm. Gazing at the enormous organs, she asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before. “So what does the female look like?” she said. “Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car.” The lower oviduct (the equivalent of the vagina in birds) is typically a simple tube. But when Dr. Brennan dissected some female ducks, she discovered they had a radically different anatomy. “There were all these weird structures, these pockets and spirals,” she said. Somehow, generations of biologists had never noticed this anatomy before. Pondering it, Dr. Brennan came to doubt the conventional explanation for how duck phalluses evolved. In some species of ducks, a female bonds for a season with a male. But she is also harassed by other males that force her to mate. “It’s nasty business. Females are often killed or injured,” Dr. Brennan said. Species with more forced mating tend to have longer phalluses. That link led some scientists to argue that the duck phallus was the result of males’ competing with one another to fertilize eggs. “Basically, you get a bigger phallus to put your sperm in farther than the other males,” Dr. Brennan said. Dr. Brennan realized that scientists had made this argument without looking at the female birds. Perhaps, she wondered, the two sexes were coevolving, with elaborate lower oviducts driving the evolution of long phalluses. To test this idea, Dr. Brennan traveled to Alaska. Many species of waterfowl breed there, with a wide range of mating systems. Working with Kevin McCracken of the University of Alaska and his colleagues, she caught and dissected 16 species of ducks and geese, comparing the male and female anatomy. If a male bird had a long phallus, the female tended to have a more elaborate lower oviduct. And if the male had a small phallus, the female tended to have a simple oviduct. “The correlation was incredibly tight,” Dr. Brennan said. “When you dissected one of the birds, it was really easy to predict what the other sex was going to look like.” Dr. Brennan and her colleagues are publishing their studyTuesday in the journal PLOS One. Dr. McCracken, who discovered the longest known bird phallus on an Argentine duck in 2001, is struck by the fact that it was a woman who discovered the complexity of female birds. “Maybe it’s the male bias we all have,” he said. “It’s just been out there, waiting to be discovered.” Dr. Brennan argues that elaborate female duck anatomy evolves as a countermeasure against aggressive males. “Once they choose a male, they’re making the best possible choice, and that’s the male they want siring their offspring,” she said. “They don’t want the guy flying in from who knows where. It makes sense that they would develop a defense.” Female ducks seem to be equipped to block the sperm of unwanted males. Their lower oviduct is spiraled like the male phallus, for example, but it turns in the opposite direction. Dr. Brennan suspects that the female ducks can force sperm into one of the pockets and then expel it. “It only makes sense as a barrier,” she said. To support her argument, Dr. Brennan notes studies on some species that have found that forced matings make up about a third of all matings. Yet only 3 percent of the offspring are the result of forced matings. “To me, it means these females are successful with this strategy,” she said. Dr. Brennan suspects that when the females of a species evolved better defenses, they drove the evolution of male phalluses. “The males have to step up to produce a longer or more flexible phallus,” she said. Other scientists have documented a similar coevolution of genitals in flies and other invertebrates. But Dr. Brennan’s study is the clearest example of this arms race in vertebrates. “It’s rare to find something so blatantly obvious in the female anatomy,” Dr. Brennan said. “I’m sure it’s going on in other vertebrates, but it’s probably going in ways that are more subtle and harder to figure out.” To test her hypothesis, Dr. Brennan plans to team up with a biomechanics expert to build a transparent model of a female duck. She wants to see exactly what a duck phallus does during mating. Dr. Brennan also hopes to find more clues by studying phalluses on living ducks. At the waterfowl sanctuary in Litchfield, she is spending the year tracking the growth and disappearance of phalluses in ducks and geese. Hardly anything is known about how the phallus waxes and wanes — not to mention why. “It may be easier to regrow it than to keep it healthy,” Dr. Brennan said. “But those are some of the things I may be able to find out. When you’re doing something that so little is known about, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen.”

Fay Wray Fazil Say Willie "The Say Hey Kid" Mays Willie the Weeper Sleeper The Grim Reaper

Snake Hips Tucker The Great Schnozzola May West

Lu Waters Blue Lu Barker Blue Lou

Thalassa Cruso Connor Cruise O'Brien Frank O'Connor

I'll bet Kemp tells that to all the guys...

Oh, I almost forgot--George Duvivier accidentally stepped on my toe at a club where he was playing with Teddy Wilson. He apologized.

For about 45 minutes in 1982 I occupied a jail cell in rural North Carolina with Joseph Lowery (At the time Director of the SCLC) and several other folks. We had been arrested for civil disobedience.

Clyde McCoy Ray Lodwig Ray Anthony

President Bush Marks Malaria Awareness Day Bush dances with Senegalese performers from West African Dance Company in the Rose Garden. (Reuters)

Morton Zuckerman Zuckerman Unbound Portnoy

Raymond Lessey Plessy Ferguson Fergie

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By April 18, 2007 Dick Allen, 80, a Historian of Jazz, Dies By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Dick Allen, a jazz historian whose scholarly command of the traditional New Orleans sound was matched only by his role as a French Quarter character, died on Thursday in Dublin, Ga. He was 80. The cause was heart failure, said his sister, Betty Smith. He had been bedridden since leaving New Orleans in 2003 and had lived in a nursing home before that. “In a town that enshrines and cherishes characters, Dick was one of the great ones,” said Robert H. Patterson, who worked with Mr. Allen at Tulane University’s William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive, a premier collection of oral histories of traditional jazz, which Mr. Allen began in 1958. Mr. Allen and Bill Russell began recording interviews with traditional jazz musicians in the mid-1950s in an oral history project that grew into the Hogan Jazz Archive. He was the archive’s associate curator from 1958 to 1965 and curator from 1965 to 1980. He retired in 1992. At various times he ran a record shop in New Orleans and made recordings as well as becoming “the friend and confidant of all New Orleans musicians” and “adviser and guide to everyone from television networks to old ladies in pursuit of George Lewis,” the jazz critic Whitney Balliett said in 1967. He also wrote numerous articles, liner notes and program notes and was a consultant, instructor, production adviser, producer or curator for many institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, he was among the founders of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which draws thousands of people to the city annually. Mr. Allen was born on Jan. 29, 1927, near Milledgeville, Ga., at Allen’s Invalid Home, a home for mentally ill patients established by his grandfather, Dr. Henry Dawson Allen. He went to Princeton before serving in the Navy during World War II and returned home to graduate from the University of Georgia. Mr. Allen studied trombone with Manuel Manetta, who taught Jelly Roll Morton, Red Allen and many other New Orleans musicians.

That is good. No mention here of the death of Brant Parker - Hart's partner in the creation of "Wizard of Id". He died 8 days after Hart. Amazing. The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By April 18, 2007 Brant Parker, 86, Co-Creator of ‘The Wizard of Id’ Comics, Dies By DENNIS HEVESI Brant Parker, a co-creator of “The Wizard of Id,” an award-winning comic strip that is set in medieval times and has poked fun at politics and cultural follies for more than 40 years, died on Sunday at his home in Lynchburg, Va. He was 86. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, according to an announcement by the Creators Syndicate, which distributes “The Wizard of Id.” Mr. Parker’s death came eight days after the death of his collaborator, Johnny Hart, who was best known as the creator of the comic strip “B.C.” With Mr. Parker doing the drawing and Mr. Hart coming up with the gags, “The Wizard of Id” began its run in 1965 and eventually appeared in more than 1,000 newspapers. It has won six awards from the National Cartoonists Society. Since 1997, “The Wizard” has been produced by Mr. Parker’s son Jeff. The strip takes place in the Kingdom of Id, where a greedy, diminutive tyrant known simply as the King rules over an oppressed people who are still able to find humor in the situation. Its cast includes the Wizard; Lackey, the King’s servant; Bung, the alcoholic jester; and Turnkey, a dungeon guard. In one “Wizard” strip, a bare-chested Turnkey climbs down a staircase into the torture chamber, walks past a victim being halved by a scythe, another dangling over a pot of boiling water and a third being whipped — then hangs a sign saying, “No smoking!” Brant Julius Parker was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 26, 1920. He attended the Otis Art Institute in the late 1930s, then worked at the Disney Studios until 1942, when he joined the Navy. After World War II, he returned to Disney, where he worked on Donald Duck cartoons and the half-hour animated film “Mickey and the Beanstalk.” Mr. Parker married Mary Louise Sweet in 1947 and moved to Binghamton, N.Y., where he was a political cartoonist for The Binghamton Press. In 1950, while judging a high school art contest, Mr. Parker met and befriended a contestant, Mr. Hart. Fifteen years later, Mr. Hart asked Mr. Parker to collaborate on “The Wizard.” They worked together until 1997, when Mr. Parker handed his pen to his son. In addition to his wife and his son Jeff, Mr. Parker is survived by another son, James; three daughters, Julie Shackleton, Laurie Tannenbaum and Kathie Borkowski; a brother, John; 13 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. On Monday, on the Creators Syndicate Web site, Jeff Parker posted a cartoon showing the King and the Wizard peering at the stars through a telescope. “Hey!” the Wizard says. “There’s cartoons up there!”

Dave Page Munro Leaf Paper Tiger

Perhaps, but I think they'd rather have enough food. Here's an update: The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By April 24, 2007 Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO BELTSVILLE, Md., April 23 — What is happening to the bees? More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives. As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all. The volume of theories “is totally mind-boggling,” said Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University. With Jeffrey S. Pettis, an entomologist from the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr. Cox-Foster is leading a team of researchers who are trying to find answers to explain “colony collapse disorder,” the name given for the disappearing bee syndrome. “Clearly there is an urgency to solve this,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “We are trying to move as quickly as we can.” Dr. Cox-Foster and fellow scientists who are here at a two-day meeting to discuss early findings and future plans with government officials have been focusing on the most likely suspects: a virus, a fungus or a pesticide. About 60 researchers from North America sifted the possibilities at the meeting today. Some expressed concern about the speed at which adult bees are disappearing from their hives; some colonies have collapsed in as little as two days. Others noted that countries in Europe, as well as Guatemala and parts of Brazil, are also struggling for answers. “There are losses around the world that may or not be linked,” Dr. Pettis said. The investigation is now entering a critical phase. The researchers have collected samples in several states and have begun doing bee autopsies and genetic analysis. So far, known enemies of the bee world, like the varroa mite, on their own at least, do not appear to be responsible for the unusually high losses. Genetic testing at Columbia University has revealed the presence of multiple micro-organisms in bees from hives or colonies that are in decline, suggesting that something is weakening their immune system. The researchers have found some fungi in the affected bees that are found in humans whose immune systems have been suppressed by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or cancer. “That is extremely unusual,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. Meanwhile, samples were sent to an Agriculture Department laboratory in North Carolina this month to screen for 117 chemicals. Particular suspicion falls on a pesticide that France banned out of concern that it may have been decimating bee colonies. Concern has also mounted among public officials. “There are so many of our crops that require pollinators,” said Representative Dennis Cardoza, a California Democrat whose district includes that state’s central agricultural valley, and who presided last month at a Congressional hearing on the bee issue. “We need an urgent call to arms to try to ascertain what is really going on here with the bees, and bring as much science as we possibly can to bear on the problem.” So far, colony collapse disorder has been found in 27 states, according to Bee Alert Technology Inc., a company monitoring the problem. A recent survey of 13 states by the Apiary Inspectors of America showed that 26 percent of beekeepers had lost half of their bee colonies between September and March. Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. The number of bee colonies has been declining since the 1940s, even as the crops that rely on them, such as California almonds, have grown. In October, at about the time that beekeepers were experiencing huge bee losses, a study by the National Academy of Sciences questioned whether American agriculture was relying too heavily on one type of pollinator, the honeybee. Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees’ natural forage areas. So far, the researchers have discounted the possibility that poor diet alone could be responsible for the widespread losses. They have also set aside for now the possibility that the cause could be bees feeding from a commonly used genetically modified crop, Bt corn, because the symptoms typically associated with toxins, such as blood poisoning, are not showing up in the affected bees. But researchers emphasized today that feeding supplements produced from genetically modified crops, such as high-fructose corn syrup, need to be studied. The scientists say that definitive answers for the colony collapses could be months away. But recent advances in biology and genetic sequencing are speeding the search. Computers can decipher information from DNA and match pieces of genetic code with particular organisms. Luckily, a project to sequence some 11,000 genes of the honeybee was completed late last year at Baylor University, giving scientists a huge head start on identifying any unknown pathogens in the bee tissue. “Otherwise, we would be looking for the needle in the haystack,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. Large bee losses are not unheard of. They have been reported at several points in the past century. But researchers think they are dealing with something new — or at least with something previously unidentified. “There could be a number of factors that are weakening the bees or speeding up things that shorten their lives,” said Dr. W. Steve Sheppard, a professor of entomology at Washington State University. “The answer may already be with us.” Scientists first learned of the bee disappearances in November, when David Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper, told Dr. Cox-Foster that more than 50 percent of his bee colonies had collapsed in Florida, where he had taken them for the winter. Dr. Cox-Foster, a 20-year veteran of studying bees, soon teamed with Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the Pennsylvania apiary inspector, to look into the losses. In December, she approached W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University, about doing genetic sequencing of tissue from bees in the colonies that experienced losses. The laboratory uses a recently developed technique for reading and amplifying short sequences of DNA that has revolutionized the science. Dr. Lipkin, who typically works on human diseases, agreed to do the analysis, despite not knowing who would ultimately pay for it. His laboratory is known for its work in finding the West Nile disease in the United States. Dr. Cox-Foster ultimately sent samples of bee tissue to researchers at Columbia, to the Agriculture Department laboratory in Maryland, and to Gene Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois. Fortuitously, she had frozen bee samples from healthy colonies dating to 2004 to use for comparison. After receiving the first bee samples from Dr. Cox-Foster on March 6, Dr. Lipkin’s team amplified the genetic material and started sequencing to separate virus, fungus and parasite DNA from bee DNA. “This is like C.S.I. for agriculture,” Dr. Lipkin said. “It is painstaking, gumshoe detective work.” Dr. Lipkin sent his first set of results to Dr. Cox-Foster, showing that several unknown micro-organisms were present in the bees from collapsing colonies. Meanwhile, Mr. vanEngelsdorp and researchers at the Agriculture Department lab here began an autopsy of bees from collapsing colonies in California, Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania to search for any known bee pathogens. At the University of Illinois, using knowledge gained from the sequencing of the bee genome, Dr. Robinson’s team will try to find which genes in the collapsing colonies are particularly active, perhaps indicating stress from exposure to a toxin or pathogen. The national research team also quietly began a parallel study in January, financed in part by the National Honey Board, to further determine if something pathogenic could be causing colonies to collapse. Mr. Hackenberg, the beekeeper, agreed to take his empty bee boxes and other equipment to Food Technology Service, a company in Mulberry, Fla., that uses gamma rays to kill bacteria on medical equipment and some fruits. In early results, the irradiated bee boxes seem to have shown a return to health for colonies repopulated with Australian bees. “This supports the idea that there is a pathogen there,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “It would be hard to explain the irradiation getting rid of a chemical.” Still, some environmental substances remain suspicious. Chris Mullin, a Pennsylvania State University professor and insect toxicologist, recently sent a set of samples to a federal laboratory in Raleigh, N.C., that will screen for 117 chemicals. Of greatest interest are the “systemic” chemicals that are able to pass through a plant’s circulatory system and move to the new leaves or the flowers, where they would come in contact with bees. One such group of compounds is called neonicotinoids, commonly used pesticides that are used to treat corn and other seeds against pests. One of the neonicotinoids, imidacloprid, is commonly used in Europe and the United States to treat seeds, to protect residential foundations against termites and to help keep golf courses and home lawns green. In the late 1990s, French beekeepers reported large losses of their bees and complained about the use of imidacloprid, sold under the brand name Gaucho. The chemical, while not killing the bees outright, was causing them to be disoriented and stay away from their hives, leading them to die of exposure to the cold, French researchers later found. The beekeepers labeled the syndrome “mad bee disease.” The French government banned the pesticide in 1999 for use on sunflowers, and later for corn, despite protests by the German chemical giant Bayer, which has said its internal research showed the pesticide was not toxic to bees. Subsequent studies by independent French researchers have disagreed with Bayer. Alison Chalmers, an eco-toxicologist for Bayer CropScience, said at the meeting today that bee colonies had not recovered in France as beekeepers had expected. “These chemicals are not being used anymore,” she said of imidacloprid, “so they certainly were not the only cause.” Among the pesticides being tested in the American bee investigation, the neonicotinoids group “is the number-one suspect,” Dr. Mullin said. He hoped results of the toxicology screening will be ready within a month.

washingtonpost.com NEWS | OPINIONS | SPORTS | ARTS & LIVING | Discussions | Photos & Video | City Guide | CLASSIFIEDS | JOBS | CARS | REAL ESTATE  ad_icon FDA Was Aware of Dangers To Food Outbreaks Were Not Preventable, Officials Say By Elizabeth Williamson Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, April 23, 2007; A01 The Food and Drug Administration has known for years about contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms that led to disease outbreaks that killed three people, sickened hundreds, and forced one of the biggest product recalls in U.S. history, documents and interviews show. Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents. Congressional critics and consumer advocates said both episodes show that the agency is incapable of adequately protecting the safety of the food supply. FDA officials conceded that the agency's system needs to be overhauled to meet today's demands, but contended that the agency could not have done anything to prevent either contamination episode. Last week, the FDA notified California state health officials that hogs on a farm in the state had likely eaten feed laced with melamine, an industrial chemical blamed for the deaths of dozens of pets in recent weeks. Officials are trying to determine whether the chemical's presence in the hogs represents a threat to humans. Pork from animals raised on the farm has been recalled. The FDA has said its inspectors probably would not have found the contaminated food before problems arose. The tainted additive caused a recall of more than 100 different brands of pet food. The outbreaks point to a need to change the way the agency does business, said Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA's food-safety arm, which is responsible for safeguarding 80 percent of the nation's food supply. "We have 60,000 to 80,000 facilities that we're responsible for in any given year," Brackett said. Explosive growth in the number of processors and the amount of imported foods means that manufacturers "have to build safety into their products rather than us chasing after them," Brackett said. "We have to get out of the 1950s paradigm." Tomorrow, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing on the unprecedented spate of recalls. "This administration does not like regulation, this administration does not like spending money, and it has a hostility toward government. The poisonous result is that a program like the FDA is going to suffer at every turn of the road," said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the full House committee. Dingell is considering introducing legislation to boost the agency's accountability, regulatory authority and budget. In the peanut butter case, an agency report shows that FDA inspectors checked into complaints about salmonella contamination in a ConAgra Foods factory in Georgia in 2005. But when company managers refused to provide documents the inspectors requested, the inspectors left and did not follow up. A salmonella outbreak that began last August and was traced to the plant's Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter brands sickened more than 400 people in 44 states. The likely cause, ConAgra said, was moisture from a roof leak and a malfunctioning sprinkler system that activated dormant salmonella. The plant has since been closed. The 2005 report shows that FDA inspectors were looking into "an alleged episode of positive findings of salmonella in peanut butter in October of 2004 that was related to new equipment and that the firm didn't react to, . . . insects in some equipment, water leaking onto product, and inability to track some product." During the inspection, the report says, ConAgra admitted it had destroyed some product in October 2004 but would not say why. "They asked for some of our documentation and we made the request to them that they put it in writing due to concerns about proprietary information," ConAgra spokeswoman Stephanie Childs said last week. "We did not receive a written request, . . . they filed the report and that was that." Until February of this year. That's when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified the FDA of a spike in salmonella cases in states near the ConAgra plant. The agencies contacted the company, which initiated a recall and shut the plant for upgrades. Brackett said that if the FDA inspector had seen anything truly dangerous the agency would have taken further action. But, he said, the agency cannot force a disclosure, a recall or a plant closure except in extreme circumstances, such as finding a hazardous batch of product. The problem in 2005, he added, "doesn't necessarily connect to the salmonella outbreak right now. It's not unusual to have it in raw agricultural commodities." The FDA has known even longer about illnesses among people who ate spinach and other greens from California's Salinas Valley, the source of outbreaks over the past six months that have killed three people and sickened more than 200 in 26 states. The subsequent recall was the largest ever for leafy vegetables. In a letter sent to California growers in late 2005, Brackett wrote, "FDA is aware of 18 outbreaks of foodborne illness since 1995 caused by [E. coli bacteria] for which fresh or fresh-cut lettuce was implicated. . . . In one additional case, fresh-cut spinach was implicated. These 19 outbreaks account for approximately 409 reported cases of illness and two deaths." "We know that there are still problems out in those fields," Brackett said in an interview last week. "We knew there had been a problem, but we never and probably still could not pinpoint where the problem was. We could have that capability, but not at this point." According to Caroline Smith DeWaal, who heads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer-advocacy group, "When budgets are tight . . . the food program at FDA gets hit the hardest." In next year's budget, passed amid discovery of contamination problems in spinach, tomatoes and lettuce, Congress has voted the FDA a $10 million increase to improve food safety, DeWaal said. The Agriculture Department, which monitors meat, poultry and eggs and keeps inspectors in every processing plant, got an increase 10 times that amount to help pay for its inspection programs. The FDA visits problem food plants about once a year and the rest far less frequently, Brackett said. William Hubbard, who retired as associate commissioner of the FDA in 2005 and founded the advocacy group Coalition for a Stronger FDA, said that when he joined the agency in the 1970s, its food safety arm claimed half its budget and personnel. "Now it's about a quarter . . . at a time in which the problems have grown, the size of the industry has grown and imports of food have skyrocketed," Hubbard said. Post a Comment View all comments that have been posted about this article. Your washingtonpost.com User ID, birdcrash, will be displayed with your comment. Comments: (Limit 5,000 characters) Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post. © 2007 The Washington Post Company Ads by Google Peanut Butter Lawsuit Got sick? Submit your case. Free review by leading injury law firm. www.personalinjurylawyeramerica.com Pet Food Recall Concerns? Our food is wheat & corn free and made with human-quality ingredients www.sojos.com Peanut Butter Recall Law Lawyers Helping Salomenella Victims Call 1-800-LAW-INFO Today www.peanut-butter-recall.com