Mr. Peanut Gets Revenge

I threw away the peanut butter sandwich crackers in my cupboard today. Until the FDA clears it, peanut butter or peanut buttery type products are not safe to eat. This includes cookies, crackers, candy and ice cream. Why? Salmonella typhimerium contamination. In other words, Salmonella!

I've been following this outbreak for the past few weeks now. According to the article from the Centers for Disease Control (located in Maryland, btw), the outbreaks originated from peanut butter produced by the Peanut Corporation of America processing plant in Blakely, GA.

My question? You get Salmonella by eating foods contaminated with animal poop. HOW DID IT GET INTO THE PEANUT BUTTER?! o.O

In case you get hit by the Salmonella bug, or any other diarrheal bug for that matter, here's what you need to do:

1. Let it run baby, let it run!
Diarrhea and vomiting are GREAT ways for your body to get rid of the bugs that caused the problem. By taking medicines to stop the diarrhea, you are really prolonging the agony, so to speak.

2. Drink LOTS and LOTS of water, or preferrably, gatoraid, sodas or drinks with electrolytes.
Without getting into too much gory detail (although I could), your intestines are not absorbing the water that your body needs when you have diarrhea. It puts you at risk for severe dehydration and electrolytic imbalance. To make sure that you are getting enough liquids, keep drinking. What's more, keep drinking stuff that has sugar and salt. PEDIALYTE! AVOID milk and diet drinks. You don't need to worry about calorie counting right now!

3. KISS - Keep it simple, silly! Meaning, stick to a very simple, low fat, low milk diet.
I like the BRAT diet because it's easy to remember: Bananas, Rice, Applesauce, and Toast. -No reason you can't also throw in a bowl of low fat chicken soup, or Vietnamese pho, mind you...

4. Practice anti-socialism.
Wash your hands and stay home from work or school until you are no longer an infectious walking bag of germs. PLEASE.

Take it easy for a few days. If it's Salmonellosis, down time is about 5-7 days.

See a doctor if you don't improve in a few days, have a high fever, severe dehydration (can't drink or eat, faint...), cramping, bloody diarrhea or other underlying medical conditions.

Lastly, no peanut butter cookies for a while, okay?

Biotech Beer

It's a curse and a blessing in many ways to work in the field called Biotechnology. A blessing because when you say "biotechnology" people widen their eyes and go "OOoOOHH!!!"

A curse because then they think we're one of those people, whatever that means. For the general public, biotech has been attached to such concepts as cloning, stem cells, frankenfoods and CSI. I can follow someone's train of thought because that look of "Oh wow, she must be pretty smart!" transforms into horror as they think, "Oh wow, she's cloning Hitler in her basement! Quick Millie, run! She'll yank out your DNA and take over the world!!!"

The classic definition of Biology: The study of life. Biotechnology is simply the study and manipulation of life and it's parts. Yeech...that still sounds horrible, doesn't it? When we talk about "manipulation" of life, think food. Food, at one point, was alive (unless it's a twinkie).

Beer is biotechnology. We grow yeast on hops, let the yeast poison itself to death in it's own alcoholic waist, filter out the dead yeasty bodies and voila! Coors, Miller, Heineken or any variety of poisonous substance you prefer to drink. Incidentally, this was the only way I could get my boss to understand biotechnology. He said, "BEER?! Oh yeah, I understand that. You're making that upstairs?!"

Well, no. Not exactly. The technology is the same! Whether you want to make beer, wine, cheese, insulin, cancer drugs, proteins or any variety of much needed biological products, we use the same technology to grow the microbe (bacteria, yeast, mammalian cells), harvest what it produces (insulin, Herceptin, etc), and purify it out.

Obviously, it's a lot more complicated than that, but at least it got him away from thinking that my students were growing rabid mutant chihuahuas in beakers.