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CLENBUTEROL FOOD POISONING - CHINA
*************************************
A ProMED-mail post
ProMED-mail is a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases


Date: 17 Nov 2008
Source: Epoch Times [edited]


Clenbuterol food poisoning was reported in Jiaxing City, Zhejiang
Province. Since 10 Nov 2008, 70 employees of the Zhongmao Plastics
Products company in Jiaxing have been diagnosed. A pork dish served at
the Zhongmao cafeteria lunch meal was identified as the source.

A Chinese hospital doctor, Hao Jun (alias), confirmed to The Epoch
Times that the patients shared similar and obvious symptoms:
palpitation, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, chest tightness, uneasiness,
shaking, trembling, weakness, and instability.

Hao said, "Some patients have been seen at the hospital. More than 20
patients suffered from severe poisoning. Others were seen at other
hospitals. Most patients have been released. Those who were in
critical condition have also been stabilized, although the side
effects are yet to be observed."

Dr. Hao Jun indicated that clenbuterol is an asthma medicine. It will
speed up the catabolism of fat in pigs if used in pig feed. It will
also enhance the lean meat and muscle in pigs. It is heat stable and
will not decompose until it's heated to over 172 C. Therefore, cooking
will not eliminate clenbuterol toxicity. It will accumulate in the
human body through ingestion. Long term consumption will lead to
malignant tumors and pose particular danger to patients who have high
blood pressure or diabetes. If the intake is excessive, the poisoning
can be life-threatening.

Dr. Hao mentioned that because one of his relatives owns a pig feed
company, he was made aware of the "secret" about pig feed additives.
Clenbuterol added to feed will not only shorten the growth time but
also increase the sale price. Growth hormone is also added. Poison
chemicals such as arsenic have also been added to enhance the redness
and shine of the pork skin and hair. Some might even add tranquilizers
or sleeping pills to make pigs sleep. Long term consumption of pork
adulterated with these feeds might lead to retardation. The hormones
and chemicals could also endanger lives and lead to many illnesses.

"It is not realistic to expect the public [to] be cautious. The
critical point is the monitoring mechanism of the government," Dr. Hao
expressed, "The government's response has always been the same: "The
case is being investigated, and sanction is warranted." However, it
always ends with no action. Therefore, those who committed the crime
have nothing to fear. I believe there's some sort of collusion and
conflict of interest between the business and the officials."

Pork containing clenbuterol often has a bright red skin with very little fat.

According to partial data, since 1998, there have been at least 18
clenbuterol food poisoning cases in China. More than 1700 people have
been poisoned, with one confirmed death.

Between 8-18 Oct 2008, there were 3 food poisonings confirmed caused
by clenbuterol in pork meals in Guangdong Province.

During September 2006, a series of food borne illnesses occurred in
Shanghai and sickened more than 300 people. These were confirmed to be
related to meals with pork or pig intestines containing clenbuterol.
In June of the same year, employees of a hotel in Foshan suffered from
clenbuterol food poisoning. Also, hundreds of workers in a glass
factory in Guangdong Province were poisoned by meals containing
clenbuterol in May 2006.

Hao Jun emphasized, "Considering the infant formula food borne illness
[melamine poisoning], and the massive incidences of poor food quality
and safety, problems in China's processed foods are increasingly
worrisome."

[Byline: Xin Fei]

-- Communicated by: HealthMap Alerts via ProMED-mail

[It is well known that clenbuterol is a metabolic stimulator resulting
in a lower fat level. It is illegal to use in livestock in the US.

Clenbuterol is also used as a bronchodilator in human patients and
illegally used as a weight loss stimulant in humans.

Although the mechanism is not understood, clenbuterol in swine can and
does seem to cause problems in humans. - Mod.TG]

[ProMED-mail would like to thank Dr. Angela Huang
for submitting a similar article translated
from Chinese.

In a report on food safety by the Institute for Agricultural Sciences
of Viet Nam, discusses the use of beta agonists in swine feed. This
document mentions that only a small amount of clenbuterol is excreted
and metabolized, with the majority of the drug remaining in muscles
and organs (liver and kidney). Humans, when using food processed from
these animals show the same manifestations as if they had directly
inhaled a treatment dose of clenbuterol with increased heart rate
leading to coronary arteriectasia (arterial distension) ,
bronchoectasia (irreversible local bronchial dilitation), and a
concommitant stimulation of insulin release and glycolysis.

.
Symptoms compatible with the description provided in the above
newswire.

Of note, a similar incident occurred in Hong Kong in 1998 involving 9
people eating pork lungs that were found to have concentrations of
clenbuterol ranging between 1 and 24 micrograms per kilogram. (see
Pork, contaminated, clenbuterol - China (Hong Kong) 19980505.0876).

For a map of China, see
.

For the interactive HealthMap/ProMED map of China with links to other
recent ProMED postings on events in China and neighboring countries,
see .

selected references:

1 Martinez-Navarro JF, Food poisoning related to consumption of
illicit beta-agonist in liver, Lancet 336 (1990), p. 1311.

2. Brambilla G, Loizzo A, Fontana L et al., Food poisoning following
consumption of clenbuterol-treated veal in Italy, J Am Med Assoc 278
(1997), p. 635.

3 Brambilla G, Cenci T, Franconi F., Clinical and pharmacological
profile in a clembuterol epidemic poisoning of contaminated beef meat
in Italy, Toxicol Lett 114 (2000), pp. 47–53.

4. Ramos F, silveira I, Silva JM, Barbosa J, Cruz C, Martins J, Neves
C, Alves C.Proposed guidelines for clenbuterol food poisoning. Am J
Med. 1 September 2004. 117(5): 362-362
- Mod.MPP]

Only because I never see this assertion challenged, let me just say out loud:

It does not follow logically that someone who voted against the surge two years ago, and called for a subsequent sixteen-month “date certain” for withdrawal back then, is now vindicated, twenty-four months later, after a Herculean effort on the part of the United States military, by a bilateral agreement, between the USA and an increasingly stable Iraq, to aim for a major withdrawal of US armed forces over the next thirty-six months.

Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton.

Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff.

I love it. Why?

Off the top of my head:

--Emanuel will be pro-Israel--something many of us have worried about in re an Obama administration.

--Emanuel is a can-do kind of guy--the sort every successful president needs. Tough as nails and hard-charging, he will complement the laid-back style of the President-elect.

--Compared to some of the other Clinton vets (thinking about Harold Ickes and John Podesta, for example), Emanuel is much less ideologically driven. He is a compromiser and a fixer.

An Aside: if it seems like I am talking about my own team, I am. Until Barack Obama demonstrates to me that he does not have the best interests of America at heart, I am going to assume he does.

--Emanuel is a strong counterweight to Nancy Pelosi (whom I do perceive as a serious threat to the best interests of America). She is also the person most likely to sink an Obama presidency--if not handled with care. Rahm Emanuel strikes me as the operator best equipped to tame the termagant Madame Speaker.

--Emanuel has a track record for political intelligence and vision. That is, he sees the big picture, which, in a nutshell, reveals that we are a center-right nation frustrated with Republicans in general and mad at George Bush in particular. The President-elect has a chance to begin an Era of Obama--but only if he appeals to the center-right good sense of Middle America. If he lurches to the left, he is finished. Emanuel understands this tightrope.

Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State?

I love it. Why?

--Hillary is tough as nails. She is the closest thing to a hawk that this search is likely to produce.

--Hillary demonstrates that all that campaign claptrap about "change" and the other idealist imagery was not the whole story. Our president-elect seems less naive with each passing day.

--Hillary pushes out Joe Biden as the experienced foreign policy star. I continue to believe that Joe Biden for veep was the only egregious error from Team Obama in an otherwise almost flawless campaign. This is evidence that Obama understands that Biden lacks the capacity to play a major foreign policy role in any administration.

--Hillary pushes out John Kerry. See above (this is evidence that Obama understands that Kerry lacks the capacity to play a major foreign policy role in any administration).

--Hillary fits into the "Team of Rivals" template, which is a constructive concept (especially if the trope includes retaining Robert Gates and David Petraeus). And, in terms of obsessions, this president-elect could do a lot worse in terms of historical idols. Emulating Honest Abe is a high standard. Godspeed to him.

British archeological archives indicate that the Aksa mosque, built on the Temple Mount, may have been constructed on the site of a Byzantine Church.

The photo archives of a British archeologist who carried out the only archeological excavation ever undertaken at the Temple Mount's Aksa Mosque show a Byzantine mosaic floor underneath the mosque that was likely the remains of a church or a monastery, an Israeli archeologist said on Sunday.

Building mosques on the site of conquered religious sites has been Standard Operating Procedure for Islam since the beginning. (Mecca was not an empty piece of desert prior to Islam.) Ask the Hindus in India what happened to lots of their temples. Ask Christians about Hagia Sophia.

Religion of Tolerance my ***.

Six Agencies Searched for Data on Joe the Plumber

Democrats in power = violation of the civil rights of their enemies.

From Powerline. The blogosphere continues to do the work the heritage media formerly did. May the MSM be haunted by the angry ghost of Fred Friendly.

For the last eight years, I have paid $9.83 per month for cable. Upon moving to Waco, Texas, back in 2000, I asked for the most basic cable package available. The customer service rep replied that this would cost me approximately $35 per month. I asked for something even more basic, at which point the official reluctantly volunteered that I could purchase a less-than-basic package for a monthly charge of $8.99.

For less than ten dollars per month, I get all the network affiliates, two PBS stations, two Spanish language stations, the TV Guide Channel, Waco public access, a local weather channel, TBS, and C-SPAN 1 & 2. This has been a great deal.

As a result of our entertainment deprivation, my family loves to travel and stay in hotels and wallow in the luxury of expanded cable. These intermittent excursions always reaffirm my sense that cable TV is of the devil--mostly because of my contempt for Cartoon Network and the Disney Channel.

On a quick trip across the Gulf Coast this summer, however, I experienced the malevolent power of the cable news media. My nine-year-old son, previously a John McCain booster (because of his views on the war), announced, after thirty minutes of watching CNN’s political coverage, that he could no longer support McCain and would switch to Barack Obama.

What explained the change of heart? Just good objective reporting, I guess.

Some Context: my nine-year-old is not a political junkie (like I was at that age), but he is still brighter and more knowledgeable concerning the mechanics of politics and history than most voters. But he was certainly impressionable enough to embrace the palpable political narrative hawked on CNN.

Another example.

After John McCain's classic concession speech, an infuriatingly large number of friends and colleagues observed that this was the McCain they had formerly admired--but had somehow gotten lost in the "Rovian makeover."

A very common statement: "if he had run his campaign like that, I might have supported him."

These Pavlovian responses revealed that none of these so-called educated Americans really bothered to watch the campaign. For most of them, I suspect, the concession was the first John McCain speech they had witnessed in full all season.

In truth, McCain was McCain in 2008. As someone who watched literally hours upon hours of raw footage of all four candidates on the stump (thank you, C-SPAN), I can tell you that the concession was thoroughly in keeping with the campaign. McCain is McCain. McCain was McCain. Love him or hate him, or fall somewhere in between, but the man has not changed one iota during my twenty years of watching him.

Why did so many voters perceive him so differently this season? Most of us understand the answer to that question all too well. McCain faced a stiff headwind in terms of the coverage he received--and he never really broke through all the partisan noise. What I think I heard people saying last week was that they had accepted a mainstream media template buttressed by a few seconds of McCain on the stump or a McCain campaign ad followed by a few minutes of talking head analysis reaffirming the Obama political line:

McCain went negative. McCain went racist. McCain went Karl Rove.

Balderdash. An honest reassessment of this campaign at some point in the future, of course, will reveal a much different story--but, then again, who will care?

Finally, a telling personal observation based on experience:

Confession: I actually cheated in re cable. During the last week of the campaign, I had the opportunity to watch massive amounts of cable news network coverage of the canvass. For the first time in my life I watched a full "Hannity and Colmes." I watched O'Riley. I watched Anderson Cooper. I also watched Keith Olberman, admittedly for only a few minutes at a time--Olberman is an excruciating experience for me.

Honestly, for the most part, I loved it. The sounds and sights. The intoxicating noise. The swirling graphics. The constantly changing television topography. My eyes were the size of saucers. For me, it was as addictive as chocolate candy.

But the weird and scary aspect of the experience comes in the detox. When I finally found my way back to C-SPAN, I was a bit bored. My cable news interlude had shredded my attention span. Ordinarily, I am excited to watch a stump speech from the introductions to the main speaker to the ritual handshaking afterward choreographed to a driving rock and roll beat. But it does not take long to lose the discipline necessary to watch a full campaign speech. It is much easier and quite tempting to get the entertainment news media Cliff's Notes and fake the rest.

This cotton candy system of delivering information is full of momentary exhilaration--but it is contributing to our rapid decline.

Cable TV is the devil--or, at the very least, the seductive song of the Sirens.

Strip down your cable to C-SPAN and save American democracy.

Today, the Okie Gardener continues his series voicing his misgivings concerning the presidency and character of Barack Obama.

The Gardener considers the revelation that Bill Ayres and President-elect Obama were evidently much closer than maintained during the campaign.

My thoughts.

True, Obama's denials were disingenuous. Were they egregiously so in terms of a politician running for president? Hard to say. Reasonable people will disagree.

Of course, the Gardener touches on our real crisis: a mainstream media no longer providing an honest check to power.

An Aside: I fear that the Gardener overlooks another critical problem we face: an alternative (conservative) media that is not very serious in the aggregate.

However, the outlandish and disturbing fact in the Ayres revelation is not that Obama dissembled. Politicians lie. Dogs bite. Credit Card Companies charge interest. Caveat emptor.

Of course, as the Gardener suggests, the real worry here is that the prObama press corps seems willing to run interference for this man regardless of the high toll on their own integrity and credibility—and our modern tradition of the Fourth Estate as a balancing agent.

Barack Obama is president, which I continue to believe is not necessarily a disastrous thing. While I will criticize him vociferously when he errs and/or pursues ill-conceived or deleterious policies, I reaffirm my pledge to lay off him when possible out of respect for the office and consistent with my belief that we need him to succeed more than we need him to fail.

However, the element that frightens me most is this fact of life: the only governor on a President Obama in this current atmosphere seems to be his own decency. And while he strikes me as a decent person, my sense of human nature (to echo Lord Acton) is that powerful leaders lose perspective fairly quickly--and, of course, leaders with absolutely no checks to their own power veer off into the bar ditch with alarming regularity.

Bill Ayers Comes Clean-- Corrects Obama: "We Are Family Friends"

From Gateway Pundit. The blogosphere continues to do the work the heritage media formerly did. May the MSM be haunted by the angry ghost of Fred Friendly.

Here are two politically incorrect questions that I think will need to be answered before we can consider the possibility of assimilation by Arab Muslims, or their near neighbors. These questions also raise possibilites in the psychology of Islamic terrorists.

1. Are Arab Muslims and others influenced by them willing to give up first-cousing marriage?

Patrilateral parallel cousin marriage is evidently ancient in the Near East, from whence it spread during the Arab conquests to adjacent peoples through the vehicles of clientship, intermarriage, and religious conversion. *

In other words, the ancient tradition, and common current practice, is to marry a first or second cousin on the father's side. This practice both reflects and helps to produce inward-focused families with intense family loyalty that trumps other loyalties such as to one's nation, or to the common good. It helps lead to nepotism.

In regard to Islamic terrorists, we must ask if ages and ages of inbreeding have produced higher-than-necessary numbers of unstable individuals. It is no accident that researchers of genetic diseases regard Saudi Arabia as a great place to study their topic.

2. Are Arab Muslims and others influenced by them willing to give up sexual relationships between men and boys?

They talked about Islam, especially about the sequestering of women. They said it forced the native men into prisonlike expedients. On night patrols, they said, they would bump into Afghans hooking up with animals. And they joked about “Man-Love Thursday,” when they’d spot Afghan men and boys together, grabbing a quick sin before the redemptive Sabbath.

The above quote is from an embedded reporter with an American unit in Afghanistan. Similar observations have been made by many other allied units of various nationalities. It reminds one of the reaction Europeans had to the Turks and their similar practice. Anecdotal evidence also points to the practice in Arab culture.

In regard to Islamic terrorists, we must ask if being abused as a boy helps to produce angry men ready to lash out at "the enemy."

» Read More

This Week, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean reaffirmed his intention to relinquish his position of party leadership when his term expires in January. No surprise there. A sitting president picks the national party chair, and Dean promised from the beginning to serve only one term in that capacity.

Dean's tenure was oftentimes tumultuous. In addition to providing an inviting target to conservative commentators, he famously fought with Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer over the allocation of resources in 2006 and faced down massive inside grumbling concerning the so-called fifty-state strategy in 2008.

However, from this vantage point, it is hard to argue with Dean's success. He presided over one of the most dramatic recoveries of political power in the history of our democratic-republic. Four years ago, his party was defeated, demoralized, and a disillusioned minority in both houses of Congress. Today a Democratic president-elect, overwhelmingly elected in a contest that turned the map blue, prepares to preside over comfortable majorities in the House and Senate.

Even more important than the fifty-state strategy, and a fact that goes overlooked way too often, is that Howard Dean the insurgent presidential candidate of 2004 provided the template for victory for Barack Obama in 2008. Obama understood well that Dean's strident anti-war stance provided the roadmap to winning the Democratic nomination four years later. As the only viable Democrat who could boast clean hands on Iraq, Obama expertly crafted the "nutroots" element of the party into a powerful base and endless source of financing.

Although the Dean juggernaut lost traction in the snows of Iowa, the Obama campaign went to school on their shortcomings and built on their successes. Best known for the "Dean Scream," which probably had very little to do with his overall defeat, Dr. Dean emerges today as one of the essential components of this amazing Democratic success.

Note to self: don't get too down about today's headlines.

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.

If you can meet with triumph and disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same.

Bottom Line: according to Rudyard Kipling’s definition, without question, Howard Dean is a man.

For a party reeling from setbacks, his example of fortitude is worth emulating.