Everything you need to know about food poisoning (backgroung to Hangzhou: Nine hit by food poisoning )

By Johnny

Cases of food poisoning are on the rise, with the most common culprit being poor food hygiene. There are simple ways you can prevent it. — Dr Rob Hicks (cited in BBC)

What is it?

According to wikipedia, food poisoning, also referred as foodborne disease, is any illness resulting from the consumption of food and drink.

It is a common, usually mild, but occasionally deadly illness often accompanied by fever, muscle aches, shivering and feeling exhausted.

Food can be contaminated by many different disease-causing microbes, pathogens and poisonous chemicals, or other harmful substances.

As a result, the symptoms of food poisoning appear very different, including nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, gastroenteritis, fever, headache and fatigue.

What causes it?

Food poisoning arises from someone eats food or drink that contaminated with bacteria or toxins, such as poisonous mushrooms and vegetables that sprayed with pesticides.

Food might be polluted by improper handling, preparation, or storage.

Commonly recognised food poisoning infections include:

• Campylobacter infection is the most frequent cause. It likes to live in milk, raw poultry meat and the intestines of healthy birds.

• Salmonella. It may spreads from the intestines of birds, reptiles and mammals to humans by eating animal organs, such as kidney and liver. Salmonellosis, the illness it causes, can invade the bloodstream and cause life-threatening infections.

• E. coli O157:H7. This is a bacterial pathogen that has a reservoir in cattle and other similar animals. Human illness typically follows consumption of food or water that polluted with microscopic amounts of cow feces.

• Norwalk-like virus. It spread primarily from one infected person to another. For example, infected fishermen can contaminate oysters as they harvested them; infected kitchen workers can contaminate food as they prepare it.

How can I prevent it?

Here are some tips from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

• Make sure that food from animal sources (meat, dairy, eggs) is cooked thoroughly or pasteurized.

• Carefully select and prepare fish and shellfish to ensure quality and freshness.

• If you are served an undercooked meat or egg product in a restaurant, send it back for further cooking. You should also ask for a new plate.

• Wash your hands, cutting boards, and knives with antibacterial soap and warm to hot water after handling raw meat, poultry, seafood, or eggs.

• Do not thaw foods at room temperature. Thaw foods in the refrigerator and use them promptly.

• Mother’s milk is the safest food for young infants. Breast-feeding may prevent many foodborne illnesses and other health problems.

What’s the treatment?

According to BBC, most infections begin several hours to several days after consumption of polluted food and will last 24 to 48 hours.

During this period fluid is often lost from vomiting and diarrhoea. To prevent dehydration, drink plenty of cooled boiled water and use rehydration powders if the symptoms continue.

A health care provider should be consulted in the following situations: (cited in Mediac8 Family Health)

• High fever (temperature over 101.5 F, measured orally)
• Blood in the stools
• Prolonged vomiting that prevents keeping liquids down (which can lead to dehydration)
• Signs of dehydration, including a decrease in urination, a dry mouth and throat, and feeling dizzy when standing up.
• Diarrhoeal illness that lasts more than 3 days

Reference:

BBC Health(2008) Food poisoning,[online]Available from:< http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/conditions/foodpoisoning1.shtml>. Accessed in Dec 2,2008

Mediac8 Family Health(2008) Food poisoning,[online]Available from:< http://www.medic8.com/healthguide/articles/foodpoisoningoverview.htmll>. Accessed in Dec 2,2008

Web MD(2008) Food poisoningPrevention,[online]Available from:<http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/food-poisoning/preventing-food-poisoning>. Accessed in Dec 2,2008

Wikipedia(2008) Foodborne disease[online]Available from:< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodborne_disease >. Accessed in Dec 2,2008

(click here to main story)

 

The anti-Islam wave

The recent episode of hate and racism that hit French Muslims is just the last of a long series.

Muslims are the new scapegoat of European fascism-friendly xenophobia.

In the last years many European far-right parties sought in the ‘fear of the Muslim’ a worthy alternative to the old anti-Semitism.

The then banned anti-Islamification rally ran in Cologne by ‘Pro- Köln’ party last September highlighted the spread of this trend across Europe.

Far-right leaders from Belgium, Austria and Italy went to the congress, and also BNP’s Richard Barnbrook was to have been a guest speaker.

The police banned the rally because of public safety, as 3000 anti-fascist protesters came to face the 1500 supporters expected by Pro-Köln, as reported by the BBC.

Nationalism, xenophobia, neo-nazi influences, ‘defence’ of Christianity, are the shared beliefs of these small but growing political forces.

The parties, the leaders

The recent funerals of Joerg Haider brought tens of thousands people through the streets of Klagenfurt after the leader of the far-right party ‘Alliance for Austria’s Future’ (BZO) died in a car accident.

The mourners in the number of 50,000, according to the Guardian, were there to pay tribute to their hero.

The parents and the party had to praise the far right extremists not to turn the funeral into a neo-nazi pilgrimage.

The lack of leadership left by Haider will be probably filled by ‘Freedom Party of Austria’ (FPÖ)’s leader Heinz-Christian Strache.

Strache is deeply engaged in the anti-Islam movement, and is author of slogans like:

‘Daham statt Islam’ (at home, not Islam)

‘Pummerin statt Muezzin’, referring to the ‘Pummerin’, the main bell in St. Stephan’s Cathedral in Wien, and so religious Christian Symbol

‘Arbeit statt Zuwanderung’ (jobs, not immigration).

As reported by the Times, photographs have been recently published of Strache raising his hand in the Nazi salute. According to him he was signalling for three beers in a pub.

The Italian icon of this trend is the Member of European Parliament Mario Borghezio, exponent of the ‘Northern League’ Italian party.

Borghezio is famous for his protest acts against the Italian Muslim community, such as bringing pigs in mosques’ building yards, and for being arrested in Bruxelles’ 2007 anti-Islam protest.

The ‘Norther League’ won Berlusconi the latest Italian elections, as collected the votes of northern Italy and reached the 8.30% of votes at the Chamber of Deputies.

Also the British National Party has moved on, and is very clear on the Islam issue: “The real enemies of the British people are home grown Anglo-Saxon Celtic liberal-leftists [...] and the Crescent Horde – the endless wave of Islamics who are flocking to our shores to bring our island nations into the embrace of their barbaric desert religion” as published on their website in 2006.

Filip Dewinter, leader of far-right Belgian party ‘Vlaams Belang’ (which means Flemish interest), said in an interview in New York based magazine Jewish Week: “In our view, Judaïsm and Islam are absolute not two of the same kind. On the contrary, they are foes.”

“One has to choose sides. Which side are you on in the ‘war on terror’? [...] ‘Xenophobia’ is not the word I would use. If it absolutely must be a ‘phobia’ let it be ‘islamophobia’. Yes, we’re afraid of Islam.”

related news: Muslim graves desecrated

Muslim graves desecrated

Hundreds of Muslim graves have been vandalised in France’s Notre-Dame de Lorette WWI cemetery, near Arras.

According to the BBC, almost 500 tombstones of Muslim-French veterans have been sprayed overnight with swastikas and letters that linked together form anti-Islamic slogans.

It is the third time in two years that this sector of the cemetery suffers the attack of neo-nazi vandals, this time right on the eve of Islamic Festival of Sacrifice Eid al-Adha.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his indignation calling the incident “abject and revolting”, and claiming for the perpetrators to be brought soon to justice.

The investigations have begun on Monday, as police cordoned off the graveyard, which is one of the country’s biggest and was built on the site of a battlefield where many French soldiers died between 1914 and 1915.

According to Le Monde French police’s national crime research institute is also involved in the enquiry.

This episode is similar to the previous one in April 2008, that saw 148 graves desecrated, for which two men have been sentenced to a year in prison, one of those having already been jailed for the attack in April 2007.

Notre-Dame de Lorette cemetery holds the graves of 576 Muslim soldiers, as about 78.000 soldiers coming from France’s African colonies, Algeria and Tunisia, were killed during the WWI.

France hosts the largest Europe’s Muslim community, making up 8 percent of France’s population.

related background feature: The anti-Islam wave

Christian Words droped by a children dictionary

Oxford University Press removed words associated with Christianity, the monarchy and British history from a leading dictionary for children, according to the Sunday Telegraph.

Words like “aisle”, “bishop”, “chapel”, “empire” and “monarch” have been taken out of Junior Dictionary. Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been deleted.

Lisa Saunders, a mother of four from Northern Ireland, first realized the omission of words during a homework session with her son.

Photo by Peng Hua

When she couldn’t find “moss” and “fern,” in the 2007 version, she compared entries from the older editions, dating from 1978 to 2003 with the latest junior dictionary.

“I was completely horrified by the vast number of words which have been removed,” she told the Telegraph in London. “… you don’t cull hundreds of important words in order to get in a different set of ICT words.”

She also pointed that words associated with Britain’s traditional festivals (Whitsun, mistletoe, holly, ivy and Pentecost) were being taken out of new edition.

We don’t often go to church?

Vineeta Gupta, the head of children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press told Telegraphy that the changes reflect that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.

Environments children live have changed. More and more people move to cities from rural areas.

Besides, Britain is also much more multicultural. People don’t go to Church as often as before.

He also said they analysed millions of words from children’s books and the school curriculum and looked at how frequently they occurred in considering how to update new editions.

Advice from teachers is also taken before the final choice is made.

But school teachers said that losing these words would make children missing the chance to touch with British heritage.

Among the words taken out:

Nature

Bluebell, budgerigar, cygnet, dandelion, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, kingfisher, magpie, marzipan, minnow, newt, piglet, primrose, starling, willow, wren.

Christianity

Carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe, abbey, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, monk, nun, pew, saint, sin

History

Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade

Among the words put in:

Science and technology

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, chatroom, analogue, incisor, square number, trapezium, food chain

Society

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, drought, biodegradable, bilingual

Politics

Citizenship, EU, euro, committee, democratic

Click here to learn the background

Terror atacks in India (Background to ‘Enough is enough’)

Confessions of Mr Ajmal Amir Kasab

 

The Mumbai Police investigations of the 26/11 terror attacks on Mumbai has revealed Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole terrorist caught alive as the most important source of information in piecing together the plot and key players behind the attacks says a report in Times of India.

Kasab, belongs to Faridkot village in Okara district of Punjab province in Pakistan and is currently in the custody of the Mumbai Police Crime Branch.

A report in Indian Express Newspaper says, according to the Police, details he divulged on his indoctrination and training point a finger at the Lashkar-e-Toiba in Pakistan.

Early life

Mumbai police has pieced together events which led to Kasab’s indoctrination.

Educated till class IV in a Government school, Kasab left his native village in 2000 to stay with his elder brother who worked on a farm in Lahore.

The 21-year-old worked there as a casual labourer for some time and stayed in touch with his parents, Mohammed Ameer and Noor Elahi, occasionally visiting his village.

In 2005, however, Kasab had a fight with his parents and walked out of his home, taking to robbery and dacoity to earn money.

Kasab’s recruitment into the terror fold began in mid-2006 when he wanted to buy a firearm and was asked to contact an LeT operative in Rawalpindi.

It was through this contact that he was introduced to top leaders in the terror outfit and radicalised through sustained brainwashing.

Kasab has also revealed to interrogators that the ten terrorists were handpicked from a larger group and selected to undergo advanced specialized training.

This includes advanced weapons and explosives training, along with survival training and further coaching.

(Back to main article)

Website critique: My India

 

 

 

 

website

The website I’m going to be critiquing is My India, an Indian web portal that covers stories ranging from news to Indian movies to discussion forums. Launched in 1998, Its aim is to provide information about specific and well defined communities in India.

 

 

First impression

At first glance http://my-india.net seems like an extensive Indian portal.

 It seems to have the requisite links of Yahoo, ranging from news to matrimony.

There seems enough information in there along with several sign-in links and news

 headlines interspersed through the page.

The colour scheme is quite basic.

 A normal white layout with a hint of red and blue make the entire site look dull.

The content does not fill the page and therefore, there is a massive waste of space.

 The icons, although clichéd seem to work. 

A talisman for astrology, two hearts for matrimony, a tiny man reading a paper for news, so on and so forth.

As we scroll down, it’s almost overwhelming with options. 

 It has a series of sub sites catering to states across India 

with a ‘my-Kerala’, ‘my-Telegu’, ‘my-Gujrat’ and so forth.

 The news stories have perhaps five national headlines which don’t change through the days even though the site flaunts the daily calendar.

You realize the page ends just where it was beginning. 

But offering the benefit of the doubt, we enter the site anyway.

Content

As we enter the news section, the site seems tacky at best. 

There seem three line details to each story all of which have five word headlines. 

The headlines are varying in their timelines.

 Some pieces are four days old, some upto a week old and maybe an isolated updated fresh piece of news. 

The genre of news varies from local to international to just plain vague.

The entertainment section (Bollywood) holds nothing more than a morsel of various film logistics and pictures.

The Metro section, however, has some few local stories from the India capital Delhi.

 Most of these stories are reviews or feature pieces but are well written and extensive with pictures.

Similarly, travel section displays a few articles that don’t seem half bad or partially insightful.

That however, is the end of it. The forums prove a dud and the astrology sections lends a casual two liner forecast that’s laughable.

Writing

This site clearly does not adhere to the Jakob Nielsen rules for it’s writing. The style is inconsistent at best. 

The news pieces do not seem professional and seem more like bullet points.

 The articles get better in the metro and travel section, but that seems hardly a saving grace. 

The travel is noticeably better than the metro section. 

It offers insight and perspective of the tourism industry in India that actually displays semblance of flow and form. 

The astrology section is laughable. In it’s attempt to be concise it comes off as barely adolescent.

 Apart from that, there is very little in or around the site that could even be assessed for it’s writing. 

Navigation

The homepage itself is not bad on first glance.

 Everything seems organized with cute little icons for it’s primary sub sections.

 The categories seem well defined and extensive.

But upon inspection, the inconveniences are many.

 Several links lead nowhere and subsections are not put up. 

Certain subsections (such as matrimony) do not allow access back to the home page.

 With the exception of a multitude of links to external sites and advertisements, the site has very little to offer in itself.

Needless to say, it wouldn’t even be fair to Jakob Nielsen to fit this website to his parameters.

Conclusion

This website, clearly is not a professional undertaking. 

If it is, it’s a quick fluff make-money and disappear scheme with nothing of substance to offer. 

 It does, however, offer a wide range of pictures of Bollywood stars and several advertising banners.

 Short of a complete overhaul, it could not even dream of competing with the caliber of news sites and portals the web has to offer today.

Iran urges Obama to change approach

Iran said today that it would not abandon its nuclear program and urged President-elect Barack Obama to change America’s policy towards Iran.

Hassan Ghashghavi, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that Iran, which has repeatedly refused to suspend its enrichment of uranium, would not change its nuclear policy. He added that Iran expected Mr. Obama to stick to his campaign promise to change the previous administration’s policy.

US President-Elect Barack Obama

“They have to recognize our legal rights, and we are willing to engage in an interaction to resolve their concerns,” he said. “We need to engage in progress and development.”

Enriched uranium is used as fuel in nuclear power plants; Iran maintains that energy production is the goal of its nuclear program.

But more intensely enriched uranium can fuel a nuclear bomb; the West fears Iran is clandestinely working towards such a weapon.

Obama said he would continue offering incentives to encourage Iran to cease enriching uranium but would seek to tighten economic sanctions on the country if it did not.

NO MORE ‘MR TERRORIST’S FRIEND’

Obama’s declarations have also caused reactions of American conservatives, as they say Mr Obama is too soft on his international policy. During the election campaign Barack Obama has been named terrorist’s friend.

However, the President-Elect does not want to follow George Bush’s policy and bomb every Islamic country suspicious of having nuclear weapons. He rather prefers to find a solution through diplomatic ways.

Knowing that, Mr Ghashghavi said “–Obama- must be able to change this policy based on his slogan of change,” and that Iran expected Mr. Obama to change the confrontational policy to one based on interaction.

As a response, Mr Obama said “we can provide the economic incentives that would be helpful to a country that despite being a net oil producer is under enormous strain, huge inflation, a lot of employment problems.”

Slam,Bam,Thank You M’am: Britain On Top

A new study reveals that Britain is the most promiscous Western nation

Click here for Background to News Article

By Sunil Kumar

British men and women are the most promiscous of all big industrial western nations, researchers have found. An international index that measures one-night stands, number of partners and casual sex, Britain is top of the league table ahead of Australia, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany.

The Sunday times article reports that the study was conducted by asking more than 14,000 people in 48 countries to fill in anonymous questionnaires. Respondents were asked about numbers of partners and one-night stands, and their attitudes were assessed by asking them how many people they expected to sleep with over the next five years and how comfortable they were with the idea of casual sex.

WOMAN ON TOP

“Historically we have repressed women’s short-term mating and there are all sorts of double standards out there where men’s short-term mating was sort of acceptable but women’s wasn’t,” said David Schmitt, a professor of psychology at Bradley University, Illinois, who oversaw the research.

The results were combined into an index of so-called “sociosexuality”, the term used by evolutionary psychologists as a measure of how sexually liberal people are in thought and behaviour. Most individuals scored between 4 and 65.

The country with the highest rating was Finland, with an average of 51. Taiwan came lowest, with 19.

Britain scored 40, placing it 11th overall, behind countries such as Latvia, Croatia and Slovenia – but it was highest among the major western industrial nations. The first tranche of research was published in 2005 but analyses have continued and Schmitt described the latest in this week’s edition of New Scientist.

WHY THE BRITISH DO IT BETTER

Britain’s ranking was ascribed to factors such as the decline of religious scruples about extramarital sex, the growth of equal pay and equal rights for women and a highly sexualised popular culture.

Schmitt says the ratio of men to women is one of the factors that determine a country’s ranking.

The high scores in many Baltic and eastern European states might be linked, Schmitt said, to the fact that women outnumber men and so are under more pressure to conform to what men want in order to find a mate. In Asian countries, by contrast, men tend to outnumber women slightly, so it is men who have to conform.

Schmitt’s findings are reinforced by earlier research showing that the British are more likely than other nationalities to have “stolen” other people’s lovers.

Schmitt said that in more liberal countries such as Britain women may even be becoming more promiscuous than men. Such trends are typified by the television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl, in which Billie Piper played a middle-class prostitute who relished her numerous sexual encounters.

It’s Raining Men
One of the most intriguing ideas emerging from Schmitt’s and others’ work is that when women are at their most fertile they become even more willing than men to consider one-night stands.

There are, however, still key differences in the behaviour of men and women, especially regarding the ages at which they are most sexually liberated. Schmitt found that men tended to have the most partners, and to think most about acquiring new ones, when in their twenties. Women’s promiscuity and lustful thoughts tended to peak in their thirties.

The Moor’s Last Sigh

“The past and the future is where we spend most of our lives. In fact what you are going through in this small microcosm of ours is the disorienting feeling of having stepped for a few hours into the present”… Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh.

By Sunil Kumar

Salman Rushdie once said, “I hate admitting my enemies have a point.” Growing up in a newly independent India in the 50s and the 60s, Rushdie is very much like the midnight’s children he won the Booker prize for.

Mixing Indian metaphors with global abstraction comes easy to Rushdie. Not easily accessible at first, Rushdie is a writer who captivates the reader with the broad sweep of his imagination and the sheer audacity of challenging the fundamentalist establishment.

The fatwa made him famous. Rajiv Gandhi’s India banned him instantly and the Ayatollah Khomeini made him a pariah in the Islamic world. How did Rushdie live through those traumatic times?

In an interview with clinical psychologist Pamela Connolly Sir Salman Rushdie says that that he plunged into despair when the fatwa was declared and says that it “erased” his personality.

He adds, “The thing about hitting the bottom is then you know where the bottom is…And after that, it cleared things up in my head… One of the things it cleared up was an urge in my mind, which is that everybody should like me.”

STOP BEING A PRISONER

“That was the moment at which I stopped being the prisoner of that thing, because I thought, OK, there are people who are not going to like me and do you know what, I don’t like them.”

Rushdie always reminisces about Bombay post-independence when he thought the city was going through a kind of golden age, an Indian Camelot, where Rushdie was the knight in shining armour.

His imagination stems from Bombay and its multiple identities, a miasma of illusions, the city of Indian dreams, sleaze lightnin’!!!