Young Women Report Abdominal Pain on Smoggy Days

Here's another reason to watch what you breathe: Young women in two Canadian cities were more likely to seek emergency-room help for abdominal pain on days with bad air pollution, a researcher reported here.

Rates of emergency department visits for abdominal pain with no specific cause increased by up to 10 percent on days with high levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate pollution, according to Dr. Gilaad Kaplan of the University of Calgary.

Nearly two-thirds of the diagnoses were women, and more than half of them were ages 15 to 24. The researchers did not find increases in abdominal pain visits by men on high-pollution days, although they noticed upticks in male visits a day or two after days of heavy pollution.

Kaplan reported his findings at the Digestive Disease Week conference here over the weekend.

His group studied 10 years of emergency-room records from all hospitals in Edmonton, Alberta, as well as records from a single urban hospital in Montreal. All told, the group found 118,000 cases of patients discharged after seeking treatment for abdominal pain with no known cause.

Kaplan said his study was prompted by earlier observations that abdominal pain without a known cause is frequently associated with depression and headaches, which in turn can be exacerbated by air pollution.

He also said a study on mice from the 1970s had shown that high levels of common air pollutants reduced proper function of the digestive system, suggesting a possible mechanism underlying abdominal pain.

Although his study showed stomach pain was associated with high levels of three common kinds of pollution, there was no link with increased levels of two other major pollutants -- sulfur dioxide and fine particulates (smaller than 2.5 microns).

Strangely, the rate of stomach pain admissions actually seemed to decrease when ozone levels were high.

At a Sunday news briefing announcing the findings, Kaplan could provide no explanation for any of the associations -- positive or negative -- since the study was not designed to determine causality.

In Abdominal Pain, Ozone May Be a Culprit

But he noted that ground-level ozone was a different kind of pollutant than others positively correlated with abdominal pain emergency visits.

Carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulates are all direct waste products from fossil fuel burning, he said. Ozone, on the other hand, results from a complex chemical process in the atmosphere involving nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, heat and sunlight over time.

Dr. Marcia Cruz-Correa, a gastroenterologist at the University of Puerto Rico, said the study confirmed many physicians' impression that most cases of non-specific abdominal pain involve women.

"If we could actually find something that's a trigger for this unexplained abdominal pain, we could maybe provide guidance," said Cruz-Correa, who moderated the news briefing.

Confirmation of the findings could help inform policy for pollution control and for public health warnings involving people with respiratory diseases, she said.
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Peanut Company Closes Second Plant

As people with personal connections to the salmonella outbreak prepared to testify Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill, a flurry of activity continued in one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.

New developments unfolded this week in a chain of events that has resulted in the removal of 1,845 peanut products from store shelves, following more than 600 illnesses and an estimated eight deaths linked to bad peanuts.

The FBI raided the Peanut Corporation of America's Blakely, Ga., facility Monday as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the peanut recall. The company's subsidiary in Plainview, Texas, today announced it, too, would temporarily close its doors after lab tests detected the possible presence of salmonella.
"Unfortunately, we go from disaster to disaster, if you will," Nancy Donley, president of a food safety advocacy group, Safe Tables Our Priority, or STOP, told ABC News today. "I don't know how many it's going to take to finally get government to wake up and say, 'This is enough. Enough is enough already.'"

Sources said the FBI raided the Blakely plant looking for quality control records and other documents. Agents want to know who oversaw salmonella testing and who was responsible for shipping out tainted products. Investigators from the criminal division of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were in Blakely as well. Authorities also searched the company's home office in Virginia.

In Texas, officials said samples taken last week from the Peanut Corporation of America's Plainview plant are 99 percent positive for salmonella. The tainted products did not make it to consumers. The FDA has now collected 50 additional samples for testing and is not ruling out another recall.

At the Georgia plant today, a few former workers were meeting with the company's attorney, who wasn't talking.

Former workers were also increasingly reluctant to talk. One employee, who asked not to be identified, told ABC News that workers had no idea the company had a dozen positive salmonella tests but shipped out peanut butter and nuts, anyway.

A woman who had been hired to clean the plant, also wanting to remain anonymous, said the facility was filthy.

Peanut Co. President and Plant Manager Invited to Testify

The public could hear from the president of the peanut company and the plant manager at the heart of the salmonella outbreak as early as Wednesday at the House Energy and Commerce panel's subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

If Stewart Parnell, president of Peanut Corporation of America, indeed appears before lawmakers, it would be the first time he has spoken publicly since the problems with the company began.

The Peanut Corporation of America's third plant, located in Suffolk, Va., was inspected by the FDA Jan 26. The FDA took samples there that came back negative.

The state of Georgia, on behalf of the FDA, inspected the Blakely plant 10 times during the past three years. It did find problems with sanitation and procedures to prevent contamination, but inspectors found those problems to be routine and supervisors promised to fix them.

In 2007, Georgia also tested three products for salmonella and all were negative. The plant never told state officials they had already had five positive tests that year. It wasn't required to report that information.

"They're not held to any standards," Donley said. "They're, basically, just on their own and just doing willy-nilly what they want to do, so that's a problem there."

Blakely Mayor Ric Hall said food safety is based largely on trust that companies will do what they're supposed to do. Hall said he was "shocked" that the company may have shipped out tainted products.

Meantime, lawmakers in Washington and families nationwide are eager for answers.

"You can't have any other feeling but being angry because it shouldn't have happened," Ginger Lorentz recently told ABC Minneapolis affiliate KSTP.

Lorentz' mother Shirley Mae Almer, 72, of Perham, Minn., died just before Christmas after falling ill from salmonella in a Minnesota nursing home. Her family has since filed a lawsuit against the Peanut Corporation of America.

"She died because every morning she liked to have toast with peanut butter," Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said last week at a Senate hearing.

FDA food safety director Stephen Sundlof, in prepared testimony, told lawmakers for the Senate panel that the agency "is working hard to ensure the safety of food, in collaboration with its federal, state, local, and international food safety partners, and with industry, consumers, and academia. Although the salmonella typhimurium food borne illness outbreak underscores the challenges we face, the American food supply continues to be among the safest in the world. Food safety is a priority for the new administration."

"Consumers just need to be, frankly, yelling and screaming, to say, 'Hey, make it safer," Donley said. "It shouldn't be up to us to have to find it and monitor our kitchens and cupboards and pantries and freezers to make sure that we're not harboring some sort of unsafe food."
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Clean Air Means Longer Life, Study Says

New Research Suggests Cutting Air Pollution Can Extend Your Life Span

If the air in your city is clean, you can tack on about five months to your life. So suggests a new study by researchers at Brigham Young University and Harvard School of Public Health.

This study found that the average life expectancy in 51 cities in the United States increased by nearly three years in recent decades and that approximately five months of that increase came as a result of cleaner air.

"Life expectancy is a well-understood indicator for public health," said C. Arden Pope III, a Brigham Young University epidemiologist and lead author on the study in the Jan. 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. "We find that we are getting a substantial return on our investments in improving our air quality."

Pope is no stranger to this issue. He and co-author Douglas Dockery, chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health, teamed up with other researchers on important studies in the 1990s that revealed the negative health effects of infinitesimally small particles of pollution.

So small are these particles, known as "PM2.5," that you would have to line up 25 of them end to end to span the width of a human hair. The danger of these tiny particles is that they can find their way deep into the respiratory system when inhaled.

Dr. Joel Schwartz, an environmental epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, agreed that the research "suggests that there is a phenomenon in the United States regarding increase in air pollution and shortened life span that is greater than the six locations studied in [previous research]."

Time for Tighter Standards?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tightened air pollution standards in 1997 based on earlier data. But the new research suggests that it may be time to tighten these standards even further.

"This is a compelling paper," said Dr. David Peden, chief of pediatric immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The results speak to the need for better standards from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

And now that the new research attaches a specific benefit in terms of life span, curbing air pollution could garner more attention from the general public.

"This study certainly confirms an association between air pollution and bad health, which has been suggested by other studies," Pope said. "What is unique is that the increase in life expectancy suggested by the results [in our study] was larger and more robust than originally thought."

Specifically, the study concluded that for every decrease of 10 micrograms per cubic meter of particulate pollution in a city, its residents' average life expectancy increased by more than seven months. For this effect to be seen in Atlanta, for example, its current level of pollution would have to drop from about 18 micrograms per cubic meter to 8 micrograms per cubic meter.

Overall, it appears that we have made progress in improving air pollution levels. The study states that during the 1980s and 1990s the average PM2.5 levels in the 51 U.S. cities studied dropped from 21 to 14 micrograms per cubic meter.

But Pope said there is still room for improvement.

"There is more work to do," Pope said. "Further studies can build on this data and look at changes in air pollution after 1999 when levels were monitored closely."
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