GOT TROUBLE

Bad news about milk continues to pour in, but the US media pretty much ignores it. 900 Russians have just fallen ill from milk products - a pretty big outbreak, no? - and meanwhile, in New Zealand, it's apparently common knowledge that milk helps cause diabetes and autism, as a recent patent fight shows. Meanwhile here the celebs continue to take a check and accessorize themselves to the ongoing damage... OK...

ANOTHER RECALL YOU DIDN'T HEAR ABOUT

Cargill, this time under the nom de guerre of Skylark, again had a pretty big E. coli recall by traditional standards - 110,000 pounds - though not by our new 2002 Monster Recall standards. The news came and went on Friday. What're the odds?

HIGH-PROTEIN DIET KILLS TEENAGER

I was waiting to get a fuller story on this, but as I haven't found it yet, I'll post what is known so far: An otherwise healthy 16-year-old girl collapsed and died after two weeks on a meat-rich low-carb diet. Her doctors expressly blamed the electrolyte imbalance caused by the diet itself and ruled out possibilities such as an eating disorder. I dunno, maybe they're wrong. Maybe some other factor is going to emerge. But it's gotta make ya wonder.

NO MORE PLAY-BY-PLAY

Well, the USDA and CDC have proven so (take your pick) inept or apathetic that it's gotten to be quite tedious to report what the latest is in terms of each new plant fingered and/or cleared in the big deadly listeria outbreak. So I'm not going to keep on giving you that play-by-play. It obscures the big picture: Namely, that Wampler, like many other plants, had dozens of sanitation violations before this, meaning you can bet most of their poultry is tainted one way or another; that as the USDA now admits (despite their War on bacteria), their "food testing practices are 'not completely adequate' to deal with the amount of feces-encrusted meat being churned out of US slaughterhouses; and that the problem is very clearly and centrally located in the USDA's fealty to big business at the expense of ordinary people's (and animals') life and death: It recently emerged, for example, in a memo the agency is loudly disowning, that inspectors were given to understand that they could be held personally liable for any losses suffered by meat producers who were dissed by recall requests. Best quote from that article: "Poop is poop. I can't think of any circumstance where it is tolerable to have fecal material on any meat coming off the line." Yet as this latest fiasco makes clear, poop-covered meat is not just tolerated by the industry; it's the norm.