The biosecurity gets even tighter just a few miles away in Christiansburg, Virginia, where a new herd is being raised – pigs expected to supply organs for formal studies of animal-to-human transplantation as soon as next year.
. Pieces of plastic in BanquetIn recent weeks, U.S. consumers have seen high-profile food recalls for an unappetizing reason: They’re contaminated with foreign objects that have no place on a dinner plate. And while no one wants to bite down on
in smoked sausage, this type of contamination is one of the top reasons for food recalls in the U.S.Food safety experts and federal agencies use the terms “extraneous” or “foreign” materials to describe things like metal fragments, rubber gaskets and bits of bugs that somehow make it into packaged goods.“Extraneous materials” triggered nine recalls in 2022 of more than 477,000 pounds of food regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service — triple the number of recalls tied to food contaminated with toxic E. coli bacteria.
And the size of recalls can reach into the millions: In 2019, USDA reported 34 recalls of more than 16 million pounds of food, spurred in large part by a giant recall of nearlyof Tyson chicken strips tainted with pieces of metal.
Plastic pieces from frayed conveyor belts, wood shards from produce pallets, metal shavings or wire from machinery are all common. So are rocks, sticks and bugs that can make it from the field to the factory.
Some contamination may even be expected, the FDA acknowledgesA figure of an axolotl sits on display at a museum in Xochimilco Ecological Park, in Mexico City, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’swith The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — An abortion in Idaho is not prohibited if pregnancy complications could cause a woman’s death, even if that death “is neither imminent nor assured,” a state judge said Friday in a ruling that loosens one of theover Idaho’s strict abortion bans. The women, who are represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, aren’t asking for the state’s abortion ban to be overturned. Instead, they want the judge to clarify and expand the exceptions to the strict ban so people facing serious pregnancy complications can receive abortions before they are at death’s door.