Health Buzz: Drought and Bird Flu Spread and Other Health News

Drought Conditions May Affect Bird Flu's Spread

Too little rainfall in the northern section of China may mean birds there are more likely to end up with a deadly strain of the avian flu, Bloomberg reports. A drought means restricted drinking water for nearly 4 million people and may result in stress on local birds, making them susceptible to illness. There have been eight cases of human bird flu in China this year; five of the infected people died. Three of the people with infections lived in regions that were dealing with drought. Nie Ben, agricultural commodities manager at Shanghai Continent Futures Co., told Bloomberg that wild birds may have closer contact with domestic birds as drinking water becomes more limited, which ups the risk of cross-infection.

Learn how to keep your family safe from bird flu, and explore the U.S. News bird flu primer. A new strategy to vaccinate people against avian flu in advance was proposed last year. Europeans confronted the terrifying power of bird flu in 2006.

Stores Call Customers About Salmonella-Tainted Peanut Products

Costco, Wegmans, and Price Chopper are using information from store loyalty cards to call and warn millions of customers who bought peanut products that may be contaminated with the deadly salmonella strain, telling them to destroy the suspect food. This effort underscores the big problem in what may be the world's largest food recall ever—finding people who may have bought hundreds of potentially dangerous foods, from Keebler cookies to Walgreens candy, Nancy Shute reports. The Food and Drug Administration has added dozens more foods to the hundreds on its "potentially deadly" list in just the past two days. Sarah Klein, a staff attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C., consumer advocacy group, praised the retailers and urged other chains with loyalty programs to do the same. "Only retailers know who purchased a product," she said.

The Peanut Corp. of America plant in Blakely, Ga., that shipped salmonella-tainted food items knew in 2007 that its plant was contaminated with potentially deadly salmonella. This salmonella outbreak may be the scariest one yet, says Shute, because it involves peanut butter and peanut paste that manufacturers bought by the tanker-load and mixed into hundreds of products on supermarket shelves. Here's how to reduce your risk of becoming ill. During last year's highest-profile salmonella outbreak—which was initially attributed to tomatoes but turned out to be caused by jalapeño peppers—food safety experts said that cooking is the only sure bet to foil salmonella.

A Growing Heart Problem: Congestive Heart Failure

The good news about coronary artery disease is that fewer people are having or dying from heart attacks in the prime of life. Those who have heart attacks are likely to survive and live on into ripe old age, Bernadine Healy reports. The challenge, however, is that many of these heart attack survivors are left with weakened hearts that, over time, quietly give out, creating a virtual epidemic of chronic congestive heart failure in the elderly. Heart failure now accounts for a million hospitalizations a year and carries a high mortality—and has replaced heart attacks as the lethal face of cardiovascular disease in most of the Western world.