This from CBS News:

Castleberry Food Co. is recalling every product manufactured on a specific production line in the past two years in response to four cases of botulism poisoning in Texas and Indiana.

The production line is one of "four or five" in its Augusta, Ga., facility. On Saturday night the company also shut down the entire plant for one week while it investigates the cause of the botulism poisoning.

The plant's 450 employees, under terms of their union contract, will not be paid during the closure.

Castleberry recalled 10 hot dog chili sauce products on July 18 after 16 of 17 cans tested were found contaminated with botulism toxin. The cans were manufactured on one production line between April 30 and May 22 of this year. The company says the apparent cause of the contamination is that the product was undercooked and therefore not sterilized.

Botulism is a rare but serious illness caused by consuming foods with the botulinim toxin, a nerve toxin that left untreated can cause paralysis of the arms, breathing muscles and legs. Symptoms, such as blurred vision and slurred speech, generally begin 18 to 36 hours after eating a contaminated food.

Castleberry says no other products have tested positive for botulism. Nonetheless, the company is recalling more than 80 food products intended for humans sold under more than 25 brand names and manufactured on the production line in question.

Also produced on the line, and also recalled, are a number of pet food products. The company says the products are sold in more than 17,000 stores nationwide and in Canada.

A third-party company has been hired to carry out the recall beginning Monday.

Castleberry has posted all the recalled products on its Web site and has set up a consumer hotline: 800-203-4412.

They are telling consumers to remove all products from their homes and dispose of them in double plastic bags. Castleberry says consumers can contact the company (not the retailer) for a full refund.

What's the world coming to when Easy Bake Ovens get dangerous? This from Yahoo News:

The Easy Bake oven, an iconic toy with a four-decade history, has been recalled for the second time in less than a year, government safety advocates announced on Thursday.

In February Easy Bake's parent company, Hasbro Inc., recalled 985,000 of the toys because children were getting their hands and fingers trapped in the front opening, and some were burned. At that time, Hasbro offered a free repair kit to improve the oven's safety.

Since the February announcement, the company has received an additional 249 reports of children getting their hands or fingers caught in the ovens, including 16 reports of second- and third-degree burns. One burn required partial amputation of a 5-year-old girl's finger.

As a result, Hasbro is recalling all front-loading Easy Bake ovens sold since May 2006, even those that were repaired with the free kit distributed after the February recall.

CPSC spokeswoman Julie Vallese said they do not know how many, if any, of the additional 249 injuries occurred in repaired ovens.

The ovens should already be off store shelves, according to Hasbro spokesman Wayne Charness. The company is urging all owners to contact Easy Bake and exchange their ovens for a Hasbro product voucher. For more information, oven owners can call 800-601-8418 or visit http://www.easybake.com or http://www.cpsc.gov.

But this isn't the end of the Easy Bake oven, Charness insisted.

"It does have a 40-year history, so we're trying to get it back out there," he said. "We are working on bringing a new model into the marketplace as soon as we can."

Tuesday night, a plane was trying to land on a short runway in a rainstorm at the Sao Paulo Congonhas airport, when it ran into an airline building and a gas station and burst into flames. The TAM Airlines Airbus-320, which had come from Porto Alegre in Southern Brazil, had 186 people on the plane, and it is unknown how many people were in the building that was hit.

Witnesses said they saw the plane land and skid across the runway. Some stated it was going so fast they thought the plane was trying to take off. Authorities have announced that there is no possibility that anyone on the plane survived because the fire reached temperatures over 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The newly resurfaced runway had just been reopened after weeks of repairs. Investigators are going to look into the possibility that aviation authorities reopened the runway before all necessary repairs were made. The runway has been repeatedly criticized for being to short.

Pilots call it the "aircraft carrier" - it's so short and surrounded by heavily populated neighborhoods that they're told to take off again and fly around if they overshoot the first 1,000 feet of runway.

In February, a court in Brazil banned large aircrafts from landing at the Congonhas airport for safety concerns. There was much opposition to the decision, and an appeals court eventually overturned the decision.

According to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silve, president of Brazil, this accident has been Brazil's most deadly air disaster ever. Three days of national mourning have been announced in Brazil. The U.S National Transportation Safety Board is helping with with rescue and salvage efforts.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/07/18/brazil.plane.crash/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

This from Garth Sullivan, Esq. at Indox Consulting:

For the first time, California consumers can find out how individual cardiac surgeons fare on coronary bypass procedures. In a new report, the state has listed bypass death rates for 121 hospitals and 302 heart surgeons. The data is drawn from adult bypasses performed between Jan. 1, 2003 and Dec. 31, 2004. Hospital fees paid for the $1.5 million report, which was mandated by the state legislature in 2003. A prior report released cardiac bypass death rates at specific hospitals across the state.

The research found 95 percent of heart surgeons generally were in line with the expected mortality average of 3.08 percent, though of course some surgeons looked much worse and some much better. Those who got the short end of the stick, as you'd expect, were quick to note their patients were older and sicker than other surgeons would accept. Some of these surgeons are now saying they'll avoid the sickest patients with the most complicated cases to avoid getting a black eye in similar studies in the future. But public policy analysts say if risk adjustments are done properly, the patient mix shouldn't affect a surgeon's overall scores.

There's a headline on Yahoo News today: China is blaming the media for inflating concerns about product safety (rather ironic on the wake of the execution of the minister in charge of drug safety).

I lived in Taiwan for several years and travelled extensively through China. It is, without doubt, one of the most polluted countries in the world.

China deserves the blame. They endanger the entire world and they need to clean up.