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Be safe with chicken

CDC Investigating a Multistate Outbreak of Salmonella Infections Linked to Chicken Products Multidrug-Resistant Salmonella Infantis Infections Linked to Raw Chicken Products Media Statement For Immediate Release: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 Contact: Media Relations, (404) 639-3286 A CDC investigation notice regarding a multistate outbreak of Salmonella infections linked to raw chicken products is now available: https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/infantis-10-18/index.html Key Points: CDC and public health and regulatory officials in several states are investigating a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Infantis infections linked to raw chicken products. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service is monitoring the outbreak. As of October 17, 2018, 92 sick people have been reported from 29 states, including 21 people who have been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported. Epidemiologic and laboratory evidence indicates that many types of raw chicken products from a variety of sources are contaminated with Salmonella and are making people sick. The outbreak strain of Salmonella was found in live chickens and in many types of raw chicken products, indicating it might be widespread in the chicken industry. A single, common supplier of raw chicken products or of live chickens has not been identified. Testing shows that the outbreak strain of Salmonella is resistant to multiple antibiotics that may be used to treat people with severe Salmonella infection. Information for clinicians can be found here: https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/infantis-10-18/advice.html. CDC and USDA-FSIS have shared this information with representatives from the chicken industry and asked about steps that they may be taking to reduce Salmonella contamination. This investigation is ongoing and CDC will provide more information as it becomes available. Advice to consumers: Always handle raw chicken carefully and cook it thoroughly to prevent food poisoning. CDC is NOT advising that consumers avoid eating properly cooked chicken products, or that retailers stop selling raw chicken products. General ways you can prevent Salmonella infection include good handwashing and cooking chicken to an internal temperature of 165?F. More prevention advice here: https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/general/prevention.html Do not wash raw poultry before cooking. Germs in raw chicken can spread to other foods and kitchen surfaces. People get sick from Salmonella 12 to 72 hours after swallowing the germ and experience diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps. Most people recover within a week, but some illnesses can last longer and be more severe. See your healthcare provider if you are concerned about symptoms, such as a high fever (temperature over 101.5˚F), blood in your poop, diarrhea, or frequent vomiting that prevents keeping liquid down. If you have further questions about this outbreak, please call the CDC media line at (404) 639-3286. If you have questions about cases in a particular state, please call that state's health department.

UBC Food Distributors Recalls Hot Curry Powder and Curry Powder due to Lead

For Immediate Release

October 25, 2018

Contact

ConsumersUBC Customer Care 
 customerservice@wellmadefood.com
 877-846-8117

Announcement

 

This is to inform you of a product recall involving:
HOT CURRY POWDER & CURRY POWDER, BARAKA, 7.0 oz PLASTIC JAR
UPC CODES 822514265566 AND 822514265535 RESPECTIVELY
A voluntary recall has been initiated by UBC Food Distributors Inc, due to a high level of lead found in the above named products; after testing was done by the Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development.  This product was purchased from an importer.  The importer, along with the FDA, are now in the process of contacting the source of the product, so that corrective action can be taken on their part.  Use of, or consumption of this product may elevate lead levels in the blood.
Lead is a toxic substance present in our environment in small amounts and everyone is exposed to some lead from daily actions such as inhaling dust, eating food, or drinking water.

In general, the small exposure to lead within the U.S. population does not pose a significant public health concern. However, exposure to larger amounts of lead can cause lead poisoning. While lead can affect nearly every bodily system, its effects depend upon the amount and duration of lead exposure and age. Symptoms can include abdominal pain, vomiting, lethargy, irritability, weakness, behavior or mood changes, delirium, seizures, and coma. However, infants, young children and the developing fetus can be affected by chronic exposure to amounts of lead that may not result in obvious symptoms of lead poisoning. A child with lead poisoning may not look or act sick. Lead poisoning in children can cause: learning disabilities, developmental delays, and lower IQ scores.
Less than 20 cases of this product were shipped between June 15 and July 31 2018 to the following areas in the USA:  Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri and Colorado.   We ask that all products with the Baraka Brand and UPC CODES 822514265566 & 822514265535 be removed from shelfs immediately; and placed aside for pick up from a UBC company representative.
We ask consumers to please discontinue use of the product, and immediately return any unused portions to the outlet where it was purchased.   Your assistance is appreciated and necessary to prevent, and avoid any potential illness.
If you have any questions, please call UBC Customer Care toll free at 877-846-8117, M-F between 9am and 6pm EST, or email anytime at: customerservice@wellmadefood.com
This recall is being made with the knowledge of the Food and Drug Administration and is being done voluntarily by UBC Food Distributors Inc and its affiliates.  

Watch Live: Barack Obama receives the Paul H. Douglas Award

Full text: Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis To the People of God

“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Cor 12:26).  These words of Saint Paul forcefully echo in my heart as I acknowledge once more the suffering endured by many minors due to sexual abuse, the abuse of power and the abuse of conscience perpetrated by a significant number of clerics and consecrated persons.  Crimes that inflict deep wounds of pain and powerlessness, primarily among the victims, but also in their family members and in the larger community of believers and nonbelievers alike.  Looking back to the past, no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient.  Looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated.  The pain of the victims and their families is also our pain, and so it is urgent that we once more reaffirm our commitment to ensure the protection of minors and of vulnerable adults.

1.      If one member suffers…

In recent days, a report was made public which detailed the experiences of at least a thousand survivors, victims of sexual abuse, the abuse of power and of conscience at the hands of priests over a period of approximately seventy years. Even though it can be said that most of these cases belong to the past, nonetheless as time goes on we have come to know the pain of many of the victims.  We have realized that these wounds never disappear and that they require us forcefully to condemn these atrocities and join forces in uprooting this culture of death; these wounds never go away. The heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced.  But their outcry was more powerful than all the measures meant to silence it, or sought even to resolve it by decisions that increased its gravity by falling into complicity.  The Lord heard that cry and once again showed us on which side he stands.  Mary’s song is not mistaken and continues quietly to echo throughout history.  For the Lord remembers the promise he made to our fathers: “he has scattered the proud in their conceit; he has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty” (Lk 1:51-53).  We feel shame when we realize that our style of life has denied, and continues to deny, the words we recite.
With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives.  We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.  I make my own the words of the then Cardinal Ratzinger when, during the Way of the Cross composed for Good Friday 2005, he identified with the cry of pain of so many victims and exclaimed: “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to [Christ]!  How much pride, how much self-complacency!  Christ’s betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his body and blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart.  We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison – Lord, save us! (cf. Mt 8:25)” (Ninth Station).

2.   … all suffer together with it

The extent and the gravity of all that has happened requires coming to grips with this reality in a comprehensive and communal way.  While it is important and necessary on every journey of conversion to acknowledge the truth of what has happened, in itself this is not enough.  Today we are challenged as the People of God to take on the pain of our brothers and sisters wounded in their flesh and in their spirit.  If, in the past, the response was one of omission, today we want solidarity, in the deepest and most challenging sense, to become our way of forging present and future history.  And this in an environment where conflicts, tensions and above all the victims of every type of abuse can encounter an outstretched hand to protect them and rescue them from their pain (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 228).  Such solidarity demands that we in turn condemn whatever endangers the integrity of any person.  A solidarity that summons us to fight all forms of corruption, especially spiritual corruption.  The latter is “a comfortable and self-satisfied form of blindness.  Everything then appears acceptable: deception, slander, egotism and other subtle forms of self-centeredness, for ‘even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light’ (2 Cor 11:14)” (Gaudete et Exsultate, 165).  Saint Paul’s exhortation to suffer with those who suffer is the best antidote against all our attempts to repeat the words of Cain: “Am I my brother's keeper?” (Gen 4:9).
I am conscious of the effort and work being carried out in various parts of the world to come up with the necessary means to ensure the safety and protection of the integrity of children and of vulnerable adults, as well as implementing zero tolerance and ways of making all those who perpetrate or cover up these crimes accountable.  We have delayed in applying these actions and sanctions that are so necessary, yet I am confident that they will help to guarantee a greater culture of care in the present and future.
Together with those efforts, every one of the baptized should feel involved in the ecclesial and social change that we so greatly need.  This change calls for a personal and communal conversion that makes us see things as the Lord does.  For as Saint John Paul II liked to say: “If we have truly started out anew from the contemplation of Christ, we must learn to see him especially in the faces of those with whom he wished to be identified” (Novo Millennio Ineunte, 49).  To see things as the Lord does, to be where the Lord wants us to be, to experience a conversion of heart in his presence.  To do so, prayer and penance will help.  I invite the entire holy faithful People of God to a penitential exercise of prayer and fasting, following the Lord’s command.[1]  This can awaken our conscience and arouse our solidarity and commitment to a culture of care that says “never again” to every form of abuse.
It is impossible to think of a conversion of our activity as a Church that does not include the active participation of all the members of God’s People.  Indeed, whenever we have tried to replace, or silence, or ignore, or reduce the People of God to small elites, we end up creating communities, projects, theological approaches, spiritualities and structures without roots, without memory, without faces, without bodies and ultimately, without lives.[2]  This is clearly seen in a peculiar way of understanding the Church’s authority, one common in many communities where sexual abuse and the abuse of power and conscience have occurred.  Such is the case with clericalism, an approach that “not only nullifies the character of Christians, but also tends to diminish and undervalue the baptismal grace that the Holy Spirit has placed in the heart of our people”.[3]   Clericalism, whether fostered by priests themselves or by lay persons, leads to an excision in the ecclesial body that supports and helps to perpetuate many of the evils that we are condemning today.  To say “no” to abuse is to say an emphatic “no” to all forms of clericalism.
It is always helpful to remember that “in salvation history, the Lord saved one people.  We are never completely ourselves unless we belong to a people.  That is why no one is saved alone, as an isolated individual.  Rather, God draws us to himself, taking into account the complex fabric of interpersonal relationships present in the human community.  God wanted to enter into the life and history of a people” (Gaudete et Exsultate, 6).  Consequently, the only way that we have to respond to this evil that has darkened so many lives is to experience it as a task regarding all of us as the People of God.  This awareness of being part of a people and a shared history will enable us to acknowledge our past sins and mistakes with a penitential openness that can allow us to be renewed from within.  Without the active participation of all the Church’s members, everything being done to uproot the culture of abuse in our communities will not be successful in generating the necessary dynamics for sound and realistic change.  The penitential dimension of fasting and prayer will help us as God’s People to come before the Lord and our wounded brothers and sisters as sinners imploring forgiveness and the grace of shame and conversion.  In this way, we will come up with actions that can generate resources attuned to the Gospel.  For “whenever we make the effort to return to the source and to recover the original freshness of the Gospel, new avenues arise, new paths of creativity open up, with different forms of expression, more eloquent signs and words with new meaning for today’s world” (Evangelii Gaudium, 11).
It is essential that we, as a Church, be able to acknowledge and condemn, with sorrow and shame, the atrocities perpetrated by consecrated persons, clerics, and all those entrusted with the mission of watching over and caring for those most vulnerable.  Let us beg forgiveness for our own sins and the sins of others.   An awareness of sin helps us to acknowledge the errors, the crimes and the wounds caused in the past and allows us, in the present, to be more open and committed along a journey of renewed conversion.
Likewise, penance and prayer will help us to open our eyes and our hearts to other people’s sufferings and to overcome the thirst for power and possessions that are so often the root of those evils.  May fasting and prayer open our ears to the hushed pain felt by children, young people and the disabled.  A fasting that can make us hunger and thirst for justice and impel us to walk in the truth, supporting all the judicial measures that may be necessary.  A fasting that shakes us up and leads us to be committed in truth and charity with all men and women of good will, and with society in general, to combatting all forms of the abuse of power, sexual abuse and the abuse of conscience.
In this way, we can show clearly our calling to be “a sign and instrument of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race” (Lumen Gentium, 1).
“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it”, said Saint Paul.  By an attitude of prayer and penance, we will become attuned as individuals and as a community to this exhortation, so that we may grow in the gift of compassion, in justice, prevention and reparation.  Mary chose to stand at the foot of her Son’s cross.  She did so unhesitatingly, standing firmly by Jesus’ side.  In this way, she reveals the way she lived her entire life.  When we experience the desolation caused by these ecclesial wounds, we will do well, with Mary, “to insist more upon prayer”, seeking to grow all the more in love and fidelity to the Church (SAINT IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA, Spiritual Exercises, 319).  She, the first of the disciples, teaches all of us as disciples how we are to halt before the sufferings of the innocent, without excuses or cowardice.  To look to Mary is to discover the model of a true follower of Christ.
May the Holy Spirit grant us the grace of conversion and the interior anointing needed to express before these crimes of abuse our compunction and our resolve courageously to combat them.
                                                                        FRANCIS
 
Vatican City, 20 August 2018

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Don’t Raise Taxes on Low Income Hoosiers!

Don’t Raise Taxes on Low Income Hoosiers! Read the guest post 'Don’t Raise Taxes on Low Income Hoosiers!' on the Institute's Blog By David Sklar Assistant Director, Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council  and Chair, Indiana Coalition for Human Services Public Policy Committee   The General Assembly is about to green-light a measure that will cut  credits and raise taxes on low income working families by $5 million  by 2027, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The Earned Income  Tax Credit (EITC) is a widely utilized, and extremely successful,  tax benefit for low-income individuals that was originally created  in the 1970’s and then expanded during President Ronald Reagan’s  tax reform efforts of the late 1980’s.  In Indiana, working families  with children that have annual incomes below about $40,320 to  $54,884 (depending on marital status and the number of  dependent children) are eligible for both a federal and state EITC.   The state credit is simply the amount equal to 9% of their  federal credit.  That percentage is set statutorily by the General  Assembly, and while the state credit is a percentage of the federal  credit, the credits themselves are not officially coupled  (this is important and you’ll see why below).  The reason the EITC is so successful is that it is fully refundable.   This means that the credit, which incentivizes work, can wipe out a  family’s tax liability, and if any credit remains will be provided  to the taxpayer in the form of a tax return.  This extra money in a family’s  pocket is often used for emergency expenditures, school  supplies, household needs, etc., which can be the difference  between making it and falling off a fiscal cliff for  low-income Hoosiers.  Nearly one hundred percent of the dollars  refunded to eligible families are pumped back into our local economy,  and the program itself has been supported by leaders of both parties  including President Obama and Speaker Paul Ryan who together  supported an expansion of the program as part of our economic  recovery from the Great Recession. Unfortunately, Hoosiers who use the program are on the verge of  seeing a huge tax increase with the recent passage of the federal  tax bill, combined with the passage of House Bill 1316 during the  special session of the General Assembly this week.  Tucked into the  federal legislation was a new way of calculating cost of living  adjustments for the federal EITC. This new method, called Chained CPI,  will constrain these adjustments so that they grow at a far slower rate  than normal inflation.  Among the various provisions of HB 1316,  which was drafted in large part to protect some of Indiana’s biggest and  most important companies from seeing large increases in their state  tax liabilities as we reconcile our tax code with the federal legislation  passed by Congress earlier this year, is a provision that will require  Indiana to coincide with the use of Chained CPI.  The end result of  both the federal and state legislation will be a large tax increase  on low income Hoosiers who claim the EITC.  The Institute on  Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) projects that in 2019 recipients  will lose $12 million in federal EITC and $700,000 in state  EITC returns.  The burden on Hoosiers continues to grow exponentially  and by 2027 they are projected to lose at least $86 million federally  and $5 million more from the state EITC.  Although the state and  federal governments view any EITC expenditures not received by  taxpayers as savings, make no mistake, it is a tax increase on  low income working Hoosiers, and a big one at that.  $91 million big.     But there are other options that Indiana isn’t considering. Because  Indiana’s credit is not officially coupled with the federal credit, as  mentioned previously, we do not have to utilize this new  method of calculation for the State’s EITC.  Federally, low-income working Hoosiers are already projected to lose tens of  millions of dollars.  There is little we can do about that unless we  can convince Congress to amend or repeal its most recent  tax legislation.  But, we can do something locally with regards to the  state EITC. Another $5 million out of the pockets of low-income working Hoosiers, and local economies, is real money that cannot  be ignored.  Unfortunately we at the Indiana Coalition for Human  Services were not able to convince lawmakers to remove this provision  from HB 1316, but it is our hope that we can work with them  over the summer and fall to find a solution to this problem, just as  Indiana’s largest employers were able to find solutions to their tax  liability problems in this legislation.  We believe there are a  number of options that are worthy of consideration, and we look  forward to the opportunity to make our case.       Want to support low-income working Hoosiers? Consider joining ICHS or making a donation to IIWF.

Obama's official portraitists on their daunting task