Scientist wins Nobel for medicine days after death (AP)

STOCKHOLM � A pioneering cell biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for his discoveries about the immune system. Hours later, his university said he had died of pancreatic cancer three days earlier, even as he was using his own research to try to save his life.

The Nobel committee, which is only supposed to consider living scientists, said it was unaware of the death of Ralph Steinman when it awarded the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) prize.

The Nobel statutes say work "by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award" but they don't specifically say whether that also applies if the jury mistakenly picks a winner unaware that he or she has died.

"I think you can safely say that this hasn't happened before," Nobel Foundation spokeswoman Annika Pontikis told The Associated Press. The committee was expected to make a statement on the issue later Monday.

The Canadian-born Steinman, 68, who shared the prize with American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann, died Sept. 30 of pancreatic cancer, according to Rockefeller University in New York, where he had studied and worked since 1970.

It said Steinman underwent therapy based on his discovery of the immune system's dendritic cells, for which he won the prize.

"He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, and his life was extended using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design," the university said.

Beutler and Hoffmann were cited for their discoveries in the 1990s of receptor proteins that can recognize bacteria and other microorganisms as they enter the body, and activate the first line of defense in the immune system, known as innate immunity.

Nobel committee members said the work by the three is being used to develop better vaccines, and in the long run could also help treatment of diseases linked to abnormalities in the immune system, such as rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and chronic inflammatory diseases.

The work could also help efforts to make the immune system fight cancerous tumors, the committee said.

No vaccines are on the market yet, but Nobel committee member Goran Hansson told The Associated Press that vaccines against hepatitis are in the pipeline.

"I am very touched. I'm thinking of all the people who worked with me, who gave everything," Hoffmann said by telephone to a news conference in Paris. "I wasn't sure this domain merited a Nobel."

Beutler said he woke up in the middle of the night, glanced at his cellphone and realized he had a new email message.

"And, I squinted at it and I saw that the title line was 'Nobel Prize,' so I thought I should give close attention to that," Beutler said in an interview posted on the Nobel website. "And, I opened it and it was from Goran Hansson, and it said that I had won the Nobel Prize, and so I was thrilled."

Still, he was a "little disbelieving" until he checked his laptop, "and in a few minutes I saw my name there and so I knew it was real."

Since 1974, the Nobel statutes don't allow posthumous awards unless a laureate dies after the announcement but before the Dec. 10 award ceremony. That happened in 1996 when economics winner William Vickrey died a few days after the announcement.

Before the statutes were changed in 1974 two Nobel Prizes were given posthumously. In 1961, U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize less than a month after he died in a plane crash during a peace mission to Congo. Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt won the Nobel in literature in 1931, although he had died in March of that year.

Hansson said the medicine committee didn't know Steinman was dead when it chose him as a winner and was looking through its regulations.

"It is incredibly sad news," he said. "We can only regret that he didn't have the chance to receive the news he had won the Nobel Prize. Our thoughts are now with his family."

Beutler, 53, holds dual appointments at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and as professor of genetics and immunology at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. He will become a full-time faculty member at UT Southwestern on Dec. 1.

Hoffmann, 70, headed a research laboratory in Strasbourg, France, between 1974 and 2009 and served as president of the French National Academy of Sciences between 2007-08.

Steinman had been head of Rockefeller University's Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases.

"We are all so touched that our father's many years of hard work are being recognized with a Nobel Prize," Steinman's daughter, Alexis Steinman, said in the Rockefeller University statement. "He devoted his life to his work and his family, and he would be truly honored."

Hoffmann's discovery came in 1996 during research on how fruit flies fight infections. Two years later, Beutler's research on mice showed that fruit flies and mammals activate innate immunity in similar ways when attacked by germs.

Steinman's discovery dates back to 1973, when he found a new cell type, the dendritic cell, which has a unique capacity to activate T-cells. Those cells have a key role in adaptive immunity, when antibodies and killer cells fight infections. They also develop a memory that helps the immune system mobilize its defenses next time it comes under a similar attack.

The medicine award kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements, and will be followed by the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The winners of the economics award will be announced on Oct. 10.

The coveted prizes were established by wealthy Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel � the inventor of dynamite � except for the economics award, which was created by Sweden's central bank in 1968 in Nobel's memory. The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, on the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

Last year's medicine award went to British professor Robert Edwards for fertility research that led to the first test tube baby.

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Associated Press writer Malin Rising contributed to this report.

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Calif. gov signs bill to prevent circumcision bans (AP)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. � California's governor has signed a bill that that will prevent local governments from banning male circumcision.

Gov. Jerry Brown's office announced Sunday that the Democrat signed AB768, a bill written in response to a ballot measure proposed in San Francisco.

Backers of a ban collected more than 7,700 signatures to put a measure on the November ballot in San Francisco to outlaw the circumcision of most male children. It was later blocked by a judge.

They had argued that circumcision is an unnecessary surgery that can lead to sexual and health problems later in life.

Those against the ban say it is an important religious practice for many Jews and Muslims, and that it can reduce the risk of cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.

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Long road from farm to fork worsens food outbreaks (AP)

WASHINGTON � Outbreaks of listeria and other serious illnesses linked to tainted food are becoming more common, partly because much of what we eat takes a long and winding road from farm to fork.

A cantaloupe grown on a Colorado field may make four or five stops before it reaches the dinner table. There's the packing house where it is cleaned and packaged, then the distributor who contracts with retailers to sell the melons in large quantities. A processor may cut or bag the fruit. The retail distribution center is where the melons are sent out to various stores. Finally it's stacked on display at the grocery store.

Imported fruits and vegetables, which make up almost two-thirds of the produce consumed in the United States, have an even longer journey.

"Increasingly with agribusiness you have limited producers of any given food, so a breakdown in a facility or plant or in a large field crop operation exposes thousands because of the way the food is distributed," says Dr. Brian Currie, an infectious disease specialist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

The Colorado cantaloupe crop that's linked to 84 illnesses and as many as 17 deaths in 19 states has traveled so far and wide that producer Jensen Farms doesn't even know exactly where their fruit ended up.

The company said last week that it can't provide a list of retailers that sold the tainted fruit because the melons were sold and resold. It named the 28 states where the fruit was shipped, but people in other states have reported getting sick.

A Kansas-based processor that purchased cantaloupes from Jensen, Carol's Cuts, didn't provide a notice to its customers that it had sold the farm's cantaloupes until nine days after the original recall.

"The food chain is very complex," says Sherri McGarry, a senior adviser in the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Foods. "There are many steps, and the more steps there are the harder it can be to link up each step to identify what the common source" of an outbreak is.

Fewer and larger farms and companies dominate food production in the country. That has driven some consumers to seek out farmers markets and locally grown produce. Supermarkets now highlight food grown nearby, while farmers markets have soared in popularity.

But many in the produce industry have come together to try and improve the ability to quickly trace food from field to plate.

This is good business. Large recalls, such as spinach in 2006, peanuts in 2009 and eggs in 2010, tend to depress sales for an entire product industry, even if only one company or grower was responsible for the outbreak.

Recent outbreaks of salmonella in peanuts and eggs, which are ingredients in thousands of foods, have been more widespread and sickened more people than have the tainted cantaloupe.

"There has been a laser focus on improving traceability so any recall can identify the affected product immediately and not have an effect on the rest of the entire category," says Ray Gilmer of United Fresh Produce Association, which represents the country's largest growers.

Gilmer says that larger food companies have no choice but to take food safety very seriously.

"The stakes for a large company to have a food safety incident are huge," he said. "It could destroy their company."

Listeria, a bacteria found in soil and water, often turns up in processed meats because it can contaminate a processing facility and stay there for a long period of time. It's also common in unpasteurized cheeses and unpasteurized milk, though less so produce such as cantaloupe.

The disease can cause fever, muscle aches, gastrointestinal symptoms and even death. One in five people who have listeria can die.

A food safety law passed by Congress last year gives the FDA new power to improve tracing food through the system. Food safety advocates say the law will help make the food network safer by focusing on making every step in the chain safer and making it easier to find the source of outbreaks.

For the first time, larger farms are required to submit plans detailing how they are keeping their produce safe.

Erik Olson, director of food and consumer safety programs for the Pew Health Group, says it is critical that those improvements are made to prevent more, larger outbreaks as the system grows more complex.

"Clearly the food industry has just changed enormously in the last several decades," Olson said. "It would be virtually impossible to sit down and eat a meal and eat food that hasn't come from all over the world."

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Online:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: http://www.cdc.gov/listeria/index.html

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Fear in Colo. town at heart of Listeria outbreak (AP)

HOLLY, Colo. � Eric Jensen surveys his dusty cantaloupe field and seems equally stunned and puzzled at the fate that has befallen his crop: row upon row of melons rotting on the vine.

Jensen is the co-owner of the Colorado farm where health officials say a national listeria outbreak originated, making his withering fields the epicenter of a food scare that has sickened dozens of people from Wyoming to Maryland and caused 16 deaths.

The farm has recalled more than 300,000 cases of cantaloupes and on Thursday three states � Indiana, Louisiana and Wisconsin � were added to the recall list. Spokeswoman Amy Philpott said that trucking records show that cantaloupes originally intended for other locations ended up in those states but that the buyers were notified as part of the original Sept. 14 recall.

Jensen has no idea how his cantaloupes became infected, and neither do the Food and Drug Administration investigators who have intermittently been in this town of 800 people near the Kansas border since the outbreak started earlier this month.

Regardless of how it happened, the situation has left the town and farm reeling and in fear. Jensen had to quit growing and shipping cantaloupes after the outbreak was discovered � a staggering blow to a region where cantaloupe has always been a proud local tradition.

Until the listeria infections started showing up, Holly's field workers would bring melons into town to share, just as they have for generations. And it wasn't uncommon for Holly residents to stop by Jensen Farms to buy freshly picked cantaloupe. Now, not even the local grocery store has any of the fruit.

No one in Holly has been sickened, but people are frightened by the prospect of contracting listeria. The bacteria can have an incubation period of a month or more, and it principally affects the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.

"I ate that cantaloupe, and I gave some of it to my 97-year-old mother,'" said Wanda Watson, co-owner of the Tasty House Cafe. "I'm watching her real close. It's scary because it could be up to two months before you get sick."

Sherri McGarry, a senior adviser in the FDA's Office of Foods, said the agency is looking at the farm's water supply and the possibility that animals wandered into Jensen Farms' fields, among other things, in trying to figure out how the cantaloupes became contaminated. Listeria bacteria grow in moist, muddy conditions and are often carried by animals.

The water supply for farms in the Holly area comes from wells and irrigation ditches that tap the nearby Arkansas River. There's no shortage of thoughts around town about the potential causes.

"Well water? I doubt it. Ditch water? Well, there's some probability, but it's low," said Jim Cline, a retired construction worker. "Animal intrusion? Well, OK, what kind of animal? Deer? Coons? Coyotes? What kind of animal wants to get into a melon field?"

At Jensen Farms, workers have stopped picking cantaloupes because of a recall of its product. There's no need to irrigate the crop anymore, and the melons are drying up in the rock-hard fields. As Eric Jensen surveyed his lost crop, workers ripped up plastic that's laid down in rows to help the cantaloupe grow.

He could not discuss the outbreak, citing a likely raft of pending litigation.

"There are a lot of things I'd like to say right now, but now is not the time," Jensen said.

It's the latest blow to Holly, a town that has seen its share of hard times.

In late 2006, Holly was pummeled by a blizzard that cut off the town from the outside world so badly that helicopters had to drop feed to stranded cattle. Just as people were digging out of the blizzard, a tornado blasted through Holly, killing three people and destroying and damaging dozens of homes.

The Sept. 10 recall of Jensen Farms' cantaloupes came toward the end of a harvesting season made difficult by a severe drought that has rendered swaths of southeast Colorado, Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma federal disaster areas.

Residents talk about conditions so dry that some corn stalks have no ears of corn on them. Yields in wheat fields � usually between 40 to 50 bushels an acre � have dropped to about 20.

"We just haven't had any luck around here," said Watson.

Holly is about a 90-minute drive from the town of Rocky Ford, home to Colorado's revered cantaloupe growing region. Cantaloupes from the Arkansas River Valley are prized for their sweetness and are such a big deal that farms like Jensen's � 70 miles away � carry the brand name "Rocky Ford Cantaloupe."

The listeria scare has some residents wondering about the future for their Rocky Ford brand of cantaloupe � and cantaloupe farming in Colorado for that matter. They're hopeful this outbreak eventually will fade from the public's memory, like others involving spinach or ground meat contaminated by E. coli bacteria or salmonella.

"You think beef recalls, you think spinach in California," said Michael Daskam, who works in the local soil conservation office. "But heck, I was eating spinach and beef right after."

The same goes for locally grown cantaloupe.

"I'm not afraid of eating cantaloupe. I'd eat one right now," Holly Mayor Viola Welcher said. "We've all eaten it and no one in our area has gotten sick."

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Online:

http://www.cdc.gov/listeria/index.html

http://1.usa.gov/rr2j1d

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Killer cantaloupe, scary sprouts ? what to do? (AP)

MILWAUKEE � Avoid foreign produce. Wash and peel your fruit. Keep it refrigerated. None of these common tips would have guaranteed your safety from the deadliest food outbreak in a decade, the one involving cantaloupes from Colorado.

Whether it's sprouts or spinach, turkey or hamburger; whether the government doubled, tripled or quadrupled inspections, the truth is that no food will ever be completely free of risk.

And a few foods have become so risky that certain people such as children, pregnant women and the elderly may do best to avoid them altogether until growers and the government figure out how to make them safer, some food experts say.

An unappetizing fact: Although the current cantaloupe outbreak has been tied to just one farm in Colorado, it's at least the 19th outbreak involving that melon since 1984. It's also the first one caused by listeria, a germ that actually likes to be in the refrigerator and thrives in this fruit, which cannot be cooked unless you want to eat melon mush.

Listeria also prompted a California farm to recall bags of chopped romaine lettuce on Thursday because of possible contamination, though no illnesses have been reported. The greens from Salinas-based True Leaf Farms went to an Oregon distributor and possibly at least two other states � Washington and Idaho.

So what should you do if you see cantaloupe on a salad bar or at the grocery store? Can you be sure all of the tainted stuff has been pulled from the market, since the last bad melons were shipped on Sept. 10? What if no one knows where the cantaloupe was grown?

"If the store can't tell them or the restaurant can't tell them, I would not buy it at all," said Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America.

Laura Anderko, a Georgetown University public health expert, went a step further.

"Honestly, as a nurse, I would tell people don't eat the cantaloupe until this thing resolves itself," she said. "This stuff happens because our system is not as tight as it needs to be."

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has confirmed 13 deaths and 72 illnesses in the outbreak so far, has not told people to stop buying cantaloupe. However, the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration cannot even say where all of the tainted melon went, because it was sold and resold to many distributors across the nation.

"When in doubt, throw it out," is the CDC's advice to consumers who have any cantaloupe whose origins they can't determine.

"Even if the cantaloupe is gone, you need to wash the drawer or shelf it may have been on" to make sure other foods don't become contaminated, said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Beyond that, each outbreak brings fresh lessons on how to make produce safer. And while some of these things aren't guarantees, they can cut the odds you'll lose at the food safety lottery.

Some new tips food experts offered Thursday:

� Shop more often and consume fresh fruits and vegetables within a few days. This gives germs less chance to multiply and gives you more nutrients from your food, too.

� Don't just wash a melon. Scrub it under running water to rinse off any dislodged germs, and let it dry. If you cut it while it's still wet, "you may be sliding the pathogens more easily from the outside to the inside" on the knife, DeWaal said.

� Keep the fridge cold, 40 degrees or lower. Higher than that can let germs grow.

� Don't get a false sense of security if you buy organic produce. That just means less pesticide � not necessarily fewer germs.

� Consider dropping especially risky foods from your diet. Bean sprouts are not safe for children, pregnant women or people with weak immune systems and certain diseases, but that doesn't mean they're OK for everyone else, said Michael Doyle, a microbiologist who heads the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety.

Doyle also consults for a lot of food companies, including a major spinach producer that sought help after outbreaks involving that vegetable. He has chaired a food safety advisory council for McDonald's for many years.

"I don't eat sprouts at all," he said. If harmful bacteria are in the seeds "they grow in the sprouting process, and there's nothing to kill them unless you cook them."

You can go too far with this, though. Even Dr. Robert Tauxe, the CDC's top food-germ sleuth, once confessed over lunch that he refused to live in fear of the fork, and that there were only a few foods he absolutely wouldn't eat, such as raw oysters and unpasteurized milk.

Beyond that, safe handling and cooking can generally keep most foods safe, he said.

The big picture is important, said Robert Gravani, a food scientist at Cornell University.

A gazillion pounds of produce are consumed each day, and only a tiny fraction cause problems, he said.

"I have a hard time saying, `Don't eat produce,' because of all of the health benefits," he said. "Everything we do has some degree of risk attached to it."

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Online:

Food safety tips: www.cspinet.org, http://www.fightbac.org

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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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If you're happy and you know it, did you tweet? (AP)

WASHINGTON � Twitter confirms it: People tend to wake up in a good mood and are happiest on weekends. The fast-paced forum is offering scientists a peek at real-time, presumably little-filtered human behavior and thoughts. Cornell University researchers turned to the microblog to study mood and found a pretty consistent pattern.

The researchers analyzed English-language tweets from 2.4 million people in 84 countries, more than 500 million of the brief, conversation-like exchanges sent over two years. They used a computer program that searched for words indicating positive mood � happy, enthusiastic, brilliant � or negative mood � sad, anxious, fear.

What they found: Unless you're a night owl, a positive attitude peaks early in the morning and again near midnight, but starts to dip midmorning before rising again in the evening.

Aha, you might think, going to work and related hassles like traffic explain that pattern. After all, there was more positive tweeting on the weekend, even though the morning peak of happy tweets occurred two hours later, probably because people slept late.

Not quite. Work-related stress may play some role but it can't explain why that same midday dip occurs on the weekend, too, said lead researcher Scott Golder, a Cornell graduate student. Instead, the pattern probably is due to the effects of sleep and our 24-hour biological clock, the so-called circadian rhythms that signal when it's time to sleep and to wake, Golder and Cornell sociologist Michael Macy reported. Their study appears in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The researchers also examined tweets in the United Arab Emirates, where Friday and Saturday are considered the weekend. Sure enough, they found the same daily pattern, even though the workday tends to begin earlier there than in the West, and the same weekend pattern.

Previous research has linked the biological clock and mood, but was based mostly on small studies of American college students. There are cautions about studying Twitter postings, too: Their authors tend to be younger than the general population, and may be more affluent, better educated and different in yet-to-be-discovered ways.

Still, the study's bigger message is about the scientific potential of social media, Macy said.

Other researchers have turned to Twitter to study political campaigning, to blog postings and Twitter feeds to study emotions, and to Google searches of flu symptoms to predict outbreaks.

"It illustrates a new opportunity for doing social and behavioral science in ways that were really unimaginable even five years ago," Macy said.

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Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/

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