KUALA LUMPUR (AFP)–Malaysia’s health ministry Thursday said it was investigating the Famous Amos cookie chain after it withdrew dough from several of its outlets amid fears it was contaminated by the salmonella bacterium.

The action followed an outbreak of salmonella poisoning in the U.S., which has made at least 474 people sick since September as a result of infected peanut- butter and peanut-paste dough, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, Web site.

The health ministry said it had started a probe into Famous Amos, a unit of Kellogg Co. (K), based on information it received that the infected dough had been exported to Malaysia for the company’s use.

“The health ministry has investigated and found the company is indeed using the dough, which contains peanut butter and peanut paste, which is imported from the Peanut Corporation of America,” it said in a statement.

“The company has withdrawn the dough, which is sold at three of its premises,” it added.

Famous Amos company representatives said the company did use peanut butter in cookies in Malaysia but that all its cookies were safe for consumption.

“There is only one dough (suspected of being contaminated with salmonella), called premium choice, which we had carried and (which was only) available in limited locations,” the company’s general manager Jesrina Liew said.

“The batch, which they suspected of contamination, is still in our inventory and has not been distributed yet. (The premium choice cookies) we have recalled were from an earlier batch of dough and had not been contaminated,” she added.

The salmonella bacterium is spread most often by the consumption of food contaminated by animal fecal matter, according to health experts.

The microbe usually flourishes within the intestinal tracts of fowl and mammals.

An estimated 1.4 million human salmonella infections occur each year, causing about 15,000 hospitalizations and 400 deaths, according to the CDC.

SOURCE: CNN.COM

ATLANTA (AP) — Dr. Julie L. Gerberding has resigned as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and will be replaced on an interim basis by a deputy as of Jan. 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama is inaugurated.

Her resignation was announced in an e-mail message to employees on Friday night.

Dr. Gerberding, the first woman to direct the agency, led the C.D.C. through a post-Sept. 11 world of bioterrorism fears and was considered an effective communicator with legislators and the public.

In a November e-mail message to staff members, Dr. Gerberding said she expected that she might leave the post after the Bush administration left office. But colleagues said she had quietly held out hope that she would be allowed to stay on.

A spokesman for the agency, Glen Nowak, said Dr. Gerberding was traveling in Africa on agency business and was not available for comment.

Mr. Nowak said in a prepared statement that the Bush administration, “as part of the transition process,” had requested resignation letters from “a number of senior-level officials, including Dr. Julie Gerberding. This week, the administration accepted Dr. Gerberding’s resignation, effective Jan. 20.”

The agency investigates disease outbreaks, researches the cause and prevalence of health problems, and promotes illness prevention efforts. In a 2007 Harris Poll, the C.D.C. was rated the government agency that does the best job.

Dr. Gerberding is also head of the sister agency to the C.D.C., the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The two have a combined budget of about $8.8 billion and more than 14,000 full-time, part-time and contract employees.

Dr. Gerberding receives a total compensation of $202,200.

Dr. Gerberding, 53, was named director in July 2002. She had been an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, and joined the disease centers in 1998 to lead a patient safety initiative.

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Salmonella, a bacterium often found in undercooked meats and raw eggs, can also be found in other foods as well. The latest outbreak, which has been responsible for over 400 cases in 42 states since the fall of 2008, is the result of peanut butter. On Saturday January 11th, King Nut Companies of Solon, Ohio recalled all brands of peanut butter distributed under the company’s name after it was discovered the day before by Minnesota health officials that salmonella was present in a five-pound open container of creamy King Nut peanut butter that company distributes to hospitals and schools. Their products are not sold directly to consumers and business clients have been asked to take all King Nut peanut butter and Parnell’s Pride peanut butter distributed by King Nut out of distribution immediately

Martin Kanan the president and CEO of King Nut Companies issued an apology for the outbreak and said that the company took immediate action to ensure safety.

“We are very sorry this happened,” said Martin Kanan, president and chief executive officer of King Nut Companies. “We are taking immediate and voluntary action because the health and safety of those who use our products is always our highest priority.”

The CDC says ingesting foods that have been infected with animal waste normally contracts salmonella bacteria contamination. The symptoms that people generally experience are abdominal cramps, diarrhea and fever, which generally occur within three days after contamination. The infection usually disappears after seven days & often does not require treatment, though some people have been hospitalized due to dehydration.

For more information about the recall, please visit http://www.kingnut.com

(CNN) — If you have a fever, headache and runny nose, you might go to Google and type the words “flu symptoms” to see whether you’ve come down with influenza.

Google knows that you might do something like that, and it also knows which U.S. state you’re in. Now, it’s putting that information together in a tool that Google says could detect flu outbreaks faster than traditional systems currently in use.

Google’s new public health initiative, Google Flu Trends, looks at the relative popularity of a slew of flu-related search terms to determine where in the U.S. flu outbreaks may be occurring.

“What’s exciting about Flu Trends is that it lets anybody – epidemiologists, health officials, moms with sick children — learn about the current flu activity level in their own state based on data that’s coming in this week,” said Jeremy Ginsberg, the lead engineer who developed the site.

The tool, which launched Tuesday, operates on the idea that there’s likely to be a flu outbreak in states where flu-related search terms are currently popular.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collaborated with Google on the project, helping validate and refine the model, and has provided flu tracking data over a five-year period, said Dr. Joseph Bresee, chief of the epidemiology and prevention branch in the CDC’s influenza division.

Although it doesn’t replace the need for real viral surveillance data, Flu Trends is a good model, and the CDC looks forward to testing it this flu season, Bresee said.

“We really are excited about the future of using different technologies, including technology like this, in trying to figure out if there’s better ways to do surveillance for outbreaks of influenza or any other diseases in the United States,” he said. “In theory at least, this idea can be used for any disease and any health problem.”

Researchers found a tight correlation between the relative popularity of flu-related search terms and CDC’s surveillance data, Ginsberg said.

In the 2007-08 flu season, Google accurately estimated current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports in each of the nine U.S. surveillance regions, Google said in a statement.

Traditionally, influenza surveillance has involved physicians’ reports of patients with flu-like symptoms, lab reports of influenza from nasal and throat swabs, and death certificates.

Only that kind of analysis will detect the spread of influenza strains not covered by the flu vaccine, information that search engine information does not reflect, experts say.

But there has been concern that influenza surveillance systems in place are not fast enough, and the new tool could be useful for the basic purpose of quickly detecting outbreaks, said Dr. Randall Stafford, associate professor of medicine at Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center, who was not involved in the project.

“Sacrificing accuracy may not necessarily carry a big penalty if you’re able to predict increasing flu incidence as well as the other systems, and do it more rapidly,” he said.

Still, there are limitations, Bresee said. The tool may miss cases of influenza spreading among elderly people, because they are less likely to use the Internet than younger people, Stafford said. He also noted that many people who search for flu-related terms have viral infections that are not actually influenza.

Google has also taken into account that people sometimes look for flu-related terms in response to certain news headlines and do not actually have the flu, Ginsberg said. The tool looks for terms that, for example, reflect searches by a person who has chest congestion or wants to buy a thermometer, he said.

Flu Trends may also help doctors make diagnoses, Ginsberg said.

“I would be very hesitant to diagnose influenza at this point in the year, but if the tool tells me influenza in California is really increasing dramatically, I might be more likely or willing to diagnose,” Stafford said.

Influenza is responsible for more than 500,000 deaths worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization.

Flu Trends cannot be used to identify individual users, the company statement said. The search engine relies on aggregated counts, made anonymous, of how often certain search terms occur each week. But every computer connected to the Internet has its own internet protocol address, or IP address, which reveals its location to Google.

Software engineers and public health experts at Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, collaborated on the project, Ginsberg said. The search engine giant turned 10 years old this year.

The overall flu activity in the U.S. is low, although a few states — such as Hawaii, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Delaware and Maine — have “moderate” activity, according to Google’s map, based on data current through Monday.

“There’s no question that testing for virus in blood is the only way to get the most information, but having this sort of information earlier does make sense,” Stafford said.

SOURCE: Elizabeth Landau@CNN.COM