You may have read in the news that almost 400 million eggs have been recalled after Salmonella sickened hundreds of people. That’s a lot of eggs.

What is this nasty bacteria that makes us wonder whether we should let our kids eat raw chocolate chip cookie dough, even as we sneak several spoonfuls when they’re not looking?

Salmonella enterocolitis is one of the most common types of food poisoning and is caused by the bacteria Salmonella Enteriditis. You can get a Salmonella infection by swallowing  food or water that is contaminated with the salmonella bacteria.  Often, the culprit is surface contamination from raw chicken and raw or undercooked eggs.  In most people, it causes diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramping, but young children and those with weakened immune systems are at greater risk of dehydration and more serious infections.

Why don’t they just wash the eggs better?  Salmonella bacteria live in the intestinal tracts of animals and birds and can infect the ovaries of healthy-looking chickens.  This allows bacteria to infect the eggs even before the shell is formed and voila- you have a pathogen that can’t be washed off of the egg because it’s inside.  Organic and free range chickens have less disease than factory-”farm” raised chickens, partly because of healthier diets and less crowding.  Cooking eggs until the yolk is solid kills Salmonella bacteria.

How can you make your cookie dough and eat it too?  Buy pasteurized eggs (you can find them at most grocery stores) that have been heat-treated to kill bacteria, but are still essentially raw for all cooking and baking purposes.

Also, remember to wash cutting boards you’ve cut meat on with soap and water before cutting anything else on them, or just have separate cutting boards for meat.  Don’t forget to wash your hands after handling raw eggs!  Pet food and reptiles can also harbor salmonella bacteria, so have your kids wash their hand after handling either!

Bacteria are everywhere.  Some keep you healthy and some make you sick, but making good decisions in the kitchen can keep you and your family from being affected by food-born illness!

Did you know that we have ten times more microbes in our bodies than human cells?  It may sound gross, but these microbes are often more friend than foe and keep us healthy  in return for a little space to call their own.

There was a fantastic article in yesterday’s Science Times about microbiomes- what scientists call the collection of microorganisms colonizing our bodies.  The study of microbiomes has intensified in recent years and scientists are trying to catalog some of the bacteria we carry.

I eat yogurt filled with healthy, or beneficial, bacteria on a daily basis to keep a healthy population of these little helpers living in my gut.  This keeps the bad bacteria from finding a place to take hold.  A more extreme version of this was mentioned in the Science Times article, where a woman dying of an intestinal infection caused by pathogenic, or bad bacteria was saved when bacteria from her husband’s intestines was introduced into her large intestine.  Within hours, the good bacteria had “kicked” the bad bacteria out, taking over residence.

I also learned that babies born by C-section (like my three kids) are more prone to skin infections and asthma, possibly due to the fact that coming from the sterile amniotic sac, they are colonized by bacteria from adults’ skin rather than that bacteria from their mother’s birth canal.  In fact, people with asthma have a different set of lung microbes than healthy people and obese people have a different set of bacteria in their guts than people of normal weight.

You’ve heard that kids on farms and are exposed to dirt have healthier immune systems than city kids?  It’s not the dirt itself, but the microbes in the dirt giving them their immune systems a boost.

There are years of hard work in the lab ahead of scientists to validate their beliefs that beneficial bacteria may one day be a weapon in the arsenal against infectious disease, but in the meantime, I plan to keep eating my yogurt and letting my kids play in the dirt.

This morning, Twitter led me to a great website filled with science news for kids.  Check it out at  http://sciencenewsforkids.com/.

The Society for Science and the public, who sponsors the site, is having a contest for kids in grades 6-12 where they can enter their own podcast talking about what they’ve learned about science from the website.  Go here for more details.

It sounds like a great way to keep your kids reading about science this summer!

Whale hunting  has been in the new a lot recently, but it now appears that the biggest threat to these intelligent, majestic animals is no longer whalers’ harpoons.

I read this morning in the Star Tribune that “Sperm whales, feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth’s oceans, have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals.”  Most of these contaminants have been introduced into the ocean by humans of course.  The article goes on to talk about how our food supply is being threatened by our poisoned oceans and that seafood is a primary source of protein for over 1 billion people.  Do you eat fish?

Apparently, high concentrations of these poisons collect in these whales because they are at the top of the food chain.  That means they eat fish and squid that have eaten smaller animals, which have eaten yet smaller animals and plants and so on.  Humans are also at the top of the food chain, and although we don’t only eat contaminated fish, we eat many other plants and animals that are exposed to heavy metals, pesticides and herbicides.  Both whales and humans nurse their young, passing contaminants from mother to baby.  (That beautiful piece of wild salmon may not be as pristine as you’ve convinced yourself that it is.  Like it or not, our bodies are full of toxins too.)

What’s happening to the whales is happening to us.  The difference is that the whales are not the ones polluting the world.

Look at the Gulf.  Looks at our sick oceans.  Go read “The Lorax.”

We have to save the whales to save ourselves.

I just got this email from the Science Museum of Minnesota and thought I’d share it with you.  It sounds like a great way to spend Father’s Day!

Father’s Day – Sunday, June 20, 2010 – 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
at the Science Museum of Minnesota

Make: Day at the Science Museum is this Father’s Day—Sunday, June 20, 2010. Mark your calendars for the chance to meet with an astounding group of local engineers, artists, tinkerers, and inventors. They’ve been hard at work, and now they want to share their DIY creations with you.

Presentations to see, hear, and interact with include:

• A 3D Printer that makes plastic models from computer designs right before your eyes
• A potential Guinness World Record-breaking attempt using kinetic gadgets
• Musical performances by experimental musicians using custom-built instruments
• A bicycle ride across a suspended cable
• Plus a whole lot more!

You’ll have the opportunity to meet with the makers, ask them about their inventions, and learn about ways that you can get involved with local making communities. Presentations will be located throughout the museum’s exhibit galleries. The event is included with regular museum admission.

Dads get in free to Make: Day!
Make: Day is a great way to celebrate Father’s Day with the whole family. With all the amazing DIY presentations, there’s sure to be something for everyone. And don’t forget to take advantage of the incredible opportunity for dads to get in free with the Make: Day Father’s Day coupon. Just print it out and present it at the box office along with any full-price ticket purchase. The free admission is good for any exhibit combination, including the Omnitheater and The Dead Sea Scrolls. So bring your DIY (or not-so-DIY) dad down and see what’s being made!

In today’s paper, I was disgusted to read that two school-age children, a toddler and a 70-year old man were victims of an E.coli outbreak this week caused by raw milk from a Minnesota dairy.  The toddler is currently hospitalized with a serious condition related to the infection (hemolytic uremic syndrome) which can cause kidney failure and death.  These are unnecessary illnesses and people are putting themselves and their children at risk by drinking raw milk.

Pasteurization is the process of heating up food to kill any bacteria it might contain.  Louis Pasteur first tested the process in 1864 and it is perfectly safe.  However, some people who drink raw milk feel that beneficial proteins and bacteria are destroyed during the heating process.

According to the Health Department, several dozen people are sickened by raw milk every year in Minnesota.  Unpasteurized milk can contain the live pathogens, or bad bacteria,  E. coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter.  Most people are careful handling and cooking  meat to avoid the very same pathogens.  Why they wouldn’t mind drinking them is a mystery to me.

Beneficial, or “good” bacteria can be found in most yogurt and many companies now add beneficial bacteria to other dairy items, including pasteurized milk.  I suspect that many of milk’s other beneficial heat-sensitive proteins can be found in other, safe foods as well.  Even raw milk cheese made correctly is safer than raw milk, because it contains other microbes that inhibit the growth of pathogens.

Maybe people don’t realize it, but giving their child a glass of raw milk is as risky as feeding them a raw hamburger.  I’m glad to hear the state is cracking down.

When I told my husband that scientists at the J.Craig Venter Institute had assembled a funtioning bacterium from bottles of chemicals, he said exactly what I was thinking.  “It’s like The Stand.”  Even if you’re not a Stephen King fan, you’ve probably heard of his novel where a genetically engineered strain of the flu virus wipes out almost every human on earth.

USA Today, on the other hand, said “The long-anticipated advance, reported in the journal Science, is a $40 million milestone in the nascent field of “synthetic biology” and points towards a future of designer microbes manufacturing fuels, chemicals and materials.”

The news that a synthetic bacterium has been created comes as no surprise to most scientists.  Even when I worked in a lab ten years ago, we cut and pasted bacterial DNA together on a regular basis.  We also synthesized  relatively short pieces of DNA by pushing buttons on a machine.  The technology has vastly improved since then, and entire bacterial genomes have been sequenced.  Scientists know exactly what it takes to make a functioning bacterial cell.

Some good and bad uses for synthetic biology immediately spring to mind:

Good things:  Scientists may be able to design bacteria that specifically target certain areas of the human bodies, so that the bacteria could colonize those areas (say, the intestine) and produce and deliver drugs to specific organs without causing harm.  You could even turn drug delivery on and off by putting “inducible promoters” which are basically on/off switches, in front of the genes for drug production.  You could possibly use the technology to deliver chemotherapy directly to tumors too, if you could create bacteria that recognize and bind to certain proteins produced by tumor cells.

Bad, bad things:  Bioweapons.  Scientists could potentially piece together nasty bacterial bioweapons that could survive sunlight and even radiation. (Most natural bacteria are relatively fragile and difficult to “disperse” or spread through the air.)

Nature has some controls of her own.  Bacteria must contain certain elements to survive and replicate, and sometimes putting foreign DNA into a bacterium will kill it.  There are also size limits.

We can only hope that the good that comes from this technological breakthrough outweighs the bad.  Later today, I’m planning to pre-order tickets for an amusement park where you’ll be able to see real live dinosaurs in about 20 years.

Sandwiched between oil spills and militant lairs in the paper this morning, I found hope for millions of people.  

The New York  Times reported that a new drug therapy offers hope to children and adults suffering from a relatively common genetic flaw that causes autism and mild to severe retardation.  According to the article, one child in five thousand is born with Fragile X Syndrome, which is the most common inherited cause of mental retardation. (Down Syndrome is not inherited.)  Fragile X patients appear to experience an overload of brain signalling and the drug, manufactured by Novartis, appears to help by slowing down this excessive talk between brain cells.  Researcher hope this will allow patients to form memories,  learn and develop more normally.   If further studies bolster these initial trials, performed in adults, the drug may also hope for patients with autism not caused by Fragile X.    “This is perhaps the most promising therapeutic discovery ever for a gene-based behavioral disease,” said Dr. Edward M. Scolnick.

Amazing.

I found lots of interesting tidbits in today’s Science Times!

In science news, my son was fascinated to learn that ABE, a pioneering undersea robotic explorer, appears to have implodedunder about 10,000 feet of water while searching for hydrothermal vents in the sea of southern Chile.  We also read that “Fearless Felix” Baumgartner is going to jump from a helium balloon in the stratosphere, 120,000 feet above earth in an attempt to be the first skydiver to break the speed of sound.

In health news, The Science Times today tells us that a study showed that when soda prices went up, consumers health improved.  (Not that surprising, really.) There was an interesting article about new research showing that taking an anti-inflammatory related to aspirin helped Type 2 diabetes patients manage their disease and even lower their blood sugar.  This seems to be further evidence that inflammation plays a role in diabetes.  There is also a good article about Dr. Thomas Frieden,the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Alanta.  I was happy to read that he’s reorganizing the agency to give scientists better access to top leadership and popping into research labs on a regular basis to see what’s going on.

StephenOrnes at sciencenews.org reports that scientists have measured the speed of air escaping the column that is formed when a rock thrown into a flat body of water, like a pond.   When the column collapses, the air that is pushed out moves faster than the speed of sound (760 miles an hour.)  To read more and watch a video, go to http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/55900/title/FOR_KIDS_Supersonic_splash_.