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Tag: siberia
Russia Dairy Plant Closed After Workers’ Milk Bath

Russia Dairy Plant Closed After Workers’ Milk Bath

By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW — A Siberian dairy plant was temporarily closed Friday after its workers had been found bathing in milk, a Russian consumer oversight agency reported.

Trade House Cheeses, a dairy producer in Omsk, about 1,600 miles east of Moscow, was closed for 90 days by regional authorities for an urgent inspection after complaints resulting from photographs and a video posted by one of its employees on a Russian social network.

In the photographs and video clips posted on New Year’s Eve by worker Artyom Romanov, a group of undressed employees relaxes in a container of milk as part of their New Year celebration. While still partly undressed, they then demonstrated cheese making in a clownish manner.

“But in reality our work is very boring.)))))” Romanov wrote in a caption accompanying the images.

“In a checkup we found the container where the workers were bathing and the bowls in which they were making cheese and a mass of other violations of sanitary-epidemic norms,” Marina Boyko, deputy chief of the Omsk region’s sanitary inspection agency, said in an interview with Lifenews, an online publication.

After the video appeared on NTV, a federal television network, many residents of Omsk refused to buy products made at the plant, an NTV report said this week.

“The production and service facilities are in an unsatisfactory sanitary-technical condition,” the statement read. “Conditions for personal hygiene are lacking.”

The appalling conditions and outrageous practices at this Omsk plant are quite a common occurrence these days in Russia as sanitary oversight has become virtually nonexistent, said Dmitry Yanin, a Russian senior consumer service expert.

“For five years Russia has been languishing in a so-called experiment of practically exercising no control over consumer production after a law was introduced limiting inspections of such facilities to only once every three years,” said Yanin, board chairman of the Russian Confederation of Consumer Societies, a Moscow-based group.

“What happened in this dairy plant in Omsk is of course a case of sheer idiocy, but nowadays there is nothing to prevent such idiots from indulging in similar outrages or routinely violating production and sanitary conditions elsewhere in the country.”

The plant in question could be closed for a thorough inspection five days after a prosecutor’s approval, Yanin said. “Which in many cases gives violators ample time to correct their problems before an inspection only to resort to malpractices again once the checkup is over.”

The average salary of a sanitary inspector is equal to $500 a month, but instead of raising that, the state decided to move in to prevent the inspector from taking bribes by in effect seriously curbing the inspector’s ability to control production norms and practices. More often than not, these practices lead to dire consequences, especially in food production and catering services resulting in thousands of cases every year, Yanin said.

In the western city of Kaliningrad 74 cases of acute food poisoning were registered this week resulting from eating shawarma (meat kebab) at a local cafeteria, Rospotrebnadzor Kaliningrad branch reported on its website.

Fifty-two of the cases were hospitalized in a regional infectious diseases clinic, Forty-seven of them were diagnosed with salmonellosis, the report said. The facility in question was closed for inspection.

“But for the video appearing on a social net and but for over 70 people poisoned from eating some horrible stuff, we would have never known about the risks of using these facilities’ products,” expert Yanin said. “The entire sphere of food production is now completely out of the state’s control, which means that none of us are safe when we buy food in Russia these days.”

Photo: Salim Virji via Flickr

Giant Virus Revived From Deep Freeze In Siberian Tundra

Giant Virus Revived From Deep Freeze In Siberian Tundra

By Geoffrey Mohan, Los Angeles Times

A 30,000-year-old giant virus has been revived from the frozen Siberian tundra, sparking concern that increased mining and oil drilling in rapidly warming northern latitudes could disturb dormant microbial life that could one day prove harmful to man.

The latest find, described online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appears to belong to a new family of mega-viruses that infect only amoeba. But its revival in a laboratory stands as “a proof of principle that we could eventually resurrect active infectious viruses from different periods,” said the study’s lead author, microbiologist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University in France.

“We know that those non-dangerous viruses are alive there, which probably is telling us that the dangerous kind that may infect humans and animals — that we think were eradicated from the surface of Earth — are actually still present and eventually viable, in the ground,” Claverie said.

With climate change making northern reaches more accessible, the chance of disturbing dormant human pathogens increases, the researchers concluded. Average surface temperatures in the area that contained the virus have increased more steeply than in more temperate latitudes, the researchers noted.

“People will go there; they will settle there, and they will start mining and drilling,” Claverie said. “Human activities are going to perturb layers that have been dormant for 3 million years and may contain viruses.”

Claverie’s co-author, Chantal Abergel, nonetheless cautioned that their finding is limited to one innocuous virus infecting an amoeba. “We cannot definitely say that there are some human pathogens in there,” she said.

They will re-examine the drill core samples, Abergel said, to “find out if there is anything there that is dangerous to humans and animals.”

Claverie’s laboratory was behind the discovery, in Chile, more than a decade ago, of the first giant DNA virus, dubbed Mimivirus. They next identified a far larger virus of an entirely different family in 2011, dubbing it Pandoravirus salinus, in homage to the mythical Pandora’s box that first unleashed evil on the world.

This time, they used an amoeba commonly found in soil and water as bait to draw out a virus from a Siberian permafrost core that had been dated to 30,000 years ago.

The finding described Monday looked like another Pandora, except it was 50 percent larger.

“Giant” in virology is still pretty tiny. A virus of one micron in size, or a thousandth of a millimeter, is considered huge. That’s big enough to be seen with a normal light microscope. The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, measures one tenth of a micron.

The genome of the newly described virus, however, contained only about a quarter of the number of paired DNA building blocks as Pandora, and the prevailing type of these base pairs was similar to the kind that dominate the Mimivirus genome.

Researchers kept with the ominous mythological theme and dubbed their find Pithovirus, from the Greek pithos, the type of amphora, or jar, that Pandora opened (it was not a box, after all).

Pithovirus still has an unusually large genome — 600,000 base pairs, which the researchers predict would include genes that code 467 proteins. The genome of Pandora virus contains more than 2.8 million base pairs and about 2,500 coding genes. For comparison: the tiny HIV retrovirus has 9,749 base pairs and nine coding genes; the virus that causes mononucleosis has about 172,000 base pairs and about 80 genes.

The prospect of finding additional viruses that prove to be viable in a host remains uncertain. Microbiologist Brent C. Christner, of Louisiana State University, who has done similar work on frozen microbes but was not involved in the study, cautioned that DNA is easily damaged and that viruses cannot replicate or mutate without a host. “They have no source of energy,” he said. “They have to hijack the mechanisms of the host cell.”

Nonetheless, the study further challenges the notion that viruses can be fully eradicated, Christner said. The genome described in the study, he noted, encodes 125 proteins involved in transcription, DNA repair and replication.

The researchers plan to re-examine large viruses that have been mistaken for bacteria in the past — one such specimen, found in 2008, had infected an amoeba living in a 17-year-old’s contact lens solution.

Photo: laurabillings via Flickr