Health Highlights: March 14, 2009

Mar. 15 -- Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:

Obama Names New FDA Chief

Calling the U.S. food safety system a "hazard to public health," President Barack Obama on Saturday named a new head of the Food and Drug Administration to start overhauling it.

Obama, in his weekly radio address, nominated former New York City Health Commissioner Margaret Hamburg as FDA commissioner and Baltimore Health Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein as her deputy, the Associated Press reported.

The president said he would also create a Food Safety Working Group to coordinate food safety laws throughout government and advise him on how to update them. Many of these laws have been untouched since President Theodore Roosevelt's era, he added.

Obama called the current food safety system too spread out, and noted that recent underfunding and understaffing has left the FDA unable to inspect more than a fraction of the 150,000 food processing plants and warehouses in the country.

"That is a hazard to public health. It is unacceptable. And it will change under the leadership of Dr. Margaret Hamburg," Obama said, according to AP.

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USDA Approves Conditional License for E. Coli Cattle Vaccine

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has granted a conditional license to a Minnesota company to market an E. coli vaccine for cattle to prevent a common source of beef contamination that has led to several large meat recalls in recent years, the Associated Press reports.

James Sandstrom, general manager of Willmar-based Epitopix, told the wire service the vaccine takes proteins that the bacteria use to absorb iron from the host animal and then injects them back into cows to generate an immune response against those proteins, without which the bacteria can't grow. The target is a strain of E. coli bacteria called O157 that sickens some 70,000 people in the United States each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infection from contaminated beef can cause bloody diarrhea and dehydration, and in severe cases, kidney failure. Children, the elderly, and those with weakened immune systems are at greater risk of serious infection.