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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The salmonella outbreak spawned one of the largest ever product recalls Wednesday by a Georgia peanut plant where federal inspectors reported finding roaches, mold, a leaking roof and other sanitary problems. Managers at the Blakely, Ga. plant owned by Peanut Corp. of America continued shipping peanut products even after they were found to contain salmonella.

Peanut Corp. expanded its recall Wednesday to all peanut products produced at the plant since Jan. 1, 2007. The company is relatively small, but its peanut paste is an ingredient in hundreds of other food products, from ice cream, to Asian-style sauces, to dog biscuits. Major national brands of peanut butter are not affected.

A senior lawmaker in Congress and Georgia's agriculture commissioner called for a criminal investigation of the company, but the Food and Drug Administration said such a step is premature while its own food safety investigation continues.

More than 500 people have gotten sick in the outbreak and at least eight may have died as a result of salmonella infection. More than 400 products have already been recalled. The plant has stopped all production.

"We feel very confident that it's one of the largest recalls we've had," said Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA's food safety center. "We're still in the process of identifying products, but it certainly is among the largest."

Most of the older products recalled Wednesday probably have been eaten already. Officials said they were seeing no signs of any earlier outbreaks that might be linked to the plant.

The latest recall covers peanut butter, peanut paste, peanut meal and granulated products, as well as all peanuts - dry and oil roasted - shipped from the factory.

There was no immediate response from Peanut Corp., which has said it is cooperating fully with the investigation.

Salmonella had been found previously at least 12 times in products made at the plant, but production lines were never cleaned up after internal tests indicated contamination, FDA inspectors said in a report. Products that initially tested positive were retested. When the company got a negative reading, it shipped the products out.

That happened as recently as September. A month later, health officials started picking up signals of the salmonella outbreak.

Michael Rogers, a senior FDA investigator, said it's possible for salmonella to hide in small pockets of a large batch of peanut butter. That means the same batch can yield both positive and negative results, he said. The products should have been discarded after they first tested positive.

A leading food safety expert agreed.

"Here's a company that knew it had salmonella in a product and still released it," said Michael Doyle, head of the food safety center at the University of Georgia. "What they tried to do is get around it by having it tested elsewhere. But that doesn't count. The first time counts. They were selling adulterated products."

Separately, senior congressional and state officials on Wednesday called for a federal probe of possible criminal violations at the plant.

The company's actions "can only be described as reprehensible and criminal," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who oversees FDA funding. "This behavior represents the worst of our current food safety regulatory system."

In Georgia, the state's top agriculture official joined DeLauro in asking the Justice Department to determine whether the case warrants criminal prosecution.

"They tried to hide it so they could sell it," Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tommy Irvin said. "Now they've caused a mammoth problem that could destroy their company - and it could destroy the peanut industry."

The peanut industry also condemned Peanut Corp. , portraying it as a rogue operator.

The FDA inspection report is preliminary, and the agency said the findings do not represent a final judgment on the company's compliance with food safety laws and regulations.

The roaches were found in a wash room next to a packaging area. And a sink used for cleaning utensils also was used to wash out mops.

Of even greater concern, inspectors found open gaps as large as a half-inch by two-and-a-half feet at air conditioner intakes on the roof of the plant. Water stains were seen on the ceiling around the intakes and near skylights. The openings were above an area in which finished products were handled. Water leaks would be a problem because salmonella thrives in moist conditions.

A leaky roof is believed to have contributed to a 2007 salmonella outbreak in Peter Pan peanut butter.

ConAgra, the manufacturer, said the plant's roof leaked during a rainstorm, and the sprinkler system went off twice because of a problem, since repaired. The moisture from those three events mixed with dormant salmonella bacteria in the plant that the company said likely came from raw peanuts and peanut dust.

Inspectors at the Blakely plant also found that Peanut Corp. did not take proper steps to prevent finished products from being contaminated by raw peanuts. Roasting is supposed to kill the bacteria, but raw peanuts can harbor salmonella.

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Bluestein reported from Atlanta.

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On the Net:

FDA's recall page: http://tinyurl.com/8srctw

© 2009 The Associated Press.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Donating a kidney doesn't appear to have any long-term health consequences for the donor, a reassuring study shows. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found those who gave up one of their two kidneys lived a normal life span and were as healthy as people in the general population. The donation also didn't raise the risk of having kidney failure later.

Kidney donation has generally been considered safe, although with surgery, there are always risks. The new research of nearly 3,700 donors dating back more than four decades is the largest and longest study to look at long-term outcomes, said the researchers. They reported their findings in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

"It is a confirmation that living donation is a safe thing," said Dr. Matthew Cooper, a transplant surgeon at the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the research.

Kidneys filter waste and excess fluid from the blood. If your kidneys fail, the options are dialysis or a transplant. More than 78,000 people are on the national waiting list to receive a kidney from a deceased donor. The need for kidneys has soared with the rise in diabetes and obesity and the wait can last for years.

Living donation has increased as more people became willing to donate and newer surgery techniques shortened recovery time. In 2007, more than a third of the 16,629 kidneys transplanted in the U.S. came from living donors, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

Dr. Hassan Ibrahim, the study's leader, and his colleagues wanted to find out what happened to the 3,698 people who had donated a kidney at the university since 1963. They tried to contact everyone and used government records to find out who had died. A group of 255 donors was randomly selected to have kidney and other tests. Results were compared with health outcomes for the general population.

Overall, 268 of the donors died, which the researchers said was comparable to survival in the general population. Eleven donors developed kidney failure decades later and needed dialysis or a transplant. The researchers said the rate of kidney failure in the donors was lower than that reported in the general population.

Most of the donors tested had good kidney function and reported an excellent quality of life, the study found.

The good outcomes likely reflect the strict criteria used to pick the donors, the researchers said. The donors had to be healthy with no kidney problems, and be free of high blood pressure and diabetes - two main causes of kidney disease.

Ibrahim said he hopes the results will increase donations and encourage transplant centers to continue to carefully select donors and not relax their requirements.

"We think these donors do extremely well because they were screened very well," said Ibrahim.

While there are no regulations for selecting living donors, the transplant network offers guidelines, said Cooper, who heads a UNOS committee on living donors. He said any kidney donor who later needs a transplant is given priority on the waiting list.

"There is a recognition of the sacrifice that these people have made," Cooper said.

Drs. Jane Tan and Glenn Chertow, of Stanford University School of Medicine, who wrote an accompanying editorial in the journal, noted that the study donors were mostly white and were likely younger than donors today. The results may not apply to older, nonwhite donors, they said.

The value of the study is its large size and duration, Tan said.

"We always have to be careful when it comes to potential harm to another individual," she said. "This study is very reassuring."

The University of Minnesota is part of a similar, ongoing study with other transplant centers that will have a larger and more diverse donor group, Ibrahim said.

One of the study donors said she didn't worry about potential problems when she gave a kidney to her oldest brother in 1983.

"I really didn't think too much past that," said Susan Kivi, 52, of Roseville, Minn. "He just deserved another chance to live a normal life."

Her recovery from surgery was a little harder than she expected, said Kivi. But she hasn't had any health problems related to giving up a kidney since then. Her brother died about four years later.

"It was worth it. He got a few good years," she said.

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On the Net:

New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org

UNOS: http://www.unos.org

© 2009 The Associated Press.

ATLANTA (AP) -- Food regulators didn't consider salmonella a threat to most peanut products before they traced an outbreak to a peanut butter plant in Georgia two years ago. Officials in the nation's top peanut-producing state promptly began checking for the bacteria during routine inspections, and everything went fine for about a year.

Then this month, investigators zeroed in on another Georgia plant while probing a second bout of salmonella that began in the fall and has sickened some 500 people in 43 states, and may have contributed to at least eight deaths.

As health officials scramble to limit the effects of the latest outbreak, food safety advocates have renewed calls for increased testing at peanut processing plants. It's a costly and time-consuming proposition for an inspection process that, as an Associated Press review of state and federal procedures shows, already suffers from a lack of manpower and transparency, and from uncertainty over how much testing is enough.

Peanut butter had long been considered a relatively low risk for salmonella because roasting the peanuts properly kills the bacteria, and because peanut butter's low moisture content makes it a less fertile breeding ground for the virus than other foods, such as poultry or lunch meats.

There is no federal law that mandates the number of inspections that must be carried out each year at peanut processing facilities. The Food and Drug Administration contracts with states to perform inspections but allows them broad discretion when it comes to how they do them. The agency asks the states to base the frequency and nature of inspections on how risky a food is considered, giving priority to high-risk foods.

The states, in turn, rely on the companies to police themselves between infrequent visits from state inspectors. And a number of leading peanut butter companies won't specify what they do to keep their products from being contaminated.

Jif maker J.M. Smucker Co., Skippy manufacturer Unilever and ConAgra Foods Inc., which makes Peter Pan, all said they have stringent food safety and quality control standards. But neither Unilever or ConAgra responded to the AP's questions about how often the plants test their finished product for foodborne illnesses or other contamination. Smucker's said it couldn't answer those questions for proprietary reasons.

None of those manufacturers is implicated in the current salmonella outbreak.

Authorities reassessed peanut butter's risk level in 2007, when salmonella was found in Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butters made at a plant operated by ConAgra in south Georgia. ConAgra officials later said jars were contaminated when moisture from a roof leak during a rainstorm and a malfunctioning sprinkler system mixed with dormant salmonella bacteria in the plant.

The FDA still considers peanut butter a low-risk food, though after the ConAgra outbreak, Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tommy Irvin ordered state inspectors to start routinely testing peanut butter for salmonella.

This month, a facility in Blakely, a rural Georgia town that calls itself the "Peanut Capital of the World" and is an hour or so drive from the ConAgra plant, found itself at the center of the investigation into the deadly salmonella outbreak. Virginia-based Peanut Corp. of America, which owns the Blakely plant, distributes peanut butter to institutions such as hospitals and nursing homes. It also provides peanut paste to food companies, which use the product in cookies, cakes and other products available on supermarket shelves.

On Tuesday, federal officials said Peanut Corp. failed to tell inspectors that after samples sent to a contract lab for testing in 2007 and 2008 tested positive for salmonella, the company got a second opinion from another lab and sold the food after the secondary tests came back negative.

"Under the current regulations and laws, they are not required to share those records with state regulatory authorities or even with the FDA," said Oscar Garrison, Georgia's assistant agriculture commissioner, who oversees the consumer protection division.

"It's just basically a loophole that has been there," he said, noting that the law does prevent a company from shipping a product if it knows there is a safety risk. He also said the agriculture department plans to try to get the state law changed during the current legislative session to require companies to share those records with inspectors.

In a news release issued after federal officials discussed the positive tests, Peanut Corp. said the company has fully cooperated with the FDA during its current salmonella investigation.

"We have shared with them every record that they have asked for that is in our possession and we will continue to do so," the release stated.

The Georgia Department of Agriculture performed two inspections last year at the Blakely plant, including one in October - a month after the first people fell ill with salmonella. They found relatively low-level violations, such as equipment that wasn't properly covered and dust buildup, but did not check for salmonella during either inspection, according to department reports obtained by the AP through an open records request.

Regulators in Georgia, Arkansas and Kentucky, where the three top commercial peanut butter brands are produced, said state employees carry out routine inspections at peanut butter plants at least once or twice a year. Officials in Arkansas and Kentucky - where Skippy and Jif are produced, respectively - review records kept by the companies. Samples of the finished product are not taken during routine walkthroughs unless inspectors have reason to believe there might be a violation.

Agriculture officials in Georgia, whose inspections are comparable to Arkansas' and Kentucky's, said last week that manpower and funding shortages limit the number and extent of inspections they can do. The state has 60 inspectors responsible for examining 15,000 sites, or about 250 food sources per inspector, ranging from individual ice machines to sprawling factories.

Companies should be required to do more testing on their own, said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based nutrition advocacy group.

"Testing should be done regularly, which could mean lot by lot, or at least daily," Smith DeWaal said.

Good management practices established by the American Peanut Council, a trade association that represents all segments of the U.S. peanut industry, say tests "should be done on a regular basis," though they do not specify how often that means. The council's president, Patrick Archer, said this is because each company must design its own inspection plan, taking into account local laws.

"Testing is costly," said Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety. "Companies have to be practical about it, as well as making sure they are providing the best possible protection for the consumer."

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Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington contributed to this report.

© 2009 The Associated Press.

Skipping rope is no longer just for kids. Rope jumping is considered one of the most effective cardiovascular workouts available for adults. The simple movements can be done by both beginners and advanced exercisers. In addition, the price of a single jump rope makes the workout an affordable option for cash strapped fitness fanatics.

Fitness experts classify jumping rope as an "excellent" fat burner. According to the National Institutes of Health, jumping rope burns approximately 750 calories per hour, which is more than any other traditional workout except running. What's more, you can easily burn additional calories by jumping faster. The faster you jump, the more calories you burn.

Another benefit to rope jumping is its accessibility. Since jump ropes are so lightweight, they can be easily packed in a small bag and taken on the road. They are also compact enough to be stored in any room in your house. Having jump ropes in various rooms means you can exercise whenever you have a few minutes to spare, including when you are in the living room front of the TV.

If you plan to use rope jumping as the main part of your fitness regime be sure you get a decent rope. Fitness experts recommend choosing a jump rope that is comfortable for you. You can choose between speed ropes made out of plastic or other basic models made from leather or nylon. If you don't mind spending a bit more money you could purchase a rope that has a built-in calorie counter, which tells you how many calories you've burned during your workout.

In regards to how long a rope you should get, fitness experts say to use one foot to step on the center of the rope, and then, pull the handles taut. The handles should come up to the middle of your chest. In addition to purchasing a well made rope you should also invest in a good pair of cross training shoes with added cushioning for the balls of your feet.

Once you have the proper equipment you can get jumping. Stick to jumping on grassy areas, an exercise mat, wooden floors, or carpet. Avoid jumping on concrete, which can overwork the joints and body in general.

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In a previous blog I noted that Nordic walking was listed as one of the top exercises for 2009 by leading fitness experts. Since that entry I received a few messages asking whether Nordic walking could be done on dirt trails in addition to traditional paved surfaces or snow. The answer is yes.

Nordic walking poles have special tips that accommodate multiple surfaces. For example, when you are exercising on concrete or hard surfaces you use the end with a rubber "paw" for traction. Then, when you are Nordic walking on dirt, rocky surfaces, ice or snow, you can remove the rubber tip to expose a metal spike that digs into the ground and helps keep you stable.

If you plan to spend the majority of your time Nordic walking on icy or rocky surfaces remember to wear appropriate shoes such as hiking or snow boots. When Nordic walking on sidewalks you can stick with traditional running or walking shoes.

Once you get the hang of the Nordic walking technique, you can tackle a variety of terrain. Just remember to lean slightly forward as you walk and plant the poles in front of your body -next to the foot that is stepping forward. Doing so will help you maintain your balance as you push off the ground and propel forward. Avoid digging into the ground as you move forward. Rather, aim to roll yourself forward and gather momentum while you walk.

When Nordic walking uphill, it's a good idea to increase the length of each step you take and lean into the hill. Conversely, when going downhill, you should shorten your stride, lean slightly back as if you were sitting and use the poles as brakes to slow down. The poles are designed to absorb some of the shock your body takes when you are moving downhill.

Finally, before Nordic walking be sure to warm-up and dress appropriately for the conditions. If you Nordic walking in cold weather, dress in layers, cover your head and hands and bring along water, especially if you plan to be outside for long periods of time.

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