Escherichia coli at Chipotle

What I found interesting on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is E-coli and Chipotle restaurants. I used this website just by going down and looking at the outbreaks section and it was one of the top things. I have always known about this outbreak but I never knew the exact statistics or facts on the whole thing. This was posted on December 21, 2015 so about a month after writing this blog so it is hard to say if things have changed. Tying in to what we have learned this week in class about epidemiology we can say that it is a common meal item or ingredient that is served at the restaurant. Forty-six out of sixty-two people have said that they have eaten at Chipotle before their illness has started. Customers should contact a health care provider if they recently became ill with diarrheal symptoms after eating at a Chipotle restaurant. The Chipotle Mexican Grill is assisting public health officials with understanding the distribution of food items served at locations where ill people ate, and this work is ongoing. This is finding the steps in reverse to find out where the problem came from whether it be the meat, cheese or the produce. They can then use epidemiology to control the problem.

This is what was posted on the restaurants of known Chipotles that have thought be have the Ecoli virus. They have been shut down and they are cleaning up their stores from top to bottom and are investigating their suppliers from that area. 

This napkin was from the Athens Ohio Chipotle and even though everyone knows that you have a tiny chance of getting Ebola there is still a huge line at every day for lunch. I personally still go to that restaurant at least one time a week to get my fix and I think it is a risk I must take.

American Association of Poison Control Centers

The American Association of Poison Control Centers is an organization you can call if you need any kind of assistance with any poison related questions or emergencies. If you have any emergencies and need to contact them it is very easy because their number is the same throughout the nation. The number is 1-800-222-1222.  Don't be afraid to call them because it is completely confidential, free and is offered 24 hours a day. Calling them instead of going to a hospital for your concern could save you a lot of money in hospital fees just by doing in home treatment.
Age and gender distributions in the 2014 AAPCC report show that children under the age of 3 years of age were involved in 35.6% of exposures and children under the age of 6 years were half of all human exposures at 47.7%. Interestingly male children under the age of 13 are in more poison cases but after that age females become the majority of exposures.
The reason category for human exposure is unintentional at 79.4% with these including food, unknown, bug sting/bite, therapeutic and misuse. There is also intentional exposure at 16.7% and this includes suspected suicide, misuse and abuse.
Routes for human exposure consist mostly of ingestion (83.7%), followed by dermal (skin),  and ocular (eye).
The following picture is hand sanitizer and the main active ingredient is ethyl alcohol and this can be absorbed through the skin and can be poison if taken through ingestion.

In an article from Seattle pi batteries have harsh chemicals inside of them such as cadmium, lead, mercury, nickel,  and lithium. When these batteries are in a landfill they then start to corrode into the soil  and make their way into water supply. That is not good for humans because we can drink this water and it can have bad effects over time. The following picture is corroding batteries in a landfill.

Heuristics

From some research from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary I found that heuristics is a process of solving a problem, learning something or even making a discovery by trial and error methods. Dictionary.com also has a very similar definition which is encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or trial by error. After reading the definitions from multiple sources it makes me think that heuristics is to keep trying to do something in multiple ways until something works. I am in an engineering major so it is a really good skill to use heuristics to solve problems because there is never one way to accomplish something. I can think of an example of heuristics that I did last semester. I was in physics and the homework was sometimes extremely difficult so I would do the problem then find another example from the book that was the same thing but it was backwards. This make me fully understand what I was doing because I preformed the problem in multiple ways. Here is a picture of a physics problem for example.

A global example of heuristics is energy when I think about it. Since there is a rising population of people every year on Earth scientists and engineers are trying to find ways to make clean renewable energy. There a lot of ideas for renewable energy that work like solar and wind but I think that eventually after a lot of trials and experiments they will perfect or discover a genius way to use energy. This picture shows how we can get energy from algae and I think that this is a good global example on how we use heuristics. Using the algae and water heated by the sun it is then harvested and then by some kind of engineering system it is turned into useable fuel and electricity.