The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service determined Thursday evening that plans put forth by Foster Farms to immediately change its slaughtering and processing practices were sufficient to avoid shuttering the facilities.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 213 of the 278 reports of salmonella contraction during the outbreak came from California. The Food Safety and Inspection Service’s investigation began July 1, but some cases were reported as early as March. While the 42 percent hospitalization rate is double that of typical salmonella outbreaks, according to the CDC, there have been no reported deaths associated with the outbreak.

Dr. Tomas Aragon, the director of the Center for Infectious Diseases and Emergency Readiness at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, said he was concerned by the relatively high rate of hospitalization for afflicted individuals.

Aragon speculated that this particular strain — or strains — is more pathogenic than typical ones, given that salmonella is usually self-limiting and that individuals with the infection usually recover without antibiotics. The salmonella linked to Foster Farms facilities has been uncommonly resistant to antibiotic treatment, according to the CDC.

No recall has been issued for the chicken products, and the investigation is ongoing. Aaron Lavallee, an administrator with the Food Safety and Inspection Service, explained that discerning which products were tainted with salmonella is the missing piece of the puzzle. Officials have yet to pinpoint whether those products are chicken breasts, thighs or something else altogether.

In letters sent to Foster Farms’ president, Ron Foster, on Oct. 7, food safety inspectors said multiple noncompliance records had been filed against the company before and during the outbreak, from January through September, regarding fecal material on animal carcasses.

Foster Farms has made various attempts to reassure the public on its website. Foster personally apologized to those afflicted with the foodborne illness, and the company reminded consumers that all raw meat must be properly handled and cooked to an internal temperature of 165 degrees to ensure safe consumption.

Cal Dining said that it does not use any Foster Farms products and that students with meal plans have no need to worry about the outbreak. Stores that do not vend Foster Farms chicken include Andronico’s Community Markets and Trader Joe’s, among others.

Costco will continue to sell Foster Farms poultry, according to Craig Wilson, the corporation’s vice president of food safety and quality assurance. Safeway representatives could not be reached for comment.

Contact Kimberly Veklerov at kveklerov@dailycal.org.

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Patricia Buffler, a world-class researcher and dean emeritus of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, died from a stroke in her office Thursday. She was 75 years old.

Buffler, known affectionately as “Pat” by colleagues and family, was a leader in all of her occupations, which ranged from epidemiologist to advocate to homemaker.

As an epidemiologist, Buffler pioneered research in childhood leukemia and other cancers. Her many initiatives included the California Childhood Leukemia Study, launched in 1995 to examine how genes, diet and environmental exposure relate to the development of leukemia in juveniles. To date, the study remains one of the largest in the world.

Although Buffler was distinguished in her field, colleagues said she never concerned herself with status. Lisa Barcellos, a campus associate professor of epidemiology, first came under Buffler’s mentorship 11 years ago and was surprised by her affable personality, which she calls “rare in academia.”

“She was warm, personable, gracious,” Barcellos said. “She had a wonderful sense of humor.”

Buffler began her career when she enrolled at the Catholic University of America, going against her father’s wishes and becoming the first person in her family to attend college.

“Her father didn’t want her to go to college,” her husband, Richard Buffler, said. “And if she did, he wanted her to study something practical. So she chose medicine.”

While attending university, Buffler’s charisma quickly distinguished itself. Classmates elected her homecoming queen one year, and she briefly dated actor Jon Voight, her husband said.

After graduating in 1960, Buffler moved to New York, where she worked as a public health nurse. She later met her husband on a blind date arranged by one of his friends. The two married in 1962 and moved to California, where Buffler earned her doctorate in epidemiology in 1973.

“She was told, ‘We don’t have many women in public health,’ ” Richard Buffler remembered.

After holding various faculty positions at the University of Texas, Buffler returned to UC Berkeley as a professor of epidemiology and dean of the School of Public Health. She became the second woman in the school’s history to hold the latter position, according to Arthur Reingold, a UC Berkeley professor and head of the campus division of epidemiology.

During her 22-year tenure, Buffler was a strong advocate for women in science and health, often offering professional and personal guidance.

“I was surprised at how many women had a story on how Pat had helped them,” said Amy Kyle, a UC Berkeley associate adjunct professor.

Buffler is survived by her husband; her two children, Martyn and Monique; and her five grandchildren.

“She was always thinking ahead for their welfare,” her husband said. “That’s who Pat was. She never stopped helping, for them or for anyone.”

The campus School of Public Health plans to host a campus memorial Nov. 10.

Contact Savannah Luschei at sluschei@dailycal.org.

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Bertozzi, currently HIV director at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an affiliate professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, will succeed Stephen Shortell, a professor of health policy and management who has served as dean for 11 years.

“Berkeley has extraordinary opportunities because of the strength of the university,” Bertozzi said.

According to Abbie Smith, academic human resources analyst at the School of Public Health, the search committee narrowed its selections to four candidates in May and sent its vote to Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer, who said Bertozzi was the search committee’s unanimous first choice.

“Stefano Bertozzi’s extensive experience confronting and engaging complex global health challenges, combined with his expert academic credentials, make him uniquely suited to lead UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks in a statement released Tuesday.

Bertozzi was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley and an affiliate of the Haas School of Business for many years. He also has an established connection with the students, having worked with UC Berkeley graduate and postdoctoral students in Mexico while at the Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica.

With global health experience in Mexico, Africa, Asia and Latin American countries, Bertozzi hopes to increase students’ opportunities to work internationally, increasing their understanding of public health in the field.

“Experience in the field is extraordinarily important,” Bertozzi said. “I’m hoping to sit down with students and faculty to see what they want from the program.”

Bertozzi says the study of public health will become increasingly interdisciplinary due to technological advancements. However, he hopes that the department of public health will aid in the delivery of health services by collaborating with programs like business that are not based in the hard sciences.

“In the U.S., because of profit motive, attention to health services is to maximize profit,” Bertozzi said. “But there is no reason we can’t use the same tools to maximize health.”

Breslauer said Bertozzi’s expert knowledge of the philanthropic world will also be needed in his new position.

“Increasingly, we are dependent on philanthropic world to make ends meet, and it is to our great benefit that we have a dean who can be a very skilled fundraiser,” Breslauer said.

Bertozzi will make a rapid one-day transition, wrapping up his last day of work in Seattle on Aug. 31. Bertozzi will serve as dean at 80 percent time between Sept. 1 and Nov 15, while he works 20 percent time at the Gates Foundation to complete projects he had started there. In mid-November, he will begin working full-time at UC Berkeley.

Contact J. Hannah Lee at jhlee@dailycal.org.

Clarification(s):
A previous version of this article may have implied that Bertozzi would continue working full-time at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation while serving as a dean. In fact, Bertozzi will serve as a dean at UC Berkeley at 80 percent time between Sept. 1 and Nov 15, while he works 20 percent time at the Gates Foundation to complete projects he had started there. In mid-November, he will begin working full-time at UC Berkeley.

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Stephen Shortell, dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health for more than 10 years, will be stepping down in July to devote more time to research and teaching, officials announced last week.

Although deans typically only serve five-year terms, the 2012-13 school year is Shortell’s 11th year in the position. He agreed to stay on this year to see the school through meeting its fundraising goal of $110 million as part of the campuswide Campaign for Berkeley fundraising effort, which aims to raise $3 billion and is set to end in 2013.

Under Shortell’s direction, the School of Public Health reinstituted the undergraduate public health major, developed Berkeley’s first largely online degree program and increased its percentage of underrepresented minority students.

Although there was initial skepticism about whether a public health undergraduate major at Berkeley would be successful, Shortell worked with faculty members and campus officials to re-establish it in 2003 after a more than 40-year hiatus. It has since became extremely popular and is currently an impacted major.

“It was a great service to the UC Berkeley campus for all those undergraduates who want to go pursue a health degree — MD, nursing or dentistry,” said Patricia Hosel, assistant dean of external relations and development at the school. “There weren’t many pathways for them to get those pre-med and health courses.”

He also helped pioneer the school’s online master’s of public health degree program — currently in its second semester — which is geared toward midlevel professionals currently working in health settings who seek additional training but do not have the time to take off from work. The online degree program was the first of its kind at Berkeley.

Additionally, during Shortell’s tenure, the school was able to significantly increase its percentage of underrepresented minority students from 9 percent in 2005 to 25 percent this year through outreach to undergraduate feeder schools and obtaining more financial resources to reach out to these students.

“We have also raised nearly $110 million of philanthropic funds over the past five years,” said Shortell in an email, “and are hopeful of securing additional funds needed to build (a) new home for our school.”

If the construction of a new building to house the school is not made a reality by the time Shortell steps down, it is something some faculty members hope will be accomplished during the term of the next dean.

A search is already under way to find Shortell’s replacement, who will take over on July 1. Nominations and applications are open not only to current faculty members but also to those qualified outside the school and are due mid-January.

“(Shortell) teaches strategic planning, and he has definitely had a vision for this school,” said Joan Bloom, a campus professor of health policy and management. “I think that would be important for a new dean to understand the place of the school within the campus. Those are important functions. We can raise funds. We support the campus.”

Contact Megan at mmesserly@dailycal.org.

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Taubes is the author of two books on health, a former lecturer at UC Berkeley and a leading science journalist whose 2002 New York Times Magazine article on what he calls “the myth of the low-fat diet” became the talk of the nutrition community.

His controversial views have led him to be hailed as one of the nation’s most progressive thinkers on diet and nutrition — and also one of the most radical.

Now Taubes, who ended his tenure as a lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in August, has launched a new initiative to compel scientists and health officials to re-examine the nutrition guidelines that have shaped American dinners for generations.

Rather than the low-fat diet plans championed by many celebrities and fitness experts, Taubes maintains that obesity is not a matter of how much one eats but what one eats. For more than 10 years, Taubes has argued that complex carbs — not fat — are fundamentally to blame for America’s obesity crisis and that anyone who tells you otherwise is practicing faulty science.

Specifically, he argues that an individual’s accumulation of fat is mostly a result of the body’s production of the hormone insulin.

“Insulin levels are mostly determined by … the quantity and quality of the carbs we consume,” Taubes said. “If you want to get the fat out and burn it for fuel, the first thing you have to do is lower insulin levels, and you do that by removing these carbohydrates from the diet.”

Thus, for Taubes, it is not simply a matter of calories in versus calories out that is to blame for the nation’s obesity crisis but which calories are going into the body in the first place.

What began as a decade-long obsession with health has since grown into a full-fledged career. Taubes lectured on various health misconceptions at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health during the 2011-12 school year and is currently working on his third book, on controversies surrounding sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.

What he calls his “insurgency” for revised nutrition guidelines and greater public awareness has led him to his newest project, the nonprofit Nutrition Science Initiative, which was launched in September. NuSI aims to fund studies that examine the fundamental causes of obesity rather than just the best ways to lose weight, as much of research on nutrition has focused on. Taubes hopes the initiative will spur the scientific community to re-examine some long-held beliefs on health that predate modern research methods and findings.

“There may be other nonprofits that share our mission, but they are trying to accomplish that by reiterating the same mantra,” said Peter Attia, co-founder of the initiative. “Those are noble desires, but our point is that if any of that stuff works, why hasn’t it worked for 40 years?”

Ronald Krauss, a senior scientist in the Life Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said in an email that while he agrees that current American nutritional guidelines need to be updated, he is not quite convinced about the premise of Taubes’ and Attia’s argument.

“As I understand (Taubes’) views, they include the notion that not all calories are equal when it comes to body weight regulation, and that carbohydrates, by triggering insulin release, promote a greater increase in body fat than fat or protein,” Krauss said in the email. “My feeling is that the factors leading to development and maintenance of obesity are highly complex, and cannot be reduced to this single mechanism.”

Taubes and Attia are looking to fund studies by researchers like Krauss who are critical of their claims.

“We want skeptics,” Taubes said. “Whatever they find will be seen as credible.”

NuSI is looking for scientists “who agree with the highest premise that the scientific evidence underpinning our dietary recommendations need to be revisited,” Attia said.

“NuSI stands unique in this position,” he added. “We’re the only ones saying that we need to go back to the drawing board — you need to understand how gravity works before you can build a bridge.”

Sara Grossman is the lead research and ideas reporter. Contact her at sgrossman@dailycal.org.

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According to UCPD Lt. Eric Tejada, police responded to a call at 2 a.m. from a passerby who reported suspicious behavior. Officers found Andrew J. Maxwell with a gunshot wound to the head at the vista point of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was taken to Highland General Hospital in Oakland.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Coroner’s Bureau confirmed that Maxwell died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at 3:08 a.m. that Friday at the hospital.

Tejada said Maxwell left a note which led police to determine that it was a suicide.

Maxwell graduated this semester with a master’s degree in public health from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He also graduated and earned a bachelor’s degree in integrative biology in 2009.

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Beginning in spring 2012, students enrolled in the new program — the On-Campus/Online Professional Master of Public Health Degree Program — will be able to take a majority of their classes online, with only three on-campus sessions, to earn a master of public health degree.

The degree program’s curriculum will require 14 courses for a minimum of 42 semester units, and at least a 3.0 grade point average. It has the same core requirements as its on-campus parallel degree program in public health, with the addition of eight courses to provide a “broad-based interdisciplinary background in public health,” according to the program’s website.

Nap Hosang, director of the school’s interdisciplinary MPH program and head of the new online program, said the introduction of the program stemmed from a growing need for public health workers both in the state of California and nationally.

“About three to four years ago, we did market surveys that figured out there was going to be national shortage of public health workers — about 450,000 — by the year 2020,” Hosang said. “At that point, the dean of public health and the associate dean decided they would initiate the process to see what it would take to develop an online public health degree.”

According to Hosang, campus officials had also determined that the school could not accommodate the physical presence of more students, leading the school’s administrative team to consider an online option.

Additionally, the faculty of the school took into account the accessibility and innovation of an online degree, Hosang said.

“It’s an exciting opportunity for faculty to compare differences in student receptivity and knowledge acquisition,” he said. “I think we are the guinea pigs, and other professional schools may be watching closely to see what we are doing.”

However, reactions to the implementation of an online degree program have not all been positive.

“While I understand that this program can offer training in public health to people in other countries and remote areas that may not be able to attend college easily, I worry about offering an online degree in any field from UC Berkeley,” said campus Graduate Assembly President Bahar Navab in an email. “I think online degree programs have the potential to diminish the value of a UC Berkeley education.”

Navab added that the assembly has not taken an official stance on online education as a whole on campus, but is “very concerned” about how it is being carried out.

“I understand that the university needs to find creative ways to bring in new revenue but there are serious concerns about online education being that new source of revenue,” she said in the email. “Also, can we honestly say that an online course is the equivalent of hands on training and face-to-face group discussion?”

The structure of the new program will allow for 85 percent of coursework to be completed online, with a mandatory 15 days to be spent on campus for special sessions. The cost of tuition and student fees will total approximately $19,000 per year.

Hosang said approximately 214 students are expected to be enrolled in the program each year, and the first class will begin Jan. 17.

“The market survey clearly indicated that there are people currently with jobs in this environment who don’t want to go back to school because they’re afraid they won’t get a job later on,” Hosang said. “There are also people who’d like to be able to do this who are not in the Bay Area — people who really like the idea of being able to get a high-quality degree from a high-quality institution and not have to leave their home.”

Amy Wang covers academics and administration.

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