Questões de Inglês - Sinônimos | Synonyms para Concurso

                    Vigilance needed to ensure safe infant food

                   WHO and FAO alert countries to possible spread of

                            melamine-contaminated dairy products

      WHO and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) are urging affected countries to ensure safe feeding of millions of infants following the ongoing melamine-contaminated milk crisis in China. The two agencies also call on countries to be alert to the possible spread of melamine-contaminated dairy products.

      “While breastfeeding is the ideal way of providing infants with the nutrients they need for healthy growth and development, it is also critical to ensure that there is an adequate supply of safe powdered infant formula to meet the needs of infants who are not breastfed”, said Dr Jorgen Schlundt, Director of the WHO Food Safety Department.

      Replacing powdered infant formula with other products such as condensed milk, honey mixed with milk, or fresh milk is inappropriate as such products would put at risk the safety and nutritional status of this vulnerable population group, the two agencies advised.

      “Restoring consumer confidence is critical. Melamine-contaminated products should be removed from the food chain in order to prevent further exposure. The safe supply of dairy products needs to be restored immediately,” said Dr Ezzeddine Boutrif, Director of the FAO Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division.

Safe feeding for infants

      WHO recommends that all infants should be fed exclusively with breast milk for the first six months of life. No other liquid or food, not even water, is needed during this period. Thereafter, infants should receive adequate and safe complementary foods while breastfeeding continues up to two years of age and beyond.

      Following reports of findings of imported melaminecontaminated products in several countries over the last two weeks, countries should closely monitor their markets. The two agencies highlighted that melamine-contaminated products could reach markets in other countries through both formal and informal trade. Getting information about the origin of the product, up-to-date recall information or in some cases testing for melamine contamination might be considered. If found contaminated, appropriate actions such as product recall and safe disposal should be taken, based on an assessment of the risk to human health.      

Safe supply of food critical 

      Food safety is not the sole responsibility of public authorities. The food industry is also responsible for ensuring a safe supply of food to the consumer. “It is critical that the industry strongly invests in food safety and adopts a food safety culture covering the food chain from raw materials through to the final product,” said Dr Boutrif.

      Incidents such as melamine contamination in China not only impact food safety and human health but also put the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of dairy farmers at risk. “There is a need for countries to do major investment in strengthening their food control and food-borne disease surveillance systems as it could minimize the potential occurrence of food safety incidents like this one”, said Dr Schlundt. 

      The melamine-contaminated dairy products event first came to the attention of the international organizations on 11th September. Both WHO and FAO have used the International Food Safety Authorities Network (INFOSAN) to inform and update national food safety authorities on this crisis, one of the largest in recent years.

      Over 54,000 children have sought medical treatment in China after drinking melamine-contaminated infant formula. Almost 12,900 are currently hospitalized. 

      Melamine is commonly used in food contact materials (e.g. containers, labels, etc.) and can also be used in agriculture production such as fertilizer. Whether this has a potential for carry-over into food at low concentrations (usually in the range of microgram per kilogram) and further impact on human health may need further evaluation.

      Melamine on its own is of low toxicity. But animal studies have suggested that kidney problems occur when melamine is present in combination with cyanuric acid, a potential impurity of melamine. The level of melamine found in the contaminated infant formula has been as high as 2,560 miligram per kilogram of food, while the level of cyanuric acid is unknown.

                                                                          Available in: http://www.who.int 

TEXT II

The backlash against big data

[…]

Big data refers to the idea that society can do things with a large body of data that weren’t possible when working with smaller amounts. The term was originally applied a decade ago to massive datasets from astrophysics, genomics and internet search engines, and to machine-learning systems (for voice-recognition and translation, for example) that work well only when given lots of data to chew on. Now it refers to the application of data-analysis and statistics in new areas, from retailing to human resources. The backlash began in mid-March, prompted by an article in Science by David Lazer and others at Harvard and Northeastern University. It showed that a big-data poster-child—Google Flu Trends, a 2009 project which identified flu outbreaks from search queries alone—had overestimated the number of cases for four years running, compared with reported data from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC). This led to a wider attack on the idea of big data.

The criticisms fall into three areas that are not intrinsic to big data per se, but endemic to data analysis, and have some merit. First, there are biases inherent to data that must not be ignored. That is undeniably the case. Second, some proponents of big data have claimed that theory (ie, generalisable models about how the world works) is obsolete. In fact, subject-area knowledge remains necessary even when dealing with large data sets. Third, the risk of spurious correlations—associations that are statistically robust but happen only by chance—increases with more data. Although there are new statistical techniques to identify and banish spurious correlations, such as running many tests against subsets of the data, this will always be a problem.

There is some merit to the naysayers' case, in other words. But these criticisms do not mean that big-data analysis has no merit whatsoever. Even the Harvard researchers who decried big data "hubris" admitted in Science that melding Google Flu Trends analysis with CDC’s data improved the overall forecast—showing that big data can in fact be a useful tool. And research published in PLOS Computational Biology on April 17th shows it is possible to estimate the prevalence of the flu based on visits to Wikipedia articles related to the illness. Behind the big data backlash is the classic hype cycle, in which a technology’s early proponents make overly grandiose claims, people sling arrows when those promises fall flat, but the technology eventually transforms the world, though not necessarily in ways the pundits expected. It happened with the web, and television, radio, motion pictures and the telegraph before it. Now it is simply big data’s turn to face the grumblers.

(From http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist explains/201 4/04/economist-explains-10)