A widespread practice of mixing tomatoes from different farms at produce distribution centers has made it impossible so far to trace the source of a nationwide salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds, federal regulators said Friday.

Dr. David Acheson, an associate commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration, acknowledged that the extent of the practice, known as "repacking," was a surprise to agency investigators, and that it vastly complicates the process of tracing the path of tomatoes from farm to store.

"We are learning that this is a very common practice," said Acheson. "Possibly 90 percent of tomatoes are repacked."

The agency has found, for example, that tomatoes from Mexico have been shipped to Florida, repacked and sold with tomatoes from Florida. Similarly, tomatoes from the United States are sent to Mexico, where they are repacked and shipped to the United States as a product of the United States.

None of these juggled tomatoes has yet been linked to the salmonella outbreak, but the practice illustrates one reason why FDA disease detectives have had no success in tracking the bug back to the farms in Mexico or southern Florida, where they think it may have originated.

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More than 40 percent of underage drinkers nationwide were provided free alcohol by adults 21 or older, a finding that validates the social host laws on Long Island, supporters of the legislation in both counties said yesterday.

Legislators in Nassau and Suffolk said the report issued yesterday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will focus more attention on the issue.

Both counties have made it a crime for adults to allow anyone in their homes under 21 to drink alcohol. Parents and guardians may allow their children to drink if they are present.

"The problem is that more and more parents are making life-and-death decisions, not only for their kids, but their kids' friends, too, allowing their homes to be used as safe havens for underage drinking that often turns into binges," said Legis. David Mejias (D-Farmingdale), sponsor of the legislation.

Suffolk Legis. Ricardo Montano (D-Central Islip), sponsor of Suffolk's social host law, said the numbers do not surprise him, but he hoped the study would have a "positive impact" by increasing awareness among adults.

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Only 4% of docs have implemented electronic health records with all the bells and whistles that wonks say will make care safer and more efficient. And only another 13% have implemented electronic records of any sort.

The main factor preventing most physicians from adopting EHRs all together now is cost.

Those are the results of a survey sponsored by the feds and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published online today by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Robert Baron, a primary care doc who runs a five-physician practice in Philadelphia, spoke today on a conference call held to discuss the survey results. He presented a great in-the-trenches view of a small practice switching over to electronic records.

“We are much more likely to know what we need to know to meet our patients’ needs,” he said. For example, the group now runs reports on diabetics with poor blood sugar control who are overdue for appointments, and lets them know it’s time to come in. And the EHR makes it easy to see relevant context in a patient’s chart, such as why a medication was stopped.

At the same time, Baron called implementing the EHR “the most difficult thing we have ever done in our practice.”

“It disrupted every system we had in the office for doing daily work,” he said. “It made us dependent on a tech we did not understand and could not maintain ourselves.” It also cost $40,000 per doctor to set up, plus tens of thousands a year in annual maintenance costs.

The authors of the survey, most of whom are affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute for Health Policy, note that President Bush as well as the leading presidential candidates from both parties are big supporters of EHRs.

But widespread adoption could cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, much of which would likely have to come through government incentives. “[W]hether any future federal administration will find the resources is uncertain,” the authors write.

Many U.S. hospitals, particularly in the South, have maternity practices that are detrimental to breast-feeding, such as giving free baby formula samples to new mothers, health officials said on Thursday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted its first-ever review of practices by hospitals and specialty birth centers in terms of promoting breast-feeding.

Health experts strongly encourage women to breast-feed their babies rather than give them bottles of formula, saying breast milk provides a range of health benefits to the infant.

CDC epidemiologist Dr. Deborah Dee, who led the study, said she was surprised so many facilities do things that may undermine breast-feeding.

For example, 70 percent of the 2,546 hospitals and 121 birth centers that provided data to the CDC included free infant formula samples in gift packages given to women when they are discharged from the facility after giving birth.

"By providing formula, it's almost an implicit endorsement of that product," Dee said.

In addition, 24 percent of the facilities said they give more than half of their healthy, full-term newborns who are being breast-fed by their mothers supplemental feedings of formula or something else other than breast milk. The CDC said this is detrimental to breast-feeding.

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Apple has made a whole lot of great products that people love. However, it takes a lot of mistakes to get to the good stuff. Many Apple products have been failures in the market, some due to the fact that they were too expensive. Here’s a look back in time.

The Apple Lisa. Ah, the Lisa. Back in the days before there was a Mac, the Lisa was created. One of the first commercial computers put on the market, it was designed for individuals instead of businesses and was intended as a step towards getting the average person to use a home computer. Unfortunately, the average person didn’t have £5000 ($10,000) to spend on a personal computer at that time.

The Runners Up:

• The TAM. In 1997, Macintosh celebrated its twentieth birthday by releasing a computer called the TAM (The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh). It had a thin monitor compared to other products on the market at the time and was advanced in several other ways. However, nobody wanted to pay the £3830 ($7500) retail price so it was discontinued almost as soon as it was released. Those Mac-committed folks who did buy the TAM are part of a strong community devoted to the product.
• Macintosh Portable. Would you pay £3319 ($6500) for a portable computer? Apple thought that customers would when this first notebook was released in the 1980s. Bigger than a briefcase in size, it wasn’t very appealing to most people. However it was an important step towards eventually developing the laptops that are in widespread use today. Too bad it didn’t last even a year on the market because of the exorbitant price.

Apple released a hefty security update for the Mac OS X and OS X Server on Wednesday that fixes more than 40 vulnerabilities, a number of which could be exploited to enable someone to run programs on the machine remotely or lead to the disclosure of sensitive data.

Security Update 2008-003 is for Mac OS X v 10.4.11 and Mac OS X Server v 10.4.11. The fixes are included in the latest Leopard edition, Mac OS X v 10.5.3, which also was released on Wednesday.

The software fixes vulnerabilities that could have led to arbitrary code execution and/or unexpected application termination related implemntaton of: AFP Server, AppKit, Apple Pixlet Video, ATS, CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics, Flash Player Plug-in, Help Viewer, and iCal. The iCal vulnerability was discovered by Core Security, which last week announced it had found three vulnerabilities in iCal.

It also fixes vulnerabilities that could have led to disclosure of sensitive information related to implementation of technologies including CUPS, International Components for Unicode, and CFNetwork when visiting a maliciously crafted Web site due to an issue in Safari's SSL client certificate handling.

Meanwhile, other updates fix vulnerabilities that could lead to information disclosure and allow a local user to manipulate files with the privileges of another user in Mail; allow a remote attacker to read arbitrary files related to Ruby; expose passwords supplied to sso_util to other local users when using Single Sign-On; expose user names on servers with Wiki Server enabled to a remote attacker; and not warn users before opening certain potentially unsafe content types.

In addition, the software fixes a vulnerability that could lead to information disclosure when viewing a maliciously crafted BMP or GIF image and lead to unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution when viewing a maliciously crafted JPEG2000 image file.

Great Britain's richest man will soon live in the world's most expensive home and it will cost him $230 million.

Lakshmi Mittal, 57, is a wealthy steel tycoon who is said to be interested in the mansion, which is located on a street known as "Billionaire's Row."  Mittal already lives in one of the world's most lavish homes -- which has 12 bedrooms and is located on a tree-lined private avenue.

The $230 million home is located in Kensington Palace Gardens in West London, which is where Princess Diana used to live.  Included in the price of the home is furniture and decor for the entire residence, and a prestigious art gallery.

The house is currently occupied by American financier Noam Gottesman, but Mittal is reportedly close to signing a contract for the place although he has publicly denied being the home's buyer.

The new home's price tag is expected to surpass the current record-holder a house near London's St. James Square which sold in March for about $227 million.

Facebook Inc founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stressed his company's independent spirit on Monday, after a report the social networking site might be sold to software giant Microsoft, which is hunting for ways to beef up its Internet business.

"You can tell, from our history and what we've done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term," Zuckerberg told Reuters while in Japan to launch a Japanese language version of Facebook.

Microsoft already has a small stake and the Wall Street Journal said this month the software giant, having failed in its $47.5 billion bid for Internet portal Yahoo, had approached Facebook to gauge its interest in a full takeover.

Asked specifically about the prospect of a sale, Zuckerberg declined to comment.

Microsoft has not given up on a deal with Yahoo, saying on Sunday it had proposed an alternative plan to Yahoo.

Facebook, founded by Zuckerberg when he was at Harvard University in 2004, has become one of the hottest properties on the Internet because of its strong loyalty among the more than 70 million users who swap pictures, messages and virtual gifts.

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Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a blunt new message that coincides with Israel's 60th anniversary urged his followers to liberate Palestine, a terrorism analyst told CNN on Friday.In a message entitled "The Causes of Conflict on the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israeli Occupation," bin Laden reiterated jihadist opposition to the existence of the Jewish state and its policies.

Bin Laden's audio message, released Thursday, told listeners that "liberating" Palestine should be the aim of every Muslim, according to terrorism analyst Laura Mansfield.

The message, played over a still image on jihadist Web sites, runs 9 minutes and 40 seconds.

Bin Laden's last message came on March 20, when in an audiotape he called Iraq "the perfect base to set up the jihad to liberate Palestine."

In an audiotape released the previous day, bin Laden condemned European countries for siding with the United States in Afghanistan and for allowing the publication of cartoons considered insulting to Islam's prophet Mohammed.

Al Qaeda which is responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the United States regularly condemns Zionism, the philosophical underpinning of Israel.

President Bush referred to al Qaeda on Friday in an address to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, in Jerusalem.

He decried the actions and the motivations of terrorists and noted that bin Laden teaches that "the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties."

When Discovery launches on May 31, the STS-124 mission to the International Space Station will carry the centerpiece of Japan's science laboratory complex and reach a milestone in NASA's restructuring of its space shuttle program after the February 2003 loss of Columbia in the skies above Texas.

The accident - caused by a piece of heat-insulating foam that came off the shuttle's external fuel tank and caused damage that resulted in the shuttle exploding on re-entry - prompted a series of changes to the shuttle program and the spacecraft, including the external tank.

"This will be the first mission that takes all the design modifications we did to the external tank and puts them in line in the processing of the tank as it goes through the normal assembly process," John Shannon, space shuttle program manager, said during a May 1 NASA briefing.

Before STS-124, he added, "all the modifications we did to the external tank were retrofitted onto tanks that had been built before Columbia." STS-124 will be the 10th shuttle flight since the Columbia accident; 10 flights remain until the shuttle is retired in the summer of 2010.

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