TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2003
NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN - 7A
Nightclub disasters incite inspections
The Associated Press
CHICAGO — Fire departments have launched a flurry of inspections of bars and concert halls around the country in response to two nightclub tragedies in the span of a week.
The result of the heightened safety was seen early Sunday when inspectors evacuated the second floor of a Chicago club after finding overcrowding, blocked exits and other problems. A week earlier in Chicago, 21 people were trampled to death at the E2 nightclub.
In Salem, Ore., a rock band
competition was canceled after an inspection revealed the venue didn't meet fire and building codes.
And other cities,including Dallas and Kansas City,Mo.,put more inspectors on duty and kept them out until the early hours Saturday and Sunday,when clubs are most crowded.
The wave of inspections closely followed the deaths of 97 people late Thursday in a West Warwick, R.I., nightclub, where a rock band's pyrotechnics ignited the ceiling tiles and quickly engulfed the nightclub and its trapped patrons in flames.
Fire officials across the country
said Sunday that they were finding clubgoers almost everywhere were more aware of their surroundings than usual—and more willing to report problems.
"We've seen a sharp increase in the number of reported overcrowdings," even though most didn't prove to be problems, said Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department.
More people than usual also called Chicago authorities to complain about clubs there, said Chief Kevin MacGregor, a department spokesman.
Kansas City's fire department which typically conducts inspections during the week, sent four teams of investigators to 54 establishments on Friday night and Saturday morning. In Dallas, the city fire department, which now has two full-time nightclub inspectors, pledged to temporarily add a second two-member team to search for safety violations.
Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street announced Sunday that the city's approximately 200 nightclubs would face emergency inspections in the next 60 days. Massachusetts' governor on Friday ordered similar inspections statewide.
Cancer-causing substance more prevalent
The Associated Press
BELTSVILLE, Md. — French fries and potato chips have been dubbed villains when it comes to a possibly cancer-causing substance, but Americans get a lot of the chemical from everyday nutritious staples, government scientists said yesterday.
Administration concluded.
Fries and chips contain more of the substance, called acrylamide, but foods with low acrylamide levels that are eaten more frequently than junk food have a big impact on the U.S. population's overall exposure to the possible carcinogens, the Food and Drug
Don't change your diet, FDA scientists stressed, especially because no one knows if acrylamide really poses a cancer risk.
Removing it from a single-food type would nudge overall exposure down by less than a quarter, the FDA's computer model estimated.
Acrylamide made headlines last spring when Swedish scientists discovered that it forms in french fries, potato chips and other high-carbohydrate foods cooked at high temperatures.
raw ingredients fried or baked in a home kitchen. It forms when a naturally occurring amino acid called asparagine is heated to high temperatures with certain sugars such as glucose.
Acrylamide forms during traditional cooking methods, whether from ready-made foods or from
Potatoes are especially rich in both asparagine and glucose and thus produce lots of acrylamide when fried or baked.
Many other foods contain acrylamide, and the longer they're cooked, the more of the chemical is formed. Soft bread contains little, but toasting that bread more than quadruples acrylamide.
seven foods probably account for most of the population's exposure. Fries and chips had the highest levels, from 16 to 48 micrograms per serving. Other foods made the list with lower levels because people eat much of them;
The FDA, using national diet studies, estimated yesterday that
Toast, at 9.8 micrograms per
Breakfast cereal, 7.3 micrograms
grams.
Cookies, 6:6 micrograms
Coffee, 2 micrograms.
Other foods may prove equally important as more are measured for acrylamide, the FDA advisers cautioned. For example, pizza has yet to be tested.
Beachcombers find more than shells on coast
The Associated Press
ANCHORAGE, Alaska Enough soggy Nike basketball shoes to outfit every high school team in Alaska are driving through the Pacific Ocean toward the state after spilling from a container ship off Northern California.
There's just one hitch.
"Nike forgot to tie the laces, so you have to find mates," said Cur
"Nikes will be soon in your neck of the sea."
Curtis Ebbesmeyer
Washington oceanographer
tis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer in Washington state who tracks flotsam. "The effort's worth it because these Nikes have only been adrift a few months. All
33. 000 are wearable."
A beachcomber told Bebesmeyer about the shoe spill after finding two new Nikes washed up on Washington's Olympic Peninsula on Jan. 9 and 16. Unfortunately, they were sizes 10 1/2 and 8 1/2. Both were left.
Research by Ebbesmeyer confirmed that a ship lost cargo Dec. 15 during a storm, including three 40-foot containers carrying an estimated 5,500 pairs of shoes each.
"Nikes will be soon in your neck of the sea," Ebbesmeyer said in an e-mail to the Anchorage Daily News last week.
Over the past decade, Ebbesmeyer has tracked 29,000 duckies, turtles and other bathtub toys; 3 million tiny Legatos; 34,000 hockey gloves; and 50,000 Nike cross-trainers that went overboard in the Pacific in 1999.
AIDS vaccine fails in first major test
The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - The failure of an experimental AIDS vaccine in its first major test has shattered hopes of developing a shield against infection in the near future and demonstrated just how far scientists are from bringing the disease under control.
The drug's developer, Vaxgen Inc., said that overall there was no meaningful difference in protection between the 3,330 volunteers who
Still, the results made public yesterday contained an intriguing finding: The vaccine appeared to work well in the small number of blacks who participated. Scientists said more study is needed to draw any conclusions.
received the genetically engineered vaccine and the 1,679 volunteers who received a placebo. All participants were at high risk of contracting the disease through sex.
Officials had been willing to give the drug approval even if it worked in just one in three people.
"The AIDS virus is really wily and mutates easily," said Dr. Tom Coates, director of the AIDS Research Institute at the University of California at San Francisco.
Dozens of companies, universities and researchers are racing to develop their own vaccines. Among them: Merck & Co., GlaxoSmithKline and Aventis Pasteur. But none of those projects is considered as advanced as Vaxgen's.
Father shoots child for throwing a snowball
The Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA — A man whose daughter was hit with a snowball by a group of girls returned to the scene and opened fire with a gun, critically wounding a 10-year-old youngster, police said.
Joseph Best, 52, was arrested yesterday and jailed on charges including attempted murder.
The victim was in critical condition with a head wound.
Best's daughter was hit with a snowball as she and her friends walked past a group of girls having a "friendly snowball fight" Sunday, police Capt. Charles Bloom said.
A scuffle then broke out among the dozen or so girls, who ranged in age from 10 to 15. The groups
soon parted ways, but Best returned with an older daughter and another brawl erupted, this time between adult relatives of both groups, Bloom said.
Police broke up that fight, but said Best came back again hours later, leaned out the passenger side of a moving car and fired at least five shots into the group of children still playing on the street. Authorities were trying to determine who was driving.
Police said the girl who was shot had been inside during the scuffles.
"This little girl had nothing to do with anything. She wasn't involved in the fight," Bloom said. "He just seemed to be randomly shooting into the crowd."
It could not be immediately determined if Best had a lawyer.