Contamination

McCormick & Co. announced a recall of four processed foods Friday afternoon because of possible salmonella contamination of an ingredient. The Sparks-based company recalled packages of French onion dip mix, vegetable dip mix, onion gravy mix and corn bread stuffing mix, all of which contained hydrolyzed vegetable protein manufactured by Basic Food Flavors of Las Vegas. Another manufacturer, a Basic Food Flavors customer, detected the contamination and reported it to the FDA. That company is recalling all the hydrolyzed vegetable protein produced since Sept.

We were very disappointed to read in the Sun on Tuesday that the Maryland Department of the Environment had approved a request from ExxonMobil to stop monitoring 130 residential wells it had contaminated in Jacksonville in 2006 and to discontinue bottled water to 126 homes ("Exxon ruling draws protest," Mar. 2). While the recovery and remediation work has had significant success in retrieving gasoline and its related contaminants, this man-made disaster has not always been predictable, and residents whose homes and lives have been impacted should not be subject to uncertainty about the safety of their well water until it is clear that the entire area is completely clear of MTBE and other contaminants from the 26,000 gallon leak.

Question: : I've been using a Grecian Formula for my graying hair for years. It has lead acetate in it. I checked the Food and Drug Administration Web site. They say they tested it and approved it. The lead has me a bit concerned. Any thoughts? Answer: : The FDA does no testing of its own but did approve lead acetate as a "progressive" hair dye. That means it gradually darkens hair with repeated use. The FDA concluded in 2002 that according to safety tests it received, "No significant increase in blood levels of lead was seen in the trial subjects and the lead was not shown to be absorbed into the body through such use."

The state has received $3.7 million from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up soil and groundwater contamination from leaking underground fuel tanks in 70 sites across Maryland - about half of them in the Baltimore area. Horacio Tablada, chief of waste management for the Maryland Department of the Environment, called the EPA funds "a shot in the arm" for his agency's efforts to clean up contamination caused by leaking underground fuel tanks at some 800 locations around the state.

To comply with a Justice Department ruling this week, the Pentagon might have to pick up the pace in cleaning heavy metals and other contamination at Fort Meade that fouled nearby wells and forced evacuations of base housing. In an advisory letter to the Pentagon intended to settle a lengthy dispute among federal agencies, the Justice Department said that the military must obey an "imminent and substantial endangerment" order issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 for Fort Meade and other Defense Department facilities in New Jersey and Florida.

For years, Harry Jennings and his neighbors on Summerfield Road put up with bad-tasting, corrosive water that ate through plumbing and ruined appliances. They also endured a dark, gritty dust wafting in the wind that would coat their cars and clothes and even stain the outside of their homes. "When the leaves weren't on the trees in winter, it would blow right through the woods," recalls Jennings, a truck driver who has lived all his 60 years in the wooded enclave off Route 3 in Gambrills.

A city crime lab employee left his own DNA on the pistol police say was used to kill an off-duty Baltimore detective, indicating that a recently discovered problem with contamination at the lab may be more widespread than officials originally believed. Evidence from the murder trial of Brandon Grimes was not among the 12 instances city officials identified last week in which lab employees introduced their own DNA into crime evidence. But lab officials testified yesterday that there are thousands of partial strands of unknown DNA in evidence samples - like the one recovered from the pistol in the Grimes case - that must be checked by hand.

Relying on a hit from the state DNA database, Baltimore police arrested a suspect last year in the long-unsolved rape and killing of Lisa Barselou, a 26-year-old who was assaulted and then submerged in the bathtub of her Bolton Hill home in 1989. Kevin Gerald Robinson is scheduled to stand trial in October. But the key to the case against Robinson, 42, is DNA, and recent testing revealed that part of the usually unassailable evidence was contaminated by a crime lab employee who left behind his own genetic material, a recurring problem at the Baltimore Police Department crime lab that led to the firing of its director this week.

Baltimore crime analysts have been contaminating evidence with their own DNA - a revelation that led to the dismissal this week of the city Police Department's crime lab director and prompted questions yesterday from defense attorneys and forensic experts about the professionalism of the state's biggest and busiest crime lab. Edgar Koch, who had been the city lab's director for the past decade, was fired Tuesday because of the DNA contamination and...

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler notified the Army yesterday that the state plans to sue to get it to finish cleaning up groundwater and soil contamination at Fort Meade. Ratcheting up a long-running dispute, Gansler sent the Army a notice of the state's intent to sue under federal pollution law, accusing the military of failing to comply with a year-old cleanup order from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Army has been working for years, under supervision by the EPA and the state, to find and clean up pollution at the 5,400-acre base in Anne Arundel County stemming from past careless disposal of fuel and munitions.