HEALTH

NY Times - Health officials have closed their investigations into an E. coli outbreak linked to raw onions on McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers that sickened more than a hundred people, the Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday.  In total, 104 people from 14 states were sickened from the contaminated food and 34 were hospitalized. One older person in Colorado died.

Officials said there did not appear to be a “continued food safety concern,” because McDonald’s had not served slivered onions — which investigators determined to be the “likely source of contamination”— on the Quarter Pounders for more than a month. The onions were recalled. And in many states, Quarter Pounders were removed from the menu altogether for several weeks. There have not been any new illnesses since McDonald’s decided to remove the onions from its menu on Oct. 22, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Washington Post -  Recently, scientists at Stanford University began to wonder why identical lab mice, bred with the same DNA and brought up in identical conditions, wound up so different in their old age. Some mice could ace cognitive tests and race around on their running wheels. Others would forget simple tasks and hobble from place to place. Genetically, they remained indistinguishable, but their twilight years could hardly have been more distinct.

The scientists’ attempts to untangle what was going on inside these mice is redefining how we think about aging. It has opened up a new area of research into what scientists are calling “organ aging,” which looks at how different parts of our bodies seem to start aging earlier than others, affecting what diseases we develop and how long we live.

The research suggests aging isn’t strictly temporal, not solely about minutes and years passing. Once considered a steady, predictable decline, affecting everything in our bodies, everywhere, all at once, aging is much more haphazard than we once thought, starting in different parts of our bodies at different times, possibly long before we’re even thinking about aging.

It’s also personal, occurring at a unique molecular level inside each of us, and the process may be partially within our control. Once we know how our own organs are aging, we may be able to brake or speed that process by how we live.