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NATION/WORLD VIRUS: Do not touch House backs bill to ease calorie labeling requirements or handle rodents Page 10A East Oregonian Continued from 1A WASHINGTON (AP) — Fast-food chains would get some relief from government rules on listing calories for things like bacon-wrapped deep dish pizza or double cheeseburgers under legisla- tion the House approved on Friday. The vote was 266-144. The legislation now heads to the Senate, where its fate is uncertain. The Obama administration said it opposes the measure though it stopped short of threat- ening a presidential veto Republicans say the calorie labeling rules sched- uled to go into effect this year are too burdensome, and they have sought to ease the requirements and lessen potential ¿nancial penalties for businesses that have to comply. Many restaurants and other food retail outlets, such as grocery stores, will have to post the calorie labels by December. The FDA rules will require restaurants and other establishments that sell prepared foods and have 20 or more locations to post the calorie content of food “clearly and conspicuously” on their menus, menu boards and displays. That includes prepared foods at grocery and convenience stores and in movie theaters, bakeries, coffee shops, pizza delivery stores and amusement parks. The bill by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., would leave the Food and Drug Administration rules requiring the labeling in place but make it easier for some businesses to comply. “This bill at its very core is about Àexibility,” McMorris Rodgers said during House debate. Republican Rep. Fred Upton, whose state of Mich- igan is home to Domino’s Pizza, said it made no sense to require that calories be posted on a menu board at the fast-food chain’s loca- tions when some 90 percent of orders are placed online. Democrats argued that people want more informa- tion, not less, when deciding what to eat. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who said she fought in the 1970s to get expira- tion dates on food, said the calorie labeling rules would help consumers make better decisions. She said it is critical at a time when more than 70 million Americans are obese, at a cost estimated to be $147 billion a year. Schakowsky said Cali- fornia, Vermont, New York City and some smaller cities and towns have already implemented the rules. “This unnecessary legis- lation would deny consumers critical information about the food they eat,” she said. The administration, in a statement this week, said the bill “would reduce consumers’ access to nutri- tion information and likely create consumer confusion by introducing a great deal of variability into how calories are declared.” The legislation would narrow labeling require- ments for supermarkets, which have complained that the rules are confusing and broad, by allowing stores to use a menu or menu board in a prepared-foods area instead of putting labels on individual items. It would also allow restaurants like pizza chains that receive most of their orders remotely to post calo- ries online instead of at the retail location. Pizza restau- rants would also have more Àexibility in the way they post calories, and restaurants and retailers could determine what constitutes a serving size, in some cases. In addition, the bill seeks to ensure that establishments aren’t punished for misla- beling due to inadvertent human error. The menu labeling rules were ¿rst required by Congress in 2010, but FDA took several years to write them as the supermarkets, convenience stores and pizza companies aggressively lobbied against them. Heat, dry spell stoke drought worry SONOMA, Calif. (AP) — Where did El Nino go? Winter has suddenly switched off the rain and Àipped on heat up to 95 degrees in California, raising jitters that the strong El Nino might not be the drought- buster the crispy state had hoped. “Forget El Nino, this is El No-no!” YouTube celebrity Hannah Hart tweeted. Heat records have fallen across the West in recent days, from Oregon to Phoenix to Los Angeles, where surfers hit the beaches and golfers strolled fairways. Much of California marked its 10th straight day on Friday without measur- able precipitation. The blue skies were increasingly unwelcome in a state that just logged its four driest years on record. California has been looking for a robust and rainy El Nino to bring it out of mandatory water cutbacks. “It’s nice to have the weather, but we hope to have the rain,” Tia Gavin of Santa Rosa said as she showed out-of-town visitors around the adobe central plaza of the wine country town of Sonoma. Strollers in shorts surveyed restaurant windows and lolled on blankets on green grass under the sun. The dry spell came after El Nino dropped near-normal rain and snow earlier this winter. “If you just looked at the precipitation, you wouldn’t think that there was an El Nino going on,” said Sam Iacobellis, a climate researcher at Scripps Institu- tion of Oceanography in San Diego. He has been taking note of early blooming Àowers as he drove to work this week. Strong El Ninos such as the one this year typically bring strong rain, Iacobellis said. However, there have been few modern El Ninos on the scale of this one, making comparisons trickier, he said. National Weather Service forecasters were quick to offer soothing messages of drizzle yet to come. “No need to be concerned,” forecaster Steve Anderson said. The balmy weather has “been awesome. It’s been great. But it’s not going to last,” he said. “It’s still winter.” Californians are partic- ularly concerned about whether the warm stretch is melting the above-average snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. The snow generally provides about a third of the state’s water when it thaws in OI¿cial¶s email sa\s sKiIt to )lint RiYer maGe too quickl\ FLINT (AP) — As the city of Flint, Michigan, prepared to begin drawing its drinking water from the Flint River, an of¿cial with the municipal water plant said his superiors were prodding him to move too quickly, an email released by the governor’s of¿ce Friday shows. “If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple weeks, it will be against my direction,” Mike Glasgow wrote to of¿cials with the state Department of Environmental Quality on April 17, 2014, when he was the plant’s laboratory and water quality supervisor. He is now the city utilities administrator. “I need time to adequately train additional staff and to update our monitoring plans before I will feel we are ready,” he wrote. “I will reiterate this to management above me, but they seem to have their own agenda.” The city made the switch to the Flint River eight days later, marking the occasion with a ceremony April 25. Flint had long relied on treated Lake Huron water from Detroit’s system, but turned to the river as a temporary measure to save money when the city was under emergency ¿nancial management. Of¿cials planned eventually to get Lake Huron water from a new pipeline. Flint did not use an anti-corrosion chemical treatment as Detroit had done, which of¿cials acknowledge was a drastic failure that enabled the corrosive river water to scrape lead from aging pipes and taint water that reached some homes. Even before the lead problem was discovered, residents complained repeatedly that their water had become smelly, bad-tasting and discolored. Gov. Rick Snyder’s of¿ce, accused by critics of mishandling and downplaying the crisis for months, released about 20,000 related emails and records Friday in response to open-records requests. The emails came from several state departments, including Environmental Quality; Technology, Management and Budget; Health and Human Services; Agricul- ture and Rural Development; and Treasury. the spring. There again, not to worry, forecaster Travis Wilson said. Parts of the Sierras broke heat records on at least two days this month, but nights have all fallen below freezing, keeping the precious new snow intact, he explained. The heat is expected to peak around Monday, with more record highs possible all the way to Washington state and in parts of Arizona. More seasonal weather patterns were expected to bring some rain back to California midweek. Californians are adjusting in the meantime. Bryan Stra- nahan had to do something unusual for this time of year when he went out Friday to run errands in Los Angeles. “I normally don’t have to look for a shady parking spot until August or September,” the New York native said. “I’m not complaining,” he added. sure. Symptoms include fever, headache, and muscle ache, and rapidly to severe breathing dif¿- culty and, in some cases, death. Hitzman offered the following advice to prevent spread: Keep food in tightly sealed containers and store it away from rodents. Keep rodents out of buildings by removing stacked wood, rubbish piles, and discarded junk from around homes and sealing any holes where rodents could enter. When cleaning a sleeping or living space, open windows to air out the area for at least two hours before entering. Take care not to stir up dust. Wear plastic gloves and a mask. Spray areas contaminated with rodent droppings and urine with a 10 percent bleach solu- tion or other household disinfectant and wait at least 15 minutes before cleaning the area. Place the waste in double plastic bags, each tightly sealed, and discard in the trash. Wash hands thoroughly afterward. Do not touch or handle live rodents and wear gloves when handling dead ones. Spray dead rodents with a 1:10 dilution of bleach and water, or other virus killing compound, and dispose of in the same way as droppings. Wash hands thoroughly. If there are large numbers of rodents in a home or other buildings, contact a pest control service to remove them. For additional infor- mation on preventing hantavirus, visit the federal CDC’s hantavirus page. ——— Contact Kathy Aney at kaney@eastoregonian. com or call 541-966-0810. Saturday, February 13, 2016 LOVE: Apologize in person and look them in the eye Continued from 1A of frustration, anger or need on a scale of 1 to 10 so both know where the other is on an issue. “And then visit a marriage or family therapist for a few sessions — with the emphasis on a few sessions — to get back on track,” Garrett said. Those on the dating scene also can be proactive. Garrett said while she is not an online dating expert, relationship websites and apps such as eHarmony. com or Christianmingle.com provide dating pro¿les and assessments. “Bottom line,” she said, “that is a great way to rule in and rule out who is a match and who isn’t.” And in spite of the line from the 1970’s romantic drama “Love Story” that love is never having to say you’re sorry, Garrett said when you do apologize to the person you love, be an adult about it, do it in person and look him or her in the eye. CAMBIER: Fellowship supplies $52,000 annually Continued from 1A Cancer Research Founda- tion awarded Cambier a four-year fellowship that will fund his research. The fellowship encourages the nation’s most promising young scientists to pursue careers in cancer research. At PHS, Cambier wasn’t the stereotypical science nerd. He played soccer and baseball. He was personable and well-liked, said Dr. Jake Cambier, C.J.’s father and a Pendleton radiologist. He got good grades. “He’s always had an inquisitive mind,” said the elder Cambier. C.J.’s curiosity caught ¿re in Jess Cooper’s physics and chemistry classes. “I’ve always been inter- ested in science. It’s kind of came easy for me,” Cambier said. “Mr. Cooper was the best chemistry teacher I ever had — he was committed to making sure we understood everything.” In college, he said, “it was sink or swim.” After high school gradu- ation in 2003, he headed to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. “I started off wanting to save the planet,” Cambier said. “I wanted to be an ecologist.” After a while, though, he realized he wasn’t attracted to the classes as much as the idea of living green. He drifted to molecular and “I’ve always been interested in sci- ence. It’s kind of came easy for me,” — C.J. Cambier, Stanford University research scientist cellular biology and began studying a phenomenon called polymerase chain reaction — a way of cloning pieces of DNA. At age 21, Cambier temporarily broke away from studies to become a bone marrow donor. He traveled to the City of Hope Hospital near Los Angeles where doctors used needles to withdraw liquid marrow from his pelvic bone. The recipient of Cambier’s marrow was a 68-year-old man with multiple myeloma. After college he worked as a lab technician for two years at the University of California at San Francisco before heading to graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle. He became fascinated by immu- nology, the study of the immune system. These days, he is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. The Runyon fellowship, which supplies $52,000 annually for four years, gives Cambier the ¿nancial freedom to do his genetic research without worrying about funding. He spends a lot of quality time with zebra¿sh, which are like lab rats with ¿ns. In their larval stage, the ¿sh are transparent. “You can do all sorts of genetic manipulation with these ¿sh,” he said. “You can knock out gene X and see if the ¿sh is more sick or resistant to infection.” Through the zebra¿sh’s transparent skin, Cambier can observe the voracious macrophage cells doing or not doing their job, depending on the scientist’s manipulations. He hopes to learn about inÀammation’s role in cancer and other disease and how to mediate that inÀammation. Despite his fascination with his research, Cambier said he feels like a fairly well-rounded guy who escapes the lab to run, hike, cycle or rock climb. “A lot of ideas come to me on a long bike ride or climbing a mountain,” he said. Cambier’s high school science teacher isn’t surprised about Cambier’s chosen career. “It doesn’t surprise me he’s a research scientist,” said Jess Cooper. “He was very bright, very motivated and very inquisitive.” ——— Contact Kathy Aney at kaney@eastoregonian.com or call 541-966-0810.
