Americans’ Perceptions of Food Safety: A Comparative Study on Fresh Produce and Meat Products

Crop Production/Industries,

Purchasing Organic Food in U.S. Food Systems: A Study of Attitudes and Practice

Consumers' preference for organic foods in the context of food aspects considered important in a consumption decision and socioeconomic variables has been examined in this study. The results indicate that food aspects related to naturalness, vegetarian-vegan and production location were critical enhancing regularity of organic food purchases. While the familiarity food aspect was viewed as a 'no' issue as far as organic food purchases are concerned. Results further indicate that females and young people buy organics on a regular basis. In terms of political affiliation and church attendance, the liberals and those who at least visit places worship once a month will also regularly buy organics.Consumer/Household Economics,

The Role of Media in Shaping the Consumers’ Food Risk Perception and Behavior: A Case Study of Spinach Recall

A clear understanding of consumers’ perception and attitude toward food risk and their behavior to food recall is important in order to develop an effective crisis management program at the firm level as well as at the government level. This study will develop food risk profiles of US consumers based on their perceived food safety risk and attitude toward food safety. The role of media usage in shaping the risk profile will be examined. The preliminary results suggest that the risk profiles of households were shaped by media usage. While the “accountables” were more likely to search internet or get news from internet, the “conservatives” usually watched news on local TV.Agribusiness, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Food Safety Risk Perceptions as a Tool for Market Segmentation: The U.S. Poultry Meat Market

This study explores the application of risk perceptions as a segmentation tool in the poultry meat market. Principal component analysis is used to examine data from a 2006 survey on a potential avian influenza outbreak in the U.S. The results suggest that the perceived level of safety of poultry meat will drive consumption choices in the case of an avian influenza outbreak. Based on the perceived safety level, the poultry meat product market was categorized into those that are home cooked and from familiar brands, the technological/novel, and organic/fast food poultry products, with the first category being perceived as the safest and the third as the least safe. The results also show significant differences in public trust in the avian influenza information provided by the government, poultry producers, politicians, and the media.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Livestock Production/Industries,

Autonomic Regulation in Musculoskeletal Pain

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AGN heating and dissipative processes in galaxy clusters

Recent X-ray observations reveal growing evidence for heating by active galactic nuclei (AGN) in clusters and groups of galaxies. AGN outflows play a crucial role in explaining the riddle of cooling flows and the entropy problem in clusters. Here we study the effect of AGN on the intra-cluster medium in a cosmological simulation using the adaptive mesh refinement FLASH code. We pay particular attention to the effects of conductivity and viscosity on the dissipation of weak shocks generated by the AGN activity in a realistic galaxy cluster. Our 3D simulations demonstrate that both viscous and conductive dissipation play an important role in distributing the mechanical energy injected by the AGN, offsetting radiative cooling and injecting entropy to the gas. These processes are important even when the transport coefficients are at a level of 10% of the Spitzer value. Provided that both conductivity and viscosity are suppressed by a comparable amount, conductive dissipation is likely to dominate over viscous dissipation. Nevertheless, viscous effects may still affect the dynamics of the gas and contribute a significant amount of dissipation compared to radiative cooling. We also present synthetic Chandra observations. We show that the simulated buoyant bubbles inflated by the AGN, and weak shocks associated with them, are detectable with the Chandra observatory.Comment: accepted to ApJ, minor change