In recent weeks, the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson has gone on the offensive in a very public way, trying to assure customers and company employees that the recalls of popular over-the-counter drugs like children’s liquid Tylenol did not reflect systemic problems across the corporation.

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And on Thursday, the executive, William C. Weldon, is expected to appear at a Congressional hearing, for the first time providing his own account to lawmakers of the manufacturing problems that led to the recalls. Mr. Weldon has asserted that missteps at the company’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit, which was responsible for the withdrawal of certain products from the marketplace, have been contained.

“From Johnson & Johnson’s perspective, our response to this issue was the most responsible it could possibly be,” Mr. Weldon said in a recent telephone interview. After months of silence, he has also appeared on CNBC and has toured the company’s own sites to talk about McNeil. “We want to ensure nothing like this happens again,” he said.

His testimony before Congress comes as the company confronts other highly publicized problems that have swirled around Mr. Weldon’s stewardship and the once unassailable integrity of one of the world’s most respected companies.

In recent months, the company has recalled tens of thousands of artificial hips as well as several million contact lenses, made by distinct units. The company is also the subject of numerous government inquiries and a spate of consumer lawsuits. In McNeil’s case, the unit recalled about 136 million bottles of liquid infants’ and children’s medicines in April, and millions of bottles of Tylenol and other pills for adults earlier in the year.

“These problems are accumulating,” said Les Funtleyder, who invests in health care stocks for Miller Tabak & Company in New York. “At some point, investors are going to start to question J.& J.’s management.”

Representative Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is holding Thursday’s hearing, said in a telephone interview that the company had failed to adequately oversee the McNeil unit and did not correct the manufacturing problems there quickly.

“Does Johnson & Johnson oversee its divisions properly, or do they have too much autonomy?” Mr. Issa asked. “Does the big name — Johnson & Johnson — mean quality, or do you have to judge each division separately?”

Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers plan to delve into communications between corporate executives and the Food and Drug Administration as recalls were considered or taking place, including attempts by the company to buy back certain vials of Motrin pills rather than formally recall them from the shelves.

Mr. Weldon said in the interview earlier this month that the company had acted quickly to recall the products, inform consumers and explain that the medicines posed no serious health hazard. While the company has temporarily shut the plant in Fort Washington, Pa., that manufactured the children’s over-the-counter products for an overhaul, Mr. Weldon said the company planned to reintroduce certain products later this year.

“We have a standard and we hold all our companies to that standard,” Mr. Weldon said, adding that he took full responsibility for McNeil’s problems. Johnson & Johnson has also announced a series of moves meant to address the concerns over the quality of its products.

In addition to a systemic review of the manufacturing operations at all of its units, the company has overhauled and centralized its quality control operations. This month, it also said Colleen A. Goggins, the senior executive who was in charge of all of Johnson & Johnson’s consumer businesses, would leave. Ms. Goggins also is expected to testify at Thursday’s hearing, her second appearance before the committee on these issues.

To date, some people fault the company’s response as inadequate.

“It’s too little, too late,” said Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan. Mr. Weldon had an obligation to address the concerns about McNeil and the decentralized nature of the company earlier this year, he said. The company has long prided itself on, and derived strong yearly profit growth from, its decentralized management structure. By having a diverse array of companies, with more than 250 separate units, the company has managed to innovate and prosper despite its size.

“J.& J. has been a master of that,” said Richard N. Foster, a former McKinsey partner who has written about Johnson & Johnson. “There are very few companies in J.& J.’s class.”

Until the first quarter of 2009, for example, Johnson & Johnson had managed to increase its earnings, adjusted for special items, for 94 consecutive quarters.

The company has also been smart and aggressive about acquisitions, including a recent bid for Crucell, a leading vaccine company in which J.& J. already owns a stake, said Michael Weinstein, an analyst at J. P. Morgan. Even with the hip implant recall, the company’s medical device franchises remain strong, he said, and its pharmaceutical group has promising products like an antistroke drug and an experimental drug for prostate cancer in development.

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Filed at 4:26 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal inspectors have reopened an investigation into complaints by Food and Drug Administration scientists who say they were pressured by their managers to approve high-tech medical scanners that could pose harm to patients.

The lead inspector overseeing the matter told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the inquiry into the allegations, which were dismissed in February, is being revisited to look at manager misconduct.

“The original intent of the investigation was to look at criminal matters and our agents did that,” said Gerald Roy, deputy inspector general for investigations in the Department of Health and Human Services. “But I point toward broader issues that really compelled me to take a second look at this and reopen it from an administrative perspective.”

The HHS office of inspector general, which oversees the FDA, closed the case in February after finding there was “no violation of law.”

But the whistleblowers have repeatedly stressed that their grievances involve mismanagement and violations of regulations — which don’t fall under criminal law.

Nine FDA medical device reviewers alleged in 2008 that agency management overruled their opinions without supporting evidence and tried to intimidate them when they went public with their concerns.

At issue are CT scanners, MRI machines and other medical devices that use radiation to detect or treat diseases. Many of the devices allow lifelike pictures of the human anatomy, but carry a higher risk from radiation than older scans such as X-rays.

In recent years, hundreds of radiation overdoses have been reported with imaging devices used by hospitals across the country. The whistleblowers say these problems underscore the concerns they raised about such devices.

The new probe comes after prodding from lawmakers and nonprofit watchdog groups, including the Project for Government Oversight. In a letter to the inspector general Tuesday, the group calls the previous investigation a “sham.”

“If these allegations are true, the FDA is failing in its primary mission of keeping people safe,” said Danielle Brian, the group’s executive director.

An agency spokeswoman said she could not immediately provide comment Tuesday.

Since the FDA whistleblowers went public with their concerns — in letters to Congress and the Obama administration in 2008 and 2009 — at least two scientists have been let go and another has quit after alleged intimidation.

Interviews with the staffers and internal e-mails obtained by The Associated Press provide new details of alleged mismanagement in the FDA’s device division.

Central to the scientists’ complaints is an FDA pathway to approval that allows speedy clearance if a device appears comparable to others already on the market.

Former FDA reviewer Dr. Gamal Akabani repeatedly recommended against clearing radiation-emitting devices used to treat cancer under the accelerated system, saying the devices needed to undergo actual testing to prove their safety and effectiveness. Between 2007 and 2008, Akabani said he was frequently pressured by supervisors to change his opinion, he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

In the final incident, Akabani’s manager asked about the health of his wife, who has cancer, and his son, who was born severely handicapped. According to Akabani, the manager suggested his job — and health insurance for his family — would be safe as long as he cooperated with his supervisors.

“It shook me to the core because I realized that he was coercing me,” said Akabani, who resigned from the FDA and currently teaches nuclear physics at Texas A&M University.

Akabani and other whistleblowers say a key problem at the agency is that managers — who have often spent decades in government — have far less expertise and up-to-date training than the medical reviewers they oversee. Akabani was recruited to the FDA after a decade in the radiology department at Duke University Medical Center.

The whistleblowers also point out that FDA managers are evaluated, in part, on their ability to get speedy reviews of devices, causing them to pressure and sometimes overrule scientists who slow down the process.

In another case of alleged retaliation, an Oxford-trained medical specialist’s contract was not renewed after he repeatedly opposed approving a CT scanner for routine colon cancer screening. Dr. Julian Nicholas said that he objected to exposing otherwise healthy patients to the cancer risks of radiation. He says he was ridiculed by agency managers for “raising the bugaboo of radiation.”

“They conspired against me because I refused to change my expert medical opinion to conform with their desired regulatory outcome,” Nicholas wrote in an e-mail to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg after his termination late last year.

Both Akabani and Nicholas say they were never contacted by the office of inspector general, which they say makes the inspectors’ original report flawed and incomplete.

The inspector general’s office issued a memo to FDA leadership in February when it concluded there had been no criminal violations.

The whistleblowers complain that FDA officials have used the four-page memo to try to dissuade members of Congress from looking into their allegations.

Robert Smith, a former radiology division reviewer who left the agency in July, said FDA leadership assured the whistleblowers that the investigation would be comprehensive.

“It was the FDA’s responsibility to make sure the investigation they requested was properly conducted and reported,” Smith said, “And it was the responsibility of the inspector general to conduct a legitimate investigation — which they know they did not.”

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Nestlé said on Monday that it planned to invest more than $500 million over the next decade to develop health and wellness products to help prevent and treat major ailments like diabetes and obesity.

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Nestlé will create a wholly owned subsidiary, Nestlé Health Science, as well as a research body, the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences, “to pioneer a new industry between food and pharma,” the company said in a statement.

The company, which is based in Vevey, Switzerland, said the initiatives would seek to develop nutritional products for diseases like diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s, which are placing an increasing burden on governments at a time when budgets are being squeezed.

“It is our strong conviction that disease prevention will have to play a much bigger role” in future health spending, Nestlé’s chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, told a news conference in Lausanne.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 220 million people worldwide suffer from diabetes and about 18 million people have Alzheimer’s. By 2030, almost 23.6 million people are expected to die from cardiovascular diseases, the leading cause of deaths worldwide.

The company said it planned to invest about 500 million Swiss francs ($509 million) over the next decade in the new areas.

The new business unit will be “run at arm’s length” from the main food, beverage and nutrition activities, Nestlé said, and it will incorporate the existing Nestlé HealthCare Nutrition business, which had sales of about $1.6 billion in 2009.

Analysts said the path appeared to be relatively clear for Nestlé, which would be able to extend its existing strengths in research and distribution.

Nestlé will be competing in part with pharmaceutical companies like Abbott Laboratories, which makes nutritional supplement drinks, as well as diversified groups like Unilever, which owns the weight management brand Slim-Fast.

“Nestlé is tackling a new industry,” said Jean-Philippe Bertschy, an analyst at Bank Vontobel in Zurich. “It’s quite hard to define what the market for this will be.”

But he said that Nestlé had the money to expand without requiring a return on investment for some time. Nestlé should be almost debt-free by the end of the year, he said, in part because it received $28.3 billion from the pharmaceutical company Novartis last month for a majority stake in the Alcon eye care division.

The new focus is unlikely to dent Nestlé’s status as the “clear leader in the food sector,” Mr. Bertschy added.

Nestlé has 280,000 employees and brands that include Kit Kat chocolate bars and San Pellegrino bottled water. Its annual sales of about nearly $102 billion are more than double its nearest competitor, Kraft of the United States. Other global competitors in food include Danone of France.

Nestlé declined to provide any more specific targets for its new venture, but Luis Cantarell, who will head the new unit, described it as “an opportunity that is more in billions than millions.”

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Ever wonder why overhearing one side of a cellphone conversation can be so irritating — and why you feel compelled to eavesdrop in spite of yourself?

Lauren L. Emberson, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Cornell University, used to get so distracted by cellphone conversations overheard on the bus that she couldn’t focus on reading. It made her wonder whether hearing only half of a conversation — a “halfalogue,” she calls it — is somehow more disturbing than hearing the whole discussion.

Twenty-four students were asked to perform tasks that required constant attention, including tracking a cursor on a screen and pushing a button every time one of four letters appeared on the screen. The volunteers were told to ignore background noise, which alternated between a recorded conversation, a “halfalogue,” a monologue and silence.

The volunteers weren’t distracted by the conversations or the monologue, but their performance on the tasks was significantly impaired when the “halfalogue” was played, according to the study, published online in Psychological Science on Thursday.

Ms. Emberson speculated that hearing half a conversation may be distracting because it is less predictable than a dialogue, which has predictable patterns.

“When speech is unpredictable, we can’t control our brain’s reaction to it — it draws our attention in,” she said in an interview. “It’s harder to understand less predictable speech; it requires more attention, and so it draws attention away from other tasks.”

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Women pay more than men for haircuts and dry cleaning. Now, a new study has found that they also pay more for being obese.

While a man racks up $2,646 annually in extra expenses if he is obese, a woman’s obesity costs her $4,879, almost twice as much.

Much of the gender gap is due to lower wages for obese women, who earn less relative to similar working women who are not obese, according to the analysis, by researchers at George Washington University.

The report is one of the first to calculate the economic toll of obesity on the individual, including both direct costs, like medical expenses, and indirect expenses, like lost wages and reduced work productivity. (The study did not account for many other personal consumer costs, like clothing, because data are not available.)

Based on a median annual wage for women of $32,450 in 2009, the report found that obese women who work full time earn $1,855 less annually than nonobese women, a 6 percent reduction. By contrast, studies have found that the wages of obese men are not significantly different from those of normal-weight men.

“One possible explanation is that there is more discrimination against women when they are obese than against men, that obesity is perceived differently for women than for men,” said Avi Dor, director of the health economics program at George Washington University.

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“Adventures on the dark side of medicine” — now that sounds like a lot of fun. A few juicy stories about black-market organs, fingerprint erasure, murder and mayhem in the I.C.U. would make a welcome change from the usual humdrum stuff of hospital and clinic, where the big events are a drug that doesn’t work properly, or a visit from a pharmaceutical salesman that screws up the entire afternoon schedule.

But no: In Dr. Carl Elliott’s survey of all that is shifty in modern medicine, those humdrum events are exactly what make up medicine’s dark side. And, indeed, Dr. Elliott’s entertaining and extremely readable essays will have you convinced that in comparison to the shenanigans that go into the creation of a single prescription pill, fingerprint erasure might actually be a little dull. After all, what is more sinister than the dubious mechanics of the ordinary, the sausage factory behind the breakfast special?

A physician who specializes in philosophy and ethics, Dr. Elliott hails from that quiet zone of medicine where much of the job involves thinking about, talking about and doling out medications. Hence his primary focus is on the ever-evolving relationship between the high art of medicine and the big business of drugs.

Some of his material has, at this point, been reviewed ad nauseam in the daily press and in books by others, so most readers will be familiar with the bad habits of Big Pharma when it comes to subtle data manipulation, high-pressure salesmanship and lavish gifts. Mighty and expensive are the efforts to guide the hands that write the prescriptions. But Dr. Elliott also spends time in places where few other authors have ventured.

Doctors get pens and trinkets, football tickets, junkets to beach resorts. Less visible are the large sums handed over in “I’m going to make you a star” projects to groom them as trusted faces and voices in the service of some drug. Education and advertisement merge in these elaborate ventures, as the paid professor travels the country, lecturing about disease and, incidentally, the treatment thereof.

These “key opinion leaders” are bad enough, but who would ever imagine that the curricula vitae of many academic physicians (those on a medical school faculty) are packed with journal articles actually written by ghostwriters sponsored by pharmaceutical companies?

“Nobody expects American politicians to write their own speeches anymore,” Dr. Elliott reminds us, “and nobody expects celebrities to write their own memoirs.” Apparently doctors have now joined the ranks of the charismatic talking heads, mouthing the words of others.

And just as “professor” generally describes someone who writes his or her own sentences, “ethicist” generally describes someone who dwells (or at least works) on an unusually high moral plane. But Dr. Elliott also takes a brief and very informative excursion into the world of the medical ethicists. Once they were highly principled, underpaid gadflies, trying to sort out medical decision making. Now they are part of a booming industry, and, speaking of industry, their ties to the pharmaceutical industry are many and complex. Many companies now hire their own ethicists. But who guards those guards?

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the pharmaceutical totem pole are the folks who make it all happen: the people who volunteer to test new chemicals for safety before they are let loose on the general public.

John le Carré’s book “The Constant Gardener” touched on some of the issues that arise when big companies pay very poor people to test their drugs. Dr. Elliott didn’t have to head to Africa to report this story, however: the Northeast corridor provided ample material.

In Philadelphia he found a group of professional “guinea pigs,” as they call themselves, sequestered in a hospital’s clinical research unit while they were testing a prospective new drug. It was one long pajama party: “We were just gorging ourselves at 2 a.m. on Cheez Doodles,” one guinea pig told him. Only one problem: Those were contraband doodles. The drug under investigation required stringent dietary restrictions, which the subjects were systematically violating. So much for the science of drug evaluation.

Some guinea pigs are activists — one has founded an industry magazine, Guinea Pig Zero. Probably more typical, unfortunately, are the subjects who spent time in a drug testing site in Miami, the largest in the country until it was shut down for fire and safety violations. Many of them were illegal immigrants, packed into shabby, overcrowded rooms with minimal supervision.

“Guinea pigs do not do things in exchange for money so much as they allow things to be done to them,” Dr. Elliott points out. “There are not many other jobs where this is the case.” Yet for all the job’s built-in vulnerability, there is little monitoring of either the subjects’ health or the data’s validity.

What a world, what a world, as the melting witch said in “The Wizard of Oz.” But there is one small consolation: at least Dr. Elliott didn’t have to call his book “White Coat, Black Heart.” Now that would have been depressing. The bottom line is that much of what he describes is simply the big business of medicine as we have allowed it to take shape. His bad actors are mostly just that: actors caught up in a script not of their own devising. They all come home in the evening, take off their black hats and hang up their white coats, just regular working stiffs out to make a buck.

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Most mothers start breast-feeding after they give birth, but many quit by the time their babies are 6 months old, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fewer than half of all babies are being breast-fed at 6 months. Three-quarters of women who gave birth in 2007 began breast-feeding, meeting a goal set by the government’s Healthy People 2010 program, the C.D.C. reported. But the number of mothers who continued to breast-feed through a child’s first year has not increased, agency officials said.

Only 43 percent of mothers are still nursing at 6 months and only 22 percent breast-feed for a full year, falling short of the national goal of having half of new mothers breast-feed for six months and 25 percent for a full year.

Breast-feeding is encouraged because of its many benefits for both mother and infant. But women often do not get the support they need in the hospital and may have a hard time continuing to breast-feed once they return to work, C.D.C. officials said.

Carol MacGowan, a public health adviser at the C.D.C., noted that the new health care law requires large employers to provide breast-feeding mothers with breaks and a private space — not a restroom — to express milk.

Breast-feeding rates varies across the country, with almost 90 percent of mothers initiating breast-feeding in Utah, compared with 52.5 percent in Mississippi.

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WASHINGTON — PomWonderful, the pricey and popular pomegranate juice sold in the distinctly curvaceous bottle, is advertised as helping reduce the risk of heart disease, prostate cancer and impotence. But according to the Federal Trade Commission, the evidence does not back up those claims.

On Monday, the F.T.C. charged Pom Wonderful, which markets the juice, and the company’s owners, billionaire philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick of Los Angeles, with making false and unsubstantiated claims about the power of their pomegranate elixir.

In a complaint that seeks to prevent the company from making any further medical claims unless they are substantiated by the Food and Drug Administration, the commission said the company ignored evidence that contradicted its claims that the juice could help prevent or treat heart disease, reduce the risk of prostate cancer and overcome erectile dysfunction.

The Resnicks, who rarely settle disputes without a court fight, said Monday that they plan to contest the charges. Already, their company has sued the commission in federal district court here claiming that the F.T.C. is exceeding its authority and that it is trampling Pom’s First Amendment rights.

“We stand behind the vast body of scientific research documenting the healthy properties of Wonderful variety pomegranate,” the company said Monday in a statement. “Our research is unprecedented among food and beverage companies, and we take pride in having initiated a program of modern scientific research to investigate the health benefits of this ancient and revered fruit.”

That ancient, revered status as a folk medicine led the Resnicks in 1998 to begin financing research into whether pomegrantes and their antioxidants had health benefits, according to a 2008 profile in The New Yorker magazine.]

The F.T.C. lawsuit comes at an awkward time for the Resnicks, whose other business ventures include Teleflora, the flower-delivery service; Fiji Water; Suterra, a maker of environmentally sensitive pest-control products; and Neptune Pacific Line, an Australian shipper. The couple also formerly owned the Franklin Mint, the marketer of commemorative coins, plates and dolls.

Next month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is opening the Resnick Pavilion, a freestanding exhibition space that was financed in part by the couple’s $45 million gift to the museum, where Mrs. Resnick is vice chairman of the board and oversees the acquisitions committee.

Pom Wonderful claims to have spent $34 million on pomegranate research, including 19 clinical trials which, according to the company, have produced 55 studies in peer reviewed journals.

In addition to the Resnicks and the company, the F.T.C. also charged Matthew Tupper, the president and chief operating officer of Pom Wonderful, and Roll International, which provides administrative services to POM and which, like POM, is owned by a Resnick trust. The charges are scheduled to be contested before an administrative law judge on May 24, 2011 in Washington..

The F.T.C. also settled on Monday a related false advertising case against Dr. Mark Dreher, Pom Wonderful’s former vice president of science and regulatory affairs, who also appeared in various media as an expert endorser of Pom products. Without admitting or denying the charges, Dr. Dreher agreed not to engage in similar acts and to cooperate with further investigations.

The F.T.C. does not have statutory authority to assess fines for violations of its regulations, although it can being a lawsuit against someone who violates a consent order. Instead, the commission can order businesses to stop illegal marketing activities and can halt anticompetitive practices.

While not disputing that the company’s medical studies exist, the Federal Trade Commission says that the company’s advertising claims overstate the results and ignore that the pomegranate products often showed no more efficacy than a placebo. In addition to the juice, Pom Wonderful markets POMx pill and liquid supplements.

The commission cited examples of Pom advertising that said the products produced “improved heart and prostate health and better erectile function.” Among the results of various studies were a reduction in plaque buildup in the carotid artery and in blood pressure, and slower progression of an indicator for prostate cancer.

Those results ignored the fact, the commission contended, that as early as May 2007 the company knew that a large study financed by the company showed no significant difference in arterial plaque build-up after 18 months between patients who drank Pom and those who drank a placebo.

The F.T.C. also stated that the company’s prostate-related claims relied on a study that itself notes uncertainty as to whether the outcomes cited by the company are relevant as an indication of clinical benefit. In addition, the company’s studies on erectile function produced no statistically significant results, the commission said.

Pom strongly disputed the commission’s assertions. “We do not make claims that our products act as drugs,” the company said. “What we do, rather, is communicate, through advertising, the promising science relating to pomegranates. Consumers and their health providers have a right to know about this research and its results.”

The F.T.C. proposed an order that would require the company to get F.D.A. approval before it makes any future claims that its products prevent or treat serious diseases.

In its federal lawsuit, Pom Wonderful accused the F.T.C. of applying a new standard for deceptive advertising to the food and dietary supplement industry that overturns 20 years of commission policy. That policy was laid out earlier this year by the F.T.C. in separate deceptive advertising actions against Nestle HealthCare Nutrition and Iovate Health Sciences.

Pom also said that the F.T.C. was, in seeking to require F.D.A. oversight over the company’s claims, treating pomegranate juice as a drug, although the products “do not carry the risks associated with pharmaceutical drugs.”

“It’s a shame that the government is unable to understand this fundamental distinction,” the company said, “and instead is wasting taxpayer resources to persecute the pomegranate.”

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Rabies deaths are on the rise in Vietnam, according to the country’s National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, whose director blamed slack management by provincial health authorities and public ignorance of the threat.

But subscribers to ProMED, a disease-outbreak Web site, have pointed out another contributing factor: in the mountainous rural northern provinces where the problem is worst, many people are fond of eating dogs.

Most rabies is transmitted by bites from stray dogs. The disease kills about 55,000 people a year around the world, mostly children under 15, according to the World Health Organization.

In parts of Vietnam, according to the national government, only one dog out of 25 is vaccinated, and there is a regular cross-country trade in dogs for the table. (Raising dogs for meat is popular in many countries, especially in southeast Asia and West Africa.)

A study in the journal PLoS Medicine last year described the deaths of two rabies patients in Vietnamese hospitals. Neither had been bitten, but one had cut up and cooked a dog killed in a traffic accident, while the other had eaten a sick cat.

Many Vietnamese refuse to eat vaccinated dogs, said Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People, an animal protection magazine, because the only vaccines locally available are grown in sheep brains using an outdated method invented by Louis Pasteur. If improperly stored, those vaccines can give rabies to the dog, and in turn to the diner.

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