Two summers ago, Chinese authorities discovered that melamine, a nitrogen-rich chemical used to make plastics and fertilizer, had been added to pet food which was then exported to the US. The tainted food poisoned thousands of dogs and cats.

Officials subsequently banned melamine from animal and human food, and designated it a controlled substance. This meant the government was supposed to supervise all aspects of its production and distribution.

Soon thereafter, melamine got into China’s milk supply, sickened 54,000 babies, killed four and indelibly stained the nation’s reputation as factory for the world’s goods.

How could that happen?

Simply put, the government’s surveillance plan proved to be no match for a hellish combination of impoverished farmers, chemical manufacturers out to increase profits, organized crime syndicates and complicit local officials.

Few in China’s army of small dairy farmers had heard about the pet food scandal and even fewer had ever heard of melamine. But they all knew where to get tasteless, white “protein powder” that supposedly rendered milk more nutritious and marketable, and when added to plain water created a slurry that could pass quality tests for milk all by itself.

The farmers claim they were not told the powder was a poison. Many had been squeezed between rising commodity prices and government price controls and could not break even without melamine economics.

The “protein powder” distributers were actually organized crime syndicates that secured the toxic substance from chemical manufacturing plants. They sold the powder out of legitimate-looking stores, placed representatives at milk production facilities, utilized door-to-door salesmen and stood by to answer questions about how to use the product.

The toxic powder was produced by chemical engineers who purchased scrap melamine, a byproduct of various manufacturing processes, and converted it to a form that would dissolve in water.

The manufacturers were pleasantly surprised to profit from something they had heretofore called waste. They dared not ask why customers wanted melamine scrap.

“I don’t know if my customers tell me the truth or not. I didn’t ask for what purpose they buy it,” Liu Qiujiang told the Washington Post. Liu works at a chemical company situated near the headquarters of the Sanlu group, a diary company at the epicenter of the national disgrace.

The convenience store is a fixture of Americana. There are 150,000 of them in the US, and collectively they do $577 billion in annual sales. That’s 4% of our gross domestic product.

But the truth is Japanese convenience stores are more convenient.

You can’t buy 900 calorie soft drinks or roller grilled hot dogs at Japanese convenience stores, but you can buy hot soup, cold beer, french fries, fresh sushi and fresh pastries. Fresh food is available because delivery trucks stop up to 10 times per day to drop off new stuff and cart off perishables that haven’t sold fast enough.

And the toilets are spotless.

Oh, and you can book concert tickets or airline tickets, order home appliances, sign up for driver’s education, change diapers, pay taxes, or pay bills at Japanese convenience stores.  Japanese people paid $80 billion worth of bills this way last year.

Not yet convinced? You can drop off luggage for your next shinkansen ride and get this, you can park your baby stroller at the small indoor play area next to a bar that serves vodka coolers.

“For mothers to maybe have a sip of alcohol while children play is, I think, welcome,” Kazuo Kimera told the Washington Post. She works for Lawson Inc, which operates 8,600 convenience stores in Japan.

Lawson’s also caters to Japan’s aging population by carrying false teeth cleansers, gravesite adornments, hair dyes and so forth. They’ve widened the aisles and enlarged the print on signage. Most stores have blood-pressure machines and lounge chairs as well.

At FamilyMart, another ubiquitous Japanese convenience store, you can arrange for someone to clean your home, and at a Japanese 7-Eleven you can drop off your laundry.

Japanese convenience stores also coordinate with the government to distribute water and other emergency supplies after natural disasters like earthquakes. And they are viewed as places of refuge where victims of physical abuse can wait for the police. Last year 40,000 Japanese used convenience stores for this purpose.

Convenience stores aren’t exportable thank heavens, but the concept of a more convenient convenience store is. Hmmm…

Google Flu Trends, a recently released free tool from the company’s philanthropic division, Google.org, may detect regional influenza outbreaks 7-10 days faster than traditional methods.

And the same early-warning technology can probably be used to detect outbreaks of food borne illnesses and bioterrorist attacks as well.

Google’s bio-surveillance tool relies on the fact that many people enter phrases like “do I have the flu?” into search engines long before calling their physicians. Working with the Centers for Disease Control, Google created a basket of search phrases that suggest influenza and then aggregated all the hits by location. Terms like thermometer, muscle aches, and flu symptoms made the list.

Flu Trends utilizes terms like minimal, moderate, and intense to describe flu-related search activity and displays its results on a map (shown), along with flu prevention tips, vaccination site locators and links to helpful Web sites.

This process is light-years ahead of normal tracking systems which rely on people to visit a  doctor and get tested for the flu, and then for positive results to be relayed to and analyzed by the CDC.

Last February for example, the CDC reported an influenza outbreak in mid-Atlantic states, but in retrospect Google’s search data had revealed a regional spike in flu-related search activity 2 weeks earlier.

Superior lead times can save lives by enabling officials to target educational campaigns and resources where they are needed, and by motivating people to ramp up personal hygiene practices like hand washing . 

As compelling and wonderfully modern as this sounds, Google Flu Trends is still an emerging technology that must undergo rigorous prospective testing. The tool will inevitably be associated with false positive reports for example, because common but less deadly viral illnesses present with the same symptoms as influenza. The inclusion or exclusion of certain phrases into the above-mentioned basket of terms is likely to impact the tool’s accuracy.

A research paper outlining Google Flu Trends methodology will soon be published in Nature. That’s a good start.