Two days after federal officials discovered that Peanut Corporation of America knowingly shipped salmonella-laced products 12 times in the last 2 years, they launched a criminal investigation.

Soon there followed a public lynching on Capitol Hill and a liquidation filing under Chapter 7 of Virginia’s bankruptcy laws.

That was fast.

The salmonella outbreak has sickened 637 people in 43 states and killed at least 8. Nearly 2,000 products have been recalled.

“A criminal investigation has been initiated through (the FDA’s) office of criminal investigation. (It has) to work through the Department of Justice to develop a case and prosecute, if that’s what it comes to,” Stephen Sundlof told the Washington Post.

Sundlof is director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the FDA.

The investigation might or might not trigger felony charges against PCA and its management team, according to Michael Taylor, a one-time food safety official at the FDA now at George Washington University.

“Under the food safety law, if you ship an adulterated food in interstate commerce, that violates one of the so-called prohibited acts and can be prosecuted criminally,” Taylor told the Post.

“Food can be considered adulterated if it is produced under unsanitary conditions.”

According to Taylor, the penalties for relevant misdemeanors top out at a fine of $1,000 plus a year in prison per offence. For felonies, the maximum punishment is a $10,000 fine and 5 years in jail.

No one knows yet whether it’s possible to file separate claims for each tainted lot, or how the bankruptcy filing will affect progression of the criminal investigation.

“The penalties are relatively light,” Taylor said. “If the facts are…as…reported, you have a company that was knowingly and recklessly shipping products from a facility known to be contaminated with salmonella,” he told the Post.

“The question is whether the criminal remedies in the Food and Drug Act are sufficient, given the severity of the harm.”

Looks like we know the answer to that.

The director of China’s central leading group on rural work has outlined an approach to manage growing unrest precipitated by a sharp economic downturn that has left 26 million migrant workers jobless.

“If mass incidents happen,” said Chen Xiwen “all officials must go to the front line and try to persuade people face-to-face. They cannot…push police to the front lines. The police cannot be deployed unless there are truly unfortunate situations where people are beating, attacking, robbing or burning.”

And officials should punish the instigators, learn from the conflict and figure out how to improve what they do, he added.

In that order, we assume.

Right now 15% of China’s 130 million migrant workers are unemployed and 6 million more will enter the pool this year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

China’s ranks of migrant workers have exploded in the past 20 years, as farmers are increasingly forced to rely on supplemental income, which can account for up to 60% of their total take.

“There is a saying in the countryside that to feed the mouth depends on farming but pocket money comes from outside,” Xu Yong told the Washington Post.

But “that road is blocked this year,” said the director of the Center for Chinese Rural Studies at Central China Normal University.

So at a recent conference with the state-owned press, Chen offered more than just crisis management tips. He urged local officials to solve land disputes, resettlement issues and environmental problems for example, lest they spawn demonstrations.

So will the protests increase? Xu couldn’t say for sure. “During the Spring Festival, most migrant workers went home and had a rest,” he said.

“After this, they will hunt for jobs. If they can’t find any jobs but stay in the cities, it will be easy to generate conflict and instability.”

“April and May will be the most serious time,” Xu said.

Female physicians implement evidence-based guidelines for drug utilization in heart failure more often than their male counterparts, according to Magnus Baumhäkel and colleagues at the University Hospital of Saarland.

Meanwhile, female heart failure patients are less likely than male patients to receive guideline-recommended drugs, the scientists reported in European Journal of Heart Failure.

To reach these conclusions, the scientists carried out a cross-sectional, observational study of 1,857 New York Heart Association Class II heart failure patients who were treated in eastern Germany from March through November, 2006.

Just over 52% of the participants were male and 63% received care from male physicians.

Female participants were a bit older—their mean age was 70 while the men clocked in at 66.

The scientists found that 80% of heart failure patients received either an angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or an angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB). Nearly 4% received both. Only 70% of the patients were receiving beta-blockers, a third recommended drug for heart failure.

But the key was that use of “ACE-inhibitors or ARBs was significantly higher in male compared with female patients, and recommended doses also tended to be higher in males,” wrote the scientists.

Men also tended to get higher doses of beta-blockers, consistent with trial findings showing that higher doses of all these drugs are more effective.

Even so, only half the participants got “sufficient doses of ACE-inhibitors and only every fourth patient [was treated] with the recommended dose of a beta-blocker,” they wrote.

All in all, the researchers were left to conclude somewhat gallingly that a “female patient was likely to receive the worst medical treatment from a male physician, whereas male patients were best treated by a female physician.”