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soning, but that progress for individual patients comes with a downside: It could hurt the nation's ability to spot and solve dangerous outbreaks.
• Next-generation tests that promise to shave a few days off the time needed to tell whether E. coli, salmonella or other foodborne bacteria caused a patient's illness could reach medical laboratories as early as next year. That could allow doctors to treat sometimes deadly diseases much more quickly -- an exciting development.
• The problem: These new tests can't detect crucial differences between different subtypes of bacteria, as current tests can. And that fingerprint is what states and the federal government use to match sick people to a contaminated food. The older tests might be replaced by the new, more efficient ones.
• "It's like a forensics lab. If somebody says a shot was fired, without the bullet you don't know where it came from," explained E. coli expert Dr. Phillip Tarr of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
• The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that losing the ability to literally take a germ's fingerprint could hamper efforts to keep food safe, and the agency is searching for solutions. According to CDC estimates, 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from foodborne illnesses each year, and 3,000 die.
• ___

• NEW YORK (AP) -- The American Civil Liberties Union says it will ask the Organization of American States' human rights commission to investigate the U.S. government for allegedly violating the rights of convicted terrorism plotter Jose Padilla by labeling him an "enemy combatant" a decade ago and subjecting him to interrogation that amounted to torture, including sleep and sensory deprivation in solitary confinement.
• The watchdog legal group told The Associated Press that it plans to file a petition Tuesday morning to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which serves as the human-rights investigation arm of the Washington-based OAS. The regional international organization promotes cooperation among the 35 independent countries of the Americas.
• Jamil Dakwar, the ACLU's human rights program director, said this will be the first-ever petition to be filed to the OAS commission by an American citizen against the U.S. government alleging torture and abuse.
• It asks the OAS body to recommend that the United States publicly acknowledge

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