The Bush administration spent a great deal of time in office building up homeland security defenses against mostly-imagined threats in biological and chemical terrorism.
On the domestic side it did all it could to destroy food safety by getting rid of regulators.
The years of the Bush presidency could be characterized in many ways, all bad, one being the recurring feature of a surprising number off mass illnesses caused by contamination in food products.
In this climate, the Peanut Corporation of American, run by Stewart Parnell, caused one of the biggest outbreaks of salmonellosis in the country’s history. The outbreak killed nine people and sickened hundreds.
By contrast, anthrax bioterrorist Bruce Ivins killed five and made 17 others very ill.
A federal grand jury indicted four former employees of a peanut company linked to a 2009 salmonella outbreak that killed nine people and sickened hundreds, leading to one of the largest recalls in history.
The 76-count indictment was unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Georgia. It charged the former employees of Virginia-based Peanut Corp. of America with conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and others offenses related to contaminated or misbranded food.
Named in the indictment were company owner Stewart Parnell, his brother and company vice president Michael Parnell, Georgia plant manager Samuel Lightsey and Georgia plant quality assurance manager Mary Wilkerson.
FDA inspectors found remarkably bad conditions inside Parnell’s processing plant in Blakely, Ga., including mold and roaches, and the company went bankrupt after the recall …
Stewart Parnell, who invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before Congress in February 2009, once directed employees to “turn them loose” after samples of peanuts had tested positive for salmonella and then were cleared in a second test, according to e-mail uncovered at the time by congressional investigators.
The indictment cited emails sent between defendants talking about contamination in the product.
Stewart Parnell was subsequently eclipsed by Austin ‘Jack’ Decoster, an Iowa egg farmer with a history of violations who caused the biggest recall of eggs in US history when his products delivered Salmonella enteriditis in 2010.
Decoster’s egg farms were directly responsible for sickening 1,500 — 2,000, or more, and the recall of almost 400 million eggs.
DD blog covered some it in the series puckishly entitled Eat Shit Farms, here.
Trivia note: Bart Stupak became momentarily famous for trying to attach an anti-abortion amendment to the Affordable Care Act. He subsequently declined to run again, apparently frazzled by the enmity directed at him from women’s reproductive rights organizations. Stupak is now a lobbyist.
Soligenix stock was on the rise again Tuesday, a day after it gained more than 14 per cent when it said it will submit a proposal for a potential multi-million dollar contract to develop its radiation therapy, OrbeShield.
Its stock closed at 80 cents on Monday, and was lately up by more than 11 per cent, changing hands at around 89 cents as of 1:25pm ET.
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has called on the company to submit a full proposal for a potential multi-year, multi-million dollar contract to develop OrbeShield.
Ever since the beginning of the war on terror, Soligenix — once known as DOR Biopharma, has been kept alive solely by bioterror defense funding, most notably for a ricin vaccine. It has also been peddling its anti-radiation sickness nostrums, always called Orbesomethings, for the same period of time.
The company has never brought anything to market. In 2012 its stock fell into virtual worthlessness. Since then it has been kept alive by a value pumping maneuver (a reverse stock split that took 20 shares, then valued at a nickel a piece, and condensed them into one worth about eighty cents) and parasitic attachment to another biodefense funding stream.
Soligenix — from the archives. Keynsian job program digging holes and filling them back in. Or high button welfare workfare for a handful of lousy scientists? You decide.
They all cluster around computer science, engineering and hard science degrees.
Lehigh, my alma mater, is number six in the list.
As far as LU went, the benefits of the school reputation, when it came to immediate hiring, went exclusively to the civil, mech and chemical engineers. Those were the only students corporate America deigned to send recruiting scouts to the school for.
During this time the student body and athletes were “the Engineers.”
Today, the school is the home of the much less inspiring “Mountain Hawks,” changed because it now has more non-engineers enrolled than the real thing.
Also in the list, the obvious — CalTech, here in Pasadena, MIT, the Ivy League schools … (Harvard’s there, where you must go and learn to be a lawyer to have any chance of being among America’s nobility, or at least one of its immediate shoeshiners.)
Surprisingly, the service academies at Annapolis and West Point are included, again for their undergraduate engineering degrees. (The inclusion of Stevens Tech in Hoboken, and a couple other old but small relative unknowns made me laugh, names that show the editors were pooching their list to add a few surprises.)
So if the only measuring stick is bucks on hiring and at mid-career, perhaps all the schools are a good bet, if you’ve the right degree and can survive the four years with a reasonable record.
Otherwise, I’m jaundiced. Monetarily, Lehigh has never been of even the slightest value. And of the majority of the peers I recall in my classes, not so much, initially, for them, either.
However, I was able to make a difference at the school. Unlike the vast majority of engineers who there at the same time.
On 9/11, it would also be good to remember what the catastrophe brought on.
Share it.
Lethal trivia: One week after, we were treated to anthraxer Bruce Ivins from the heart of the US biodefense industry. That’s him in the video and the white label pressing of his home-made country 45.
Just think about that for a minute. Bruce Ivins, a man at the very center of one of the more famous defense science installations, used 9/11 as cover to kill, sicken and spread fear in more Americans.
Fort Detrick, the place where Ivins made the anthrax, has never apologized.
Posted in Bioterrorism at 10:16 am by George Smith
It’s the time of year when the microbe at the heart of my old doctoral thesis is in highest concentration in Gulf Stream waters. And while most people suffer no consequences, a small number have very bad luck.
If you live near or on the east and gulf coasts and spend summers at the beach or in brackish water in the estuaries you’ve probably come in contact with Vibrio vulnificus. Fortunately, it takes big numbers of it in a wound or ingested and a few other factors to get infections started.
From the wires:
According to the Hillsborough County Health Department, two Hillsborough residents have died this year from Vibrio vulnificus infections and five other cases of Vibrio have been reported in the county.
The microscopic bacterial organism Vibrio vulnificus occurs naturally in coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It is especially common during the summer months when water temperatures are warmer.
Infections are most often due to consumption of raw oysters and other undercooked raw shellfish. They can also result from exposure of open wounds or sores to seawater.
WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — A Robeson County man is dead after being exposed to a flesh eating bacteria while fishing near the state line.
Doctors say Charles Curtis Hardin, 56, of Fairmont, died last week after they amputated his leg in an attempt to save his life.
TAMPA (FOX 13) –
Authorities are investigating the death of a 43-year-old Hillsborough County man whose family says a flesh-eating bacteria is to blame.
Tim Ingram, of Gibsonton, passed away last Sunday. His family says it was because of a bacterial infection called vibrio vulnificus.
The source of the infection is not known. Ingram’s wife Ava tells FOX 13’s Doctor Joette Giovinco that Tim had been in the Gulf of Mexico waters off Redington Shores. They then learned of a beach bacteria advisory through a relative. He also ate raw oysters before getting sick.
There are two types of infection, one that sets in after consumption of raw filter-feeder shellfish carrying the organism. Underlying conditions such as liver disease and depressed immunity contribute.
The other stems from wound infection occurred during fishing and boating.
Unfortunately, you can’t tell who among the general population might be most at risk just by looking. Summer recreation and vacation doesn’t work that way.
Both infections are disastrous although the former is generally much more lethal than the latter. In any case, they’re both quite worrisome when diagnosed.
Although the bacterium is susceptible to antibiotics, when the patient presents infections are frequently too fulminating and advanced for best outcomes. It is an example of extreme bioterrorism from nature, so to speak.
Vibrio vulnificus produces a protein digesting enzyme known as a collagenase. And this gives it its “flesh-eating” invasive characteristic.
People will always eat raw shellfish in the summer. And more and more, with global warming, will be spending time in warm salty water in the late summer. Which regrettably guarantees we will always have cases at this time of year.
Stimulus works. It creates jobs. One of the best examples is the explosion in hiring for homeland security, at the local level, for the last twelve years.
Coincidentally, following upon the weekend post which discussed parts of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, this new hire in Odessa, TX:
Ector County Commissioners approved the hiring of a bioterrorism technician at their meeting Monday, but the position covers more than just the threat of terrorist attacks.
Ector County Health Department Director Gino Solla said the position, part of the public health preparedness system, is part-time and assist with duties that involve dealing with disasters that range from manmade attacks to natural incidents.
“It could be radiological or even … a tornado,??? Solla said. “Any time people are hurt or killed, public health gets involved.???
Hired at a step five, or $13.36 an hour, Dillon Harris will be coming from Dwight, Ill., and is a student at Monmouth College. Studying to get into medical school while in college, Harris said he will be taking time off from his studies to get hands-on training before entering his field …
Bioterrorism technician. For this part of Texas. It’s an eye-rolling proposition.
There will never be a bioterror or any other kind of terror incident in this place. Still it is a job for someone who does not have one, which means money spent on the local economy. And — ultimately — all these jobs come from the federal government and grants from agencies like the Dept. of Homeland Security.
They are the equivalent of stimulus. Or, if you prefer, Keynsian jobs programs.
The funding, reads the newspaper, came from “the Bioterrorism Response Program after it was formed in 2003 in response to the Anthrax scares … a large part of the Public Health Emergency Preparedness budget has been issued through grants.”
The grants for the hire are scheduled through 2012 and 2013, it adds.
Readers know I’m a bioterrorism expert. They can easily understand the outrage that results when all domestic jobs which could theoretically be sustained or created by stimulus or thought of as bad.
Except in the cases of creating homeland security positions where there will never even be a theoretical need.
Having said that, creation of a new job in the Odessa area, whatever it may be, is a good thing.
The US military, through a West Point terrorism training school, released documents seized during the Osama bin Laden raid, a year ago this week. Readers know that despite the formidable achievement, for which the President deserves a great deal of credit, there has been no bin Laden dividend. The 99 percent has seen no benefit from his killing. The war, if anything, has accelerated with more drone assassinations and special operations work.
The original No-Prize was invented by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics. It was a way to say ‘atta-boy,’ a symbolic air prize totally without worth. And that’s the bin Laden doc release by the US government.
At the time of the raid the media, fed by government minders, dutifully reported that a “trove” of materials had been seized in the bin Laden compound.
Physically, perhaps it was true. However, the released of 17 declassified documents today, constituting over 170 pages of translated-into-English letters is a dud.
They are not particularly interesting. For example, in document “SOCOM-2012-0000004T” there is much trivial discussion on which media outlets in the US should get al Qaeda’s propaganda messages for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Fox News is written off.
“[CNN] seems to be in cooperation with the government more than the others (with the exception of Fox News),” the letter reads, penned by American-turned al Qaeda man Adam Gadahn to bin Laden. The Arabic version of CNN, he writes, is somewhat better.
In the end Gadahn makes the recommendation that every news channel receive a copy of Ayman Zawahiri’s 9/11 anniversary speech.
“Except for Fox News, let her die in her anger.” It is inadvertently funny.
Gadahn also recommends a few journalists by name — all them of seemingly cocked up in some interesting way.
There is “Brian Russ” — he means ABC’s Brian Ross. And “Simon Hirsh,” presumably Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh.
I leave only a picture for readers to determine why this is hilarious.
Were bin Laden and Adam Gadahn fans of re-runs of My Mother the Car? It is hard to know.
The other observation to be made is that being the preferred journalists of al Qaeda is like getting a recommendation from a colony of flesh-eating bacteria.
The remote possibility exists that some of the material has been doctored by the US government for the express purpose of humiliation.
Readers can zip out to Cryptome here, to see for themselves. But it’s mostly rancid old mutton, passed off as veal for a day or two in the mainstream media.
It shows again how short al Qaeda was on talent. It just adds to the picture that over a decade of war history had passed bin Laden and his terror men by.
Last year the picture was of bin Laden, alone in his compound, writing letters to his minions, missives ignored. Much like Hitler in the Fuhrer bunker near the end, moving formations that no longer existed on a room’s map table, no one daring to point out the obvious.
There are big differences, of course. In the grand scheme of history, Hitler still makes bin Laden look like a piker.
In sharp contrast, many Americans still know some of the famous names of US generals from WWII. Movies were made about them.
Nobody down ladder knows the names of the men who killed bin Laden. They may know the name of the dog on the mission — Cairo — because it was convenient publicity.
Americans can’t name the commanding generals in any of the theaters of war where there is action against al Qaeda or the Taliban. And they will never be able to do so because no one cares.
Glorious memorable movies will not be made. The war will go on, somewhere, always.
This is the way the military machine has made things. If there are any men or women of stature among them aghast at the length of the conflict and how millions upon millions of their countrymen have been economically disenfranchised and cast into ruin on the home front while they have continued to meaninglessly fight on, we will never hear it.
The nation’s top military officer told Harvard’s Kennedy School Thursday that despite the death of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the exit of longtime dictators from the world stage, and no mortal enemy in the form of a nation-state the United States is more vulnerable.
Army General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told students at a forum on the Cambridge campus that even though the world appears to enjoy greater stability and interdependence, threats looming beneath the surface — from cyber warfare to the proliferation of long-range missiles — actually place American security at greater risk.
“The truth is, I believe I am chairman at a time that seems less dangerous but is actually more dangerous,??? Dempsey said, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “That’s the essence of what I like to call the security paradox.???
Dempsey, who took on the role as top military adviser to President Obama last fall, has been criticized for asserting that the international scene poses greater harm than at any time in his lifetime – even the Cold War when the destruction of much of humanity loomed as a possible consequence of the nuclear standoff between superpowers.
A week from now no readers will remember this man’s name, only that yet another bit of exaggerated insane trash was passed off as wisdom from an expert.
We do not need or train good military leaders. They are only needed to ensure the machine continues to grind.
Why this blog exists
A scholarly report issued by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State entitled Carnage Interrupted: An Analysis of Fifteen Terrorist Plots Against Public Surface Transportation cites yours truly in the footnotes.
This is because I did primary research on the infamous London ricin plot.
The report, written by Brian Michaal Jenkins, a counter-terror expert and former Green Beret covers it, although under the label — Heathrow Express Ricin Plot.
“The trial of the defendants did not establish any link to al Qaeda or Zarqawi,” writes Jenkins. “Since all but one of the nine held for trial were acquitted, we can only speculate that at least some of them may have thought as part of the global jihadist enterprise.”
Or maybe not. For the text Jenkins eschews the political dimension of the case — which was its primary reason for being in the news in the first place.
The castor beans seized in no way could have been made into a WMD, or even a weapon that would have killed many. Jenkins grasps this.
In a reaction to a Scotland Yard officer’s claim that it “was going to be our 9/11,” Jenkins writes:
“This was a gross exaggeration of what was a terrorist fantasy, or at most, an amateurish scheme. The Heathrow Express plotters possessed no ricin and their planned method of disbursal was dubious.”
Jenkins still comes up a bit short on what ricin actually is, however. He writes that it might pose some hazard if smeared on handrails or doorhandles.
He knows ricin is not a contact poison and cannot be absorbed through the skin. But if there were open cuts on the hand?
No. If such were the case it would have been impossible to work in castor mills, work in castor plant fields, or handle castor mash — which was often packaged as fertilizer and used in mostly futile attempts to kill insect pests. Fatalities would have resulted.
In castor powder, which is all anyone has ever produced from castor seeds outside of fully-equipped biochemistry labs where people know what they’re doing, there is simply not enough ricin to make that a realistic hazard.
Eating it, however, is another matter. And there are times when people have tried to poison one another in domestic criminal cases with it.
The Heathrow Express/London ricin plot was a huge deal, politically. The Bush administration conspicuously used it to push for war in Iraq, making the claim that the UK poison ring — actually, Kamel Bourgass — was connected to al Qaeda in Iraq. It was in a slide used to present evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in league with al Qaeda.
Indeed, the UK prosecution’s initial strategy was try and tie the poison recipes of Kamel Bourgass to materials seized from al Qaeda hideouts in Kandahar and Kabul. They failed in this because that’s not where the poison recipes seized in the London ricin trial were from.
Nevertheless, the Carnage Averted monograph is a worthy read on a collection of failed terrorist plots.
Inspire magazine, while not meant to be an al Qaeda joke, has always been easy to brush off. It’s been an example of how al Qaeda has had a serious problem with recruitment filled as it is with wishful thinkers and fantasies on terror that will never come true. Al Qaeda, for practical purposes, is operationally dead. As far as the 99 percent and middle class America is concerned, it poses no serious threat.
Al Qaeda has been whittled down by American might over a decade of war. The US employs more money and manpower hunting it than it needs to destroy a handful of medium-sized nations.
Al Qaeda, while not gone, just does not matter. Jihadists may got lucky now and then in the future. But there won’t be any game changers with regards to the progeny of Osama bin Laden. The history book has closed on this chapter although the US war machine will continue to prosecute it.
Today then, news of the latest issues of Inspire — inspiring only laughter if you have any sense.
The men who launched al Qaeda’s English-language magazine may have died in a U.S. missile strike last fall, but “Inspire” magazine lives on without them — and continues to promote jihadi attacks on Western targets, offering detailed advice on how to start huge forest fires in America with timed explosives and how to build remote-controlled bombs …
But issue nine carries equally lethal advice, with “It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb,” which gives detailed instructions on how to ignite an “ember bomb” in a U.S. forest, recommending Montana because of the rapid population growth in wooded areas.
“In America, there are more houses built in the [countryside] than in the cities,” says the writer, who uses the pseudonym The AQ Chef. “It is difficult to choose a better place [than] in the valleys of Montana.”
Readers know US terror beat reporters are panderers. And stupid.
They choose not to point out the total cluelessness of the al Qaeda man.
More houses are built in the urban environment than in the woods. That’s a fact.
I live in southern California. In Pasadena. Where I can look outside and see the mountains, and the houses built right up to them and on their lower slopes. Every year southern California has fires, some of them set by arsonists. These fires burn down homes, frequently lots and lots of them.
Population of Montana: 998,199
Population of LA County: 9,830,420
Doh!
The al Qaeda men writing for Inspire have obviously never actually been to the United States.
They just wishfully think it would be good, and really terrorizing, if someone could like, uh, start a couple fires in … wait for it … Montana!
Where they’d be put out right away. Al Qaeda apparently cannot even scan net news archives for stories where fires do get out of control in states where lots of people live — like here, or … well. Do it yourself.
Inspire only shows two things — that al Qaeda is virtually destroyed and that US war-on-terror reporters are crap. The latter has been known for a long time.
The ABC news story, and others, note the new issues of Inspire are “riddled” with spelling errors.
One of al Qaeda’s most prominent radical clerics may have been killed in a drone strike last year, but his words appear to have lived on in a new issue of al Qaeda’s English-language magazine in which he calls for biological attacks against the U.S.
“The use of chemical and biological weapons against population centers is allowed and is strongly recommended,” U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki is quoted as saying in one of two new issues of the Inspire magazine.
Al Qaeda has never had any bioweapons capability. It is a fiction although the terror agency’s desire to have them is not.
What’s left of it, a small number of kooks and feebs worldwide, apparently continues to call for the wishful manufacture of biological weapons because its people, who are not very discerning, read everything about it in western news. And they have come to believe that because so many stories assert that it its elementary to produce biological weapons, someday it will be easy for them. Or it will fall into someone’s hands, magically, or something like that.
Reality, on the other hand, has not been kind to the group in this matter.
Everything wished for in Inspire has never happened. The only interesting issue was the one which covered, after the fact, the al Qaeda plan to bomb UPS and FedEx jets with bombs hidden in toner cartridges.
What happens when you ask someone who has never established any credentials in the hard sciences — like biology or chemistry — about the future of bioterrorism?
PAUL SOLMAN: Or maybe creating problems, says Marc Goodman, if the bio-hacker is so inclined.
MARC GOODMAN: As it becomes democratized, I can go ahead and capture your DNA and come up with a particular attack that’s targeted against you specifically.
PAUL SOLMAN: And all you have to do is shake my hand or something to get some DNA.
MARC GOODMAN: And I would have to do is shake your hand, get the coke can that you throw away, get the pen that you signed something with.
PAUL SOLMAN: And then cook up the Paul Solman virus — one and done.
The man doesn’t know anything about real world bioterrorism.
Indeed, one oddly named Genome Compiler Corp, paradoxically seems to indicate he’s never actually been in a lab that would lend practical expertise to the matter. On the other hand, it does have a nice glitzy look one associates with glib snake-oil peddling.
Anyway, with futurism, this isn’t the point. What’s important is that you sound good to laymen.
And that’s easy work in these environs. Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi, made a fortune on it decades ago. In fact, the bio-hacker making custom viruses for individuals was basically in one of his their books, War and Anti-War, published at least fifteen years ago (probably longer). Anyone who has read Wired, at least semi-regularly, for any length of time during its history of publication has also seen it many times.
Many can, and literally have, said viruses custom-made to kill you are
coming on the menu. And they’ll be puffing and squirting from the garage or basement because, if you read all the stuff at the PBS link, Petri dishes, DNA sequencing and making life has become so cheap. Evolution is so last decade.
It’s a story that gets repeated over and over, one that does well because it’s appealing and fun, just like tales about Bigfoot, magic, electromagnetic pulse guns and paranormal activity.
If you go out to the PBS link, you’ll see most of it is focused on the story-telling of Singularity University.
Singularity University is the work of Ray Kurzweil, a brilliant man who came up with optical character recognition and software for early synthesizers.
Kurzweil’s also about the clap-trap of the Singularity meme — that idea predicting achievement of God-like power through the the intersection of vast computing power and total control over biological systems.
For the rest of us, well let’s just say they’ll be no infinity-achieving computers, pet nanobots and popping of forever-pills. Sorry, only for the swells.
The Live Forever crew is now horribly common. With Kurzweil and others, it’s the fetish of gobbling vitamins and supplements daily, being frozen cryogenically, or becoming a cyborg. Custom viruses made from your handshake is very small beer. Indeed, how would they kill once you’ve attained computerized immortality?
If you momentarily click on the links, you’ll see custom Google lists of endlessly deadening articles about technological supremacy and the achievement of everything, all just around the corner.
However, if you read this blog regularly and actually like it, I’d imagine you’ve probably avoided it, just as one would steer clear of plates of singing maggots.
My lunch, revolting to some. Two hot dogs — actually cheaper turkey franks — and one for late in the afternoon. Since I’ve been doing the slime thing I wanted to let readers know: Of course I’m a hypocrite on meat. You have to be in this country.
I’m 90 percent sure turkey franks are made in a way similar to pink slime, from the worst cuts of the bird, stuff that used to be thrown away. Then sanitized, perhaps with ammonia, to kill all the salmonella and listeria.
And while I’ve been known to eat a raw hot dog in a pinch, mostly I boil them thoroughly. Once I even had something called a “Hot Dogger” that cooked by electrocution, making the hot dog part of a completed circuit you ran off the wall. (Did you ever have something like it? I would like to know.)
However, I’m also completely encouraged by the idea that one day, maybe soon, someone like Jamie Oliver will do a number on this, too, just the way pink slime was treated.
It will be a good thing because it’s the television coverage, complete with producer’s eye for unforced footage of mothers and kids going “Yuck!” and shrinking back in revulsion that galvanized consumer choice.
And if something is tossed off the market and more people keep thinking about the US agri-meat system, one in which toxic microbial growth is guaranteed, that’s very good.
As posted yesterday, the meat industry produces incomprehensible amounts of manure. The shit not only contaminates the cows on the outside when they stand in it, but also on the inside, when they are fed from grains cultivated in fields fertilized or tainted by runoff from it.
While bad practice, maybe — and it’s a small maybe — this wouldn’t have mattered so much but for one thing, toxic E. coli. It was not native to the cow intestine but now finds a home there and the way the meat industry does things is responsible. That’s the science of it.
It came about because the mass of excrement in proximity to the animal and meat processing makes for an excellent mixing process. And it cannot be ameliorated, therefore Rube Goldberg sanitation processing of the meat has become a feasible profit source.
So the technologies invented to cope with it are all band-aids, lousy inventions and jerry-bilt methods to diminish the numbers of dangerous microbes in the product — after the fact.
That’s the long and short of it.
From a security standpoint a bioterrorist can’t do as effective job as centrally placed business malfeasance in the food industry. It’s a topic the blog has discussed in the past when mentioning mass food poisonings caused by widespread bacterial contaminations in the last ten years.
Invariably, we have made and allowed an infrastructure in food processing which allows for casualties, presently factored out as an acceptable minor cost of doing business if the human losses are not too bad. If the profit margin is great enough a certain level of collateral damage in the way of foodborne illness and resulting fines are acceptable.
De facto, that makes the businessmen and companies fingered in food poisoning outbreaks better incidental bioterrorists than anyone purposeful.
For instance, in a multi-mail from the DailyKos last week:
Here’s the story. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) currently inspects all chicken and turkey carcasses for things like bruises, bile and feces before they are sent to further processing. However, the UDSA [sic] is now considering a pilot program that would eliminate that inspection and allow poultry processing plants to do whatever they want.
From now until April 26, the USDA is holding a public comment period on whether to go forward with this pilot program. During this comment period, we plan to submit tens of thousands of comments in opposition. Already, over 40,000 members of the Daily Kos community have signed our petition to the USDA …
I’m not a big believer in on-line petitions.
It wasn’t social networking that knee-capped the makers of pink slime. It was television, specifically Jamie Oliver and 60 Minutes, and well-placed articles in the New York Times.
