09.16.10
Eat Shit Farms, LLC (continued)
Some additional notes from today’s hardcopy Los Angeles Times, including a frank admission that the food regulatory system is broken.
Completely, DD might add.
It’s more proof that nobody in power is really interested in doing anything about the Dickensian characters from US agribusiness who emerge as threats to the general welfare.
But they are always ready to throw immoral amounts of money at bioterrorism research and defense into protecting against an outside threat.
“[While] most policy-makers and food safety experts agree the regulatory system is broken, they also agree that chances of a significant overhaul anytime soon are dwindling,” reported the newspaper here.
Unintentionally telling lines, an excuse, actually:
“In what FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg recently termed an ‘unfortunate irony,’ new FDA rules governing egg safety went into effect July 9, too late to prevent the current salmonella outbreak.”
Another unfortunate irony is that when Margaret Hamburg was installed at the FDA by the Obama administration, she was lauded for her focus on bioterrorism.
That has certainly worked out well.
In a sidebar piece, Eat Shit Farms Wright County Egg in Iowa was announced as the target of a civil suit including sickened people from six states.
“Self-policing doesn’t work,” said the lawyer representing them, during a press conference announcing the suit. “The farms failed to follow US regulations to prevent contamination,” reads the newspaper.
The Wright County Egg salmonella distribution “is the largest instance of salmonella poisoning since the Centers for Disease Control began tracking cases more than thirty years ago.”
In the last installment of Eat Shit Farms, I contrasted Austin “Jack” DeCoster’s Iowa tainted egg farms with the case of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon in which the group instigated deliberate salmonella contamination.
In 1984, the Rajneeshee sickened 751 people with Salmonella typhimurium.
DeCoster’s firm is responsible for 1,519 diagnosed cases of salmonellosis.
The lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the suit estimated the number much higher.