Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – Pilant's Business Ethics Blog

Salmonella Bacteria (Photo credit: NIAID)

No More Salmonella

This is not a problem that requires deep analysis. What’s in the balance? On one side, people’s lives and health and on the other profits from selling chicken. I think holding the industry to higher inspection standards is not going to double the price of chicken. This is not a problem that can’t be successfully dealt with. Let’s have the poultry industry finance a testing program to eliminate salmonella contamination. If other nations can do it, certainly we can.

It’s good business ethics to protect one of the principle stakeholders in your business, the consumer. We may safely assume that sickening or killing your customer base is unethical, and probably unwise.

Some will claim that the market will solve this problem, a concept I have ridiculed with some regularity. People will stop buying chicken from a company when that chicken makes them sick?

But the average consumer doesn’t know which chicken brands are safe and which are not. The safety can vary from one shipment of chickens to another from the same company. It’s a job only the government can take on. We, as consumers, cannot police the market. We may not often know what’s making us sick.

We live in the richest nation on earth. Surely we can afford to inspect chicken for salmonella poisoning.

James Pilant

Keeping salmonella out of chicken

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/22/206084/keeping-salmonella-out-of-chicken.html

Sweden has virtually eliminated salmonella in store-bought chicken, even though poultry there is industrially produced, just like in the United States. And even in this country, a 2010 Consumers Union study found no salmonella in the organic store-brand chickens it tested.

In other words, consumers shouldn’t have to accept salmonella-tainted chicken as just one of those unavoidable things. Yet that wasn’t the attitude of Foster Farms and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in response to the recent salmonella outbreak that sickened more than 300 people, most of them in California, and sent close to half to hospitals with antibiotic-resistant infections. Foster Farms refused to recall the suspect chicken shipped from its problem plants, saying that salmonella-tainted poultry is safe to eat if thoroughly cooked. The USDA refused to close the plants on the grounds that, unlike certain strains of E. coli, salmonella is not an adulterant, a poisonous or harmful substance.

From later in the article –

For too long in the United States, the agriculture industry has successfully pushed and prodded Congress and regulatory agencies into accepting practices that are literally sickening to the public. At minimum, we could begin to improve food safety by declaring salmonella an adulterant so that the USDA and agricultural operations are compelled to recall infected products.

From around the web.

From the web site, Salmonella enterica WILL RULE THE WORLD. (This purports to be Salmonella’s actual web site – I had no idea bacteria could type!)

http://salmonellaenterica.wordpress.com/about/

Hi, I’m Salmonella enterica! I’m plotting my way to rule the world, so if you don’t watch out… One of my masses of minions will INFECT YOUR SOUL. BWAHAHA. Ahem.

I’m a gram negative rod, and I’m working hard on mutating so I can
infect you no matter what you are! My goal isn’t a W death curve that
everyone seems so worked up about… MY GOAL IS TOTAL INFECTION. EVERYONE
WILL BE AT MY MERCY.

So far, I’ve gotten a decent amount of publication, but in the
future, No One will be able to deny my Very Impressive and Unavoidable
Impact on Everyday Life. I’m thinking of making this plan into the
acronym: NOVIUIE. Sounds evil. And French, with all the nasty letters
at the end for no apparent reason.

For right now, however, while people still have preventative measures
and disgusting medicines to combat my existence (as well as some odd
resistance here and there).. I plan to lay low and infect without
conscious effort. I mean, I keep my publicity up every now and then, but
that’s just because I can’t STAND being out of the spotlight for too
long.

From the same web site, Salmonella enterica WILL RULE THE WORLD. (Apparently bacteria can type but aren’t that much into spelling and capitalization, although they do like emoticons. jp)

curse this Swine flu thing! Such an attention hogger! These emerging diseases all think they’re little hot-shots, I swear! I was an emerging disease once!

I have History! I have a Track Record! People haven’t gotten rid of me yet!

“The CDC estimates that 1.4 million cases occur annually (CDC, 2005, October 13). ” –About Salmonella

:-\

*disgruntled * I used to be a real big deal with that Typhoid Mary Lady. Maybe it’ll happen all over again.

Health ALERT – salmonella outbreak in Foster Farms chicken (bloguvib.wordpress.com)

Gun Research Limited by NRA Sympathetic Legislators

From the New York Times:

The amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result, researchers say.

The dearth of money can be traced in large measure to a clash between public health scientists and the N.R.A. in the mid-1990s. At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

Alarmed, the N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill fought back. The injury center was guilty of “putting out papers that were really political opinion masquerading as medical science,” said Mr. Cox, who also worked on this issue for the N.R.A. more than a decade ago.

Initially, pro-gun lawmakers sought to eliminate the injury center completely, arguing that its work was “redundant” and reflected a political agenda. When that failed, they turned to the appropriations process. In 1996, Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, succeeded in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the disease control centers’ budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before.

One of the ways industry protects itself is by destroying or limiting research. The gun industry uses its political clout to make sure that evidence that it might find offensive is never done. This is very similar to using the government to eliminate competition or gain subsidies. Are any of these ethical? It depends on the circumstances. All over the world, trains (public transportation) are subsidized because of the many benefits they provide to society. And I could go on. But it seems unlikely that the kind of research that this legislation killed was inaccurate or unfair.

At a time when we need accurate information about the effects of guns in our society, one of the chief players in the controversy has worked hard to take facts off of the table. Gun research is a legitimate field of inquiry by the CDC. It is a public health crisis. It will continue to be.

James Pilant

Some fascinating quotes from around the web –

This is from the web site, Fundamentally Connie! (This is a very fine article and I strongly recommend it.)

Only modestly mentioned in weekend media coverage is attention to the effect of a tragedy such as this upon emergency responders. This is PTSD at its worst. I am a teacher; a researcher by choice; a parent, grandparent, a spouse, and with enough experience to clearly envision the horror they came upon; the classroom scene, the aftermath of devastation suffered by those whose call was answered. Few have mentioned the unimaginable job of the veteran Medical Examiner, working through the long and difficult night to categorize, identify, and document the extent of catastrophic bullet wounds suffered by tiny, innocent sons and daughters, grandchildren, parents, brothers and sisters; playmates silenced forever and removed quietly; …”attired in cute children’s clothing”, he noted, when asked.

From digiphile –

My Facebook feed is full of people offering prayers, voicing anger and frustration, and, happily sharing pictures of their own children. One of my friends announced the birth of his first child. Amidst grieving, new life and joy.

As the reality of this tragedy settles in, this moment may still be too raw to decide exactly what the way forward should be. In the wake of dozens of mass shootings in the past several years, there’s more interest in doing something to prevent them.

What, exactly, we should do to prevent more mass killings should be up for debate, but losing 18 children like this is unbearable. What science says about gun control and killings is not clear, though the literature should inform the debate.