Deadly E. Coli in Europe

The BoingBoing blog has a good article by Maggie Koerth-Baker that summarizes the current state of knowledge about the deadly E. coli outbreak in Europe:

Europe is currently in the grip of a deadly outbreak of Escherichia coli O104:H4—a rare strain of a common bacterium. Prior to last month, E. coli O104:H4 had only been identified as a cause of illness in one, single person. As of yesterday, the bacteria had sickened thousands and killed 27.

...

Over the weekend, authorities thought they'd pinpointed the outbreak to a bad batch of organic salad sprouts. But, when preliminary tests of the sprouts turned up no evidence of contamination, they backed off and started pointing the finger at imported cucumbers and tomatoes from Spain. Today, the official opinion flip-flopped again. Direct tests of the sprouts are still turning up negative. But epidemiological studies show that people who ate the sprouts were 9 times more likely to become infected than those who had not.

She explains how hard it is to pinpoint the source of the outbreak. It's a nice education into this fight against food-borne illness.

Robert Reich Reflects on a Corporate Criminal

The tainted egg scandal is headline news in the US. Robert Reich takes time to reflect on what he knows about the criminal who runs this criminal egg enterprise:

Thirteen years ago when I was Secretary of Labor, DeCoster agreed to pay a $2 million penalty (the most we could throw at him) for some of the most heinous workplace violations I’d seen. His workers had been forced to live in trailers infested with rats and handle manure and dead chickens with their bare hands. It was an agricultural sweatshop.

Several people in Maine told me the fine wouldn’t stop DeCoster. He’d just consider it a cost of doing business. Evidently they were right. DeCoster’s commercial egg business has a record that would make a repeat offender blush.

In 2003, DeCoster pleaded guilty to knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants (who don’t complain about unsafe working conditions, below-minimum-wage pay, and unsanitary facilities). DeCoster paid a record $2.1 million penalty for that one.

In the 1990s he was charged by Iowa authorities for violating state environmental laws governing the runoff of manure into rivers. He continued to violate environmental laws so often that the Iowa Supreme Court approved an order barring him from building more hog structures.

In 2002 the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission fined DeCoster’s operation $1.5 million for mistreating female workers. The charges included rape, sexual harassment, and other abuses.

Earlier this year, DeCoster paid another fine to settle state animal cruelty charges against his egg operations in Maine.

In other words, the current national salmonella outbreak is just the latest in a long series of DeCoster corporate crimes. He’s fostered a culture that disregards any law standing in the way of profits. Along the way, DeCoster has abused the environment, animals, his employees, and his customers.

Reich goes on to suggest some very cheap, very modest changes in the bureaucracy that would help corral these corporate criminals. Go read the whole article.

What I find hard to swallow is the two-tier system of justice. You go rob a corner store and pocket $100, you will spend years in jail. But if you are a corporate criminal who repeatedly injures workers and customers, the country says "please and thank you" to you and raps you on the wrist with minor fines that don't even equal one day's profits.

One of the fundamental requirements of justice is that the punishment meet the crime. It doesn't. Another is that criminal prosecution be swift and sure. It isn't. Another is that justice must be seen to be done. It isn't.

How to Fix a Problem

Here is a very simple, effective, and cheap solution to the problem of food safety. It is probably too simple, too effective, and too cheap to be adopted by any government, but I like it and think it will work. Here is the key bit from the Ian Ayres blog entry on Freakonomics:

By now, virtually everyone in the country has heard that the Peanut Corporation of America knowingly shipped peanut products contaminated with salmonella bacteria, leading to the deaths of at least nine people and sickening 22,500 others. Last year, the Westland/Hallmark slaughterhouse processed meat from “downer” cattle that were too sick to stand, forcing a recall of 143 million tons of beef. President Obama has spoken of a food-safety “crisis” confronting the country, and that over-used term does not seem to be an exaggeration in this case.

So what should we do? Government inspectors are too few in number to visit all of the thousands of food preparation facilities, let alone conduct thorough inspections. Some large-scale purchasers conduct their own inspections of their suppliers, or the suppliers themselves pay for inspections, as was apparently the case in the peanut incident. But private audits have not proven to be much more effective than, say, the private credit-rating agencies that gave AAA ratings to all those mortgage-backed securities.

Maybe we should take a lesson from the 1980’s commercials for the Hair Club for Men. You may remember those cheesy ads, which concluded with the pitchman declaring that “I’m not only the Hair Club president, I’m also a client.” The right way to align the incentives of management with those of the customers, in other words, may be to make sure that the managers are customers. One way we could implement this would be to require inspectors to certify that they saw the president of the company (or perhaps the plant manager) eating a substantial helping of the product being sold. (Maybe the inspectors should be required to eat some as well!) Someone who knows that his downer-burger was made from a cow that was too sick to stand, or his salmonella-butter-and-jelly sandwich contained infested nuts, might not be so happy about his working lunch.