Monday, February 18, 2008

"We need more boots on the ground at the plants."

So says the president of the Humane Society of the latest food scandal, in which 143 million pounds of ground beef ("four times bigger than the previous record") has been recalled in the wake of yet more unsavory revelations about slaughterhouses:

The recall by the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company, based in Chino, Calif., comes after a widening animal-abuse scandal that started after the Humane Society of the United States distributed an undercover video on Jan. 30 that showed workers kicking sick cows and using forklifts to force them to walk.

The video raised questions about the safety of the meat, because cows that cannot walk, called downer cows, pose an added risk of diseases including mad cow disease. The federal government has banned downer cows from the food supply.

Agriculture officials said there was little health risk from the recalled meat because the animals had already passed pre-slaughter inspection and much of the meat had already been eaten. In addition, the officials noted that while mad cow disease was extremely rare, the brains and spinal cords from the animals — the area most likely to harbor the disease — would not have entered the human food chain.

“The great majority has probably been consumed,” said Dr. Richard Raymond, the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for food safety.

I feel safer already.

What does it say when a country can squander billions of dollars on an unnecessary, unjustified war but struggles to keep its food and toys safe? Speaking of which, don't miss either installment (Part I or Part II) of Sara Robinson's "Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare." In Part II, she points out that America's for-profit healthcare system might wind up being a national security issue in its own right:

Our every-man-for-himself attitude toward health care is a security threat on a par with unsecured ports. In Canada, people go see the doctor if they're sick for more than a day or two. It was this easy access to early treatment, along with the much tighter public health matrix that enables doctors to share information quickly, that allowed the country's health care system to detect the 2003 SARS epidemics in Toronto and Vancouver while they were still very localized, act within hours to stop them before the disease spread any further, and track down and treat exposed people before they got too sick to be helped. In both cases, the system worked flawlessly. The epidemic was stopped within days and quashed entirely in under a month, potentially saving of millions of lives.

In the U.S., that same epidemic might easily have gone unnoticed for critical days and weeks. If the first people to get sick were among those 75 million without adequate insurance, they probably would have toughed it out a few extra days before finally dragging their half-dead carcasses into an ER somewhere. Not only would they be much farther along in the course of the disease—and thus at greater risk of death themselves—every one of them could have infected dozens or even hundreds of other people in the meantime, accelerating the spread of the epidemic.

Perhaps Osama hasn't hit us in years because he's on the run, fleeing George Bush's terrible swift sword. Or perhaps he's just kicking back and waiting for the E. Coli Conservatives to do his job for him.

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