33 died, ....it is a complex world out there.

Ouote from news reports

"Two Colorado cantaloupe farmers who pleaded guilty to charges related to a deadly listeria outbreak have agreed to meet with family members of people who died and to donate any money they may collect from a related lawsuit to victims and their families, a lawyer said Tuesday.

The comments by defense attorney Forrest Lewis came in federal court in Denver as Eric and Ryan Jensen entered their pleas to six misdemeanor counts of introducing adulterated food into interstate commerce.

The 2011 listeria outbreak traced to the tainted fruit caused 33 deaths and sent scores of people to hospitals."

33 Died...still think we don't need an FDA?

The FDA was fully funded in 2011, if they did their job, then there would not be 33 dead right?

Ask the 33 what the FDA did for em lately.

If your comfortalbe with the idea of an FDA, go ahead, but don't get comfortable with the idea that the FDA we have is the FDA we need.

The FDA has been issuing recalls and withdrawals for at least 40 years that I know of. Guess you can not get them all. Go to FDA.gov and take a look.
The list is updated daily.

No organization I ever worked for was perfect. Even the best organizations miss and screw up sometimes. Point is, what would we have if there was zero, no FDA? Would the results be the same? Personally, I think they catch most , but their threat makes us safer. My opinion.
Never will be 100%, but I feel safer for them being there.

It is an expectational part of the American way of life that we take for granted.Oddly, it is a silent part of our government which we seem to love to hate.

It's a strange case to me, because my uncle used to grow cantaloupe in Colorado and I don't recall taking any special precautions against contamination. I'm not even sure we washed the fruit after it was picked. These growers must have been doing multiple things wrong to have contaminated so much fruit to the extent that so many people got so sick. The details in the Wikipedia article below confirm this.

The FDA is to food safety like state troopers are to highway safety. There might be only one cop for every hundred miles of highway, but people drive a lot slower than they would knowing there's nobody on patrol.
Listeriosis outbreak

From the article Mark referenced-

"FDA investigation

An investigation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found that the contaminated cantaloupe harvest contained four separate Listeria monocytogenes strains, which the governmental agency found to be "unusual", but was still trying to determine the reason.[19] On October 20, it was reported that the FDA officials had found listeria on dirty, corroded equipment used by Jensen Farms, which had been bought used and was previously utilized for potato farming. It was stated by the government that the "equipment's past use may have played a role in the contamination".[20] Water contaminated with listeria was also found on the floor of the packing plant and it was determined that the workers moving around the plant had spread it, as the contaminated water was also found on the cantaloupe conveyor belt. It was noted by officials that Jensen Farms had "passed a food safety audit by an outside contractor" six days before the outbreak.[21]

The method of how the listeria bacteria first came to be in the plant remains unknown, as the soil on the farm was determined to be clear of the bacteria. It is suspected, however, that a "dump truck used to take culled melons to a cattle farm...could have brought bacteria to the facility".[21][22] Furthermore, Bacteria growth may have been caused by condensation stemming from the lack of a pre-cooling step to remove field heat from the cantaloupe before cold storage.[23][24]"

"Jensen Farms response

In response to the initial reports by the CDC on the contaminated cantaloupe, Jensen Farms issued a voluntary recall on September 15 of the entire harvest crop of 300,000 cantaloupe that it had distributed to its chain stores. The FDA made the public announcement for the recall after Listeria infection was confirmed by Jensen Farms at its main Colorado branch.[26] Jensen Farms was also forced to temporarily shut down its processing plant while the recall is ongoing.[27] Government officials have been investigating the company's main facility in Colorado to determine if there was "animal or water contamination", but there have been no results from the investigation thus far.[19] Holly, Colorado residents were described as being left "reeling and in fear" because of the disaster for its local producer.[2"

Okay, so the FDA still doesn't know exactly how or when the bacteria got there. More to the point, the FDA did not catch it ahead of time, all they did is a follow up investigation. Now this farm is out millions, if they even survive this event, despite the fact they appear to have made good faith efforts to recall the product. How many of us buy a piece of used equipment and sterilize it before use? How many of us visit auction barns, other farm fields, other farms without disinfection our foot wear coming and going? How many of us hit manure left int he road by spreaders 2, 5, 25 miles from home and carry it back to our farms?

Having an FDA is fine, assuming they do their job. Having the FDA on your farm every day checking up on you, testing every single animal or other product you send off the farm? That's about what it would take. Animal RFID, RFID in your crop too? Where does it end? I'd rather have the States or Counties doing the job were it up to me, assuming they could get the funding FDA uses. Local control is more effective, faster and usually far cheaper than Federal control.

Yea the FDA keeps us safe just like the War on Poverty made us all rich.Big Brother solves all our problems,let the Gov't hire some dummy and in 6 months he's an expert and knows 10X as much as
the average citizens that are paying his salary.

In general, government agencies have no incentive to reduce their "footprint" by instituting policies that would reduce their manpower requirements, budgets or are cost effective. The EPA just waves a magic wand and says "thou shalt get 54 mpg". Who bears the cost of that? The person who buys a car and that's every one of us. Cap and Trade has no positive impact other than to create a bunch of jobs for bureaucrats and raise the cost of energy for....wait for it..... every one of us.

My wife and daughter's jobs involve dealings with several government agencies in the medical field: FDA, Medicare, HHS. The stories they tell of the inane requirements, rules that serve no useful purpose and the paperwork that these agencies require are enough to make your blood boil. You have to have people to fill out the paperwork on the private side and then you need people on the public side (govt) to handle it. And most of it is useless.

It's like the requirement to require backup cameras on every vehicle sold to the tune of $ 2billion/year to consumers. Number of deaths attributed to backups? Less than 900/yr. Will the cameras prevent any of those? Who knows. I'm sure it won't bring it to zero.

Too many govt agencies, too many federal workers. All because the libs want to implement their "nanny" state.

They're suing Primus Labs,the auditors who were supposed to be preventing things like this.
Law suit

The FDA is the problem, Should there be someone inspecting and testing product on the open market, sure, however the FDA like the entire government is so corrupted and over sized they are ineffective, hence people dying, FDA approved drugs soon after their approval killing people, multiple lawsuits etc.... The FDA should be broken down to specific areas, such as Food, Drugs, etc.. and Not allow anyone who was working for Big nnalert to work for the administration, and also not allow anyone to leave the FDA to work for Big nnalert, this is where the biggest problem currently exists.

The FDA worked out dandy for those 33 people.

There are a lot of things that there are no incentives to improve, though.

Pretty much anything related to cars: fuel efficiency, safety, emissions... The normal average person isn't going to not buy a car.

A cleaner, safer, more efficient car is a more expensive car. If the normal average person can buy a smoke-belching deathtrap for $1 less than a clean efficient safe car, they will.

Imagine if we had nothing but late 1960's cars with the traffic levels of today. You wouldn't be able to BREATHE anywhere near a road, or in a city. Gas would be $12/gallon. There would be a lot more deaths on the road.

Yeah, like the police and most other govt. agencies, they come in and make a stink after the fact.

We need some kind of oversight and safety rules, but again, I'll bet they could be ran ten times better by some sort of industry/private trade group.

Gene

Might be a stupid idea, but I was always taught to wash fruit bought from a store, etc before eating it. The idea behind it, the way I understood, as a kid, was more that everyone and their brother had handled that object, and you never knew where their hands had been, or anything else for that matter. Heck it could have been hauled back to the farm in a manure wagon for all anyone knew, or the store clerk setting it out could have left the restroom without washing his hands.

In any case the contamination is typically going to be on the outside of a fruit, mellon, or whatever. To that end washing it is the only sure way to know it's clean before cutting into it to eat, and the fact these folks didn't is no more the farmers fault than it is yours or mine. Heck why not make the argument that their 'nanny' the FDA didn't hammer home the advice to wash the items before consumption as not doing so could be hazardous to their health, so they are as culpable as the farmers? Heck millions are spend every year telling us how bad cigarettes are, how you need to wash your hands after using the restroom, how you need to handle raw meats to avoid contamination, etc, etc, so why is the same not done when it comes to another situation that has the potential to be just as deadly? Makes no sense at all to me.............

Many people believe that Uncle Sam is looking out for their best interests, safety, health, etc. all of the time. Good luck. Yet those in power always praise the agency and those involved with/in charge of it, no matter how awful the response to a problem that the agency should have been on top of. "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job!" and the current federal "healthcare.gov" websites are fine examples. Brownie's agency (FEMA) got massive budget increases and power/authority increases after he left, and HHS will get big financial increases and add more employees because/in spite of their major fudge-up.

Government agencies have zero, repeat zero incentive to be nearly faultless at what they do. If they did, the flow of money into those agencies would be capped/tied to inflation or even cut back, and they couldn't raise heck after the fact to make it look like without them things like this would increase ten thousand fold. 33 people died. FDA'll claim they were understaffed and propose a bunch of new rules. They'll get some extra money and add extra "agents" next year.

Alot of government agencies have gone from agencies devoted to responding to a problem and trying to educate those involved and the public so that problem doesn't happen again to wishfully thinking they can prevent any potential problem all of the time. They soon will try to prevent any theory of any potential problem or any fantastical thoughts anyone might ever have of someone/something ever possibly possessing the potential of causing a problem. EPA is to that point already.

My sympathies to the families of the deceased.

AG

I really fail to see why they're getting charged. Where the heck was the FDA in all this? A farmer is not mandated to protect the public. Obviously if they knew there was a problem with the cantaloupe, they wouldn't have shipped them out, but not knowing, they did ship them out like it was a regular shipment. The FDA however, is mandated to protect the public, and failed miserably at doing so. Now they're just passing the blame to someone else, to avoid the sh!t storm that should be surrounding them right now. Right off the FDA website "FDA is resbonsible foramong other things) Protecting the public health by assuring that foods (except for meat from livestock, poultry and some egg products which are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture) are safe, wholesome, sanitary and properly labeled; ensuring that human and veterinary drugs, and vaccines and other biological products and medical devices intended for human use are safe and effective"

Saying we don"t need the FDA and other numerous federal agencies is like saying we don"t need Santa Claus. I mean, where would most of us be without Santa? A lot of us were raised in poor families and if there hadn"t been a Santa Claus, we wouldn"t have gotten anything for Christmas. Right? So think about that before you go condemning these much-needed agencies.

(quoted from post at 17:13:24 10/23/13) Yea the FDA keeps us safe just like the War on Poverty made us all rich.Big Brother solves all our problems,let the Gov't hire some dummy and in 6 months he's an expert and knows 10X as much as
the average citizens that are paying his salary.

Click to expand...

Talking about our new congress persons?

Story I heard was that the FDA had been on them about cleanliness in the processing area, and they never did the cleaning or maintenance they were supposed to do.

Sounded to me like FDA was doing what it was supposed to do- obviously, you can't have an inspector on site at every vegetable farm in the country- your cantaloupes would be 87 bucks a pound.

It is a big global world we live in and a simple life on the farm may not be so simple after a trip to the drug store.

I read this recently:
"this Pulitzer Prize-winning series has examined how dangerous and poisonous pharmaceutical ingredients from China have flowed into the global market. Reporting on four continents, Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker traced the illicit ingredients through traders and middlemen that formed a supply chain stretching from small factories in rural China to consumers around the world. The stories detailed the devastating, sometime deadly, human cost of this toxic pipeline.

Is it realistic to think the state or county health department is better able to deal with this?

Click the link I posted and you'll see that it wasn't really FDA or USDA that was responsible for inspecting the equipment on this one. Not disagreeing with you about the role of FDA,but they only found the source and eventually filed the charges. An independent private company was responsible for the inspections or so it seems.

(quoted from post at 11:41:27 10/23/13) It is a big global world we live in and a simple life on the farm may not be so simple after a trip to the drug store.

I read this recently:
"this Pulitzer Prize-winning series has examined how dangerous and poisonous pharmaceutical ingredients from China have flowed into the global market. Reporting on four continents, Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker traced the illicit ingredients through traders and middlemen that formed a supply chain stretching from small factories in rural China to consumers around the world. The stories detailed the devastating, sometime deadly, human cost of this toxic pipeline.

[b:1947054598]Is it realistic to think the state or county health department is better able to deal with this?[/b:1947054598]

Click to expand...

State and county law enforcement agencies co-ordinate and exchange information with other agencies all over the nation and most of the world. Why would state and local food and drug outfits be different? I don;t know if you've ever dealt with many Fed Gov agencies, but I have. Other than truly massive budgets and state of the art equipment, I haven't seen where having ".gov" in your web addy makes one solitary bit of difference in effectiveness. In fact, in many cases I saw it was laughable how inept some of the Feds were. So you go ahead and put your faith in Washington based bureaucracies, I'll put mine in the local guy whose kids might be in harms way.

//////

(quoted from post at 19:41:27 10/23/13) It is a big global world we live in and a simple life on the farm may not be so simple after a trip to the drug store.

I read this recently:
"this Pulitzer Prize-winning series has examined how dangerous and poisonous pharmaceutical ingredients from China have flowed into the global market. Reporting on four continents, Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker traced the illicit ingredients through traders and middlemen that formed a supply chain stretching from small factories in rural China to consumers around the world. The stories detailed the devastating, sometime deadly, human cost of this toxic pipeline.

Is it realistic to think the state or county health department is better able to deal with this?

Click to expand...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/health/17poison.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

"F.D.A. Tracked Poisoned Drugs, but Trail Went Cold in China"

"The F.D.A.’s mission ultimately failed. By the time an F.D.A. agent visited the suspected manufacturer, the plant was shut down and Chinese companies said they bore no responsibility for the mass poisoning."...

"The following May, Mr. Pulham, who was part of the original F.D.A. investigative team in Haiti, tried to revive the investigation. “Is it possible to block-list all Chinese pharmaceutical products until we gain cooperation?” he asked. The suggestion went nowhere."...

"At the end of 1997, a year and a half after the F.D.A. began tracing the poisonous shipments, one of its investigators, Ted Sze, finally got inside the Tianhong chemical plant in Dalian. But glycerin was no longer made there, and Mr. Sze had no records to inspect. The plant manager, Mr. Zhang, told investigators that he had received no complaints about his products and that his company had not produced the poison.

Mr. Sze, now retired from the F.D.A., said in an interview that he had no choice but to accept the manager’s word and clear the company of wrongdoing. “By the time I went there, the plant was already shut down,” he said. “The agency can only do so much.”"


_____________________________________________________________

Glad to hear the FDA sorted all that out and that threat no longer exists. :roll: Actually, the FDA got slightly beyond nowhere in this case, and it took them forever and a day to get there. They now warn suppliers and manufacturers to check for diethylene glycol in glycerin shipments. I feel safer already.

Surprise, surprise, surprise. Many counterfeit products, poisons, and poisoned products originate from China, polluter of and junk dealer to the world, and China had no interest in our interest in finding out the who, when, where, and how of all of this, and possibly bringing those involved with or responsible for this to justice in this case, and likely others. FDA with all of their "authority" likely spent millions investigating, and eventually got around to finding just about diddly squat in China (and never will because they have no authority there and will only get lip service from officials and locals), and the threat of a repeat of this at any time is quite probable, as it has happened repeated times already. I never would have imagined something like this coming from a fine, upstanding nation that produces quality products for the world like China. :roll:

The same country thought dogs and babies would do just fine with more melamine in their diets. They're still sickening and/or killing our dogs today, but the FDA has yet to cut off imports of dog food ingredients from China, as they're still seeking information.

In the USA, if you don't follow regulations and/or maintain the mountains of paperwork regulatory agencies force upon companies and individuals who's activities are regulated by those agencies, some pretty massive fines can be levied, and criminal charges brought, even if it's just over paperwork that doesn't have anything relavant to any situation such as the above. Many times records must be kept for each and every action pertaining to a regulated activity, and even if every single proper action is always taken and some of the paperwork is missing, you're in a heap of trouble.

In China, our investigative farce the FDA were told by the poison plant's manager "that he had received no complaints about his products and that his company had not produced the poison" and the FDA then "had no choice but to accept the manager’s word and clear the company of wrongdoing."

That'll show them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/americas/06poison.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&fta=y

China prosecuted a few in this story, but only because their activities threatened the well-being of or actually killed some of their fellow countrymen. It's clear from the article that nobody there has a clue what's going on, nor do they seem to have an ounce of concern about products destined for export.

AG