Salmonella Peanuts Had Metal Fragments In Them. Yep, We Should Totally Let The Free Market Handle It.

5:02 pm EST January 30th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 16 Comments

The government acknowledged Friday that a shipment of peanuts from the plant linked to a salmonella outbreak contained a “filthy, putrid or decomposed substance” later identified as metal fragments. The shipment was returned to the U.S. in April, months earlier than reflected in a federal tracking database.

The rejected shipment — coming across a bridge between New York and Canada — was logged by the Food and Drug Administration but never tested by federal inspectors, according to government records. The computer records show a mid-September date, just weeks before the earliest signs of the outbreak.

…

“The FDA failing to follow up after this incident, does that mean that products that are not good enough for a foreign country are still good enough for the USA?” asked Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. “That’s a double standard that has deadly consequences for our citizens.”

Topic: FDA, Food, Health Care

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16 Responses to “Salmonella Peanuts Had Metal Fragments In Them. Yep, We Should Totally Let The Free Market Handle It.”

MobiusKlein says:

January 30, 2009 at 7:02 pm

Can they be prosecuted for murder? Or at least negligent homicide. It’s a bit beyond civil law by now.
C.S.Strowbridge says:

January 30, 2009 at 8:36 pm

MobiusKlein says: “Can they be prosecuted for murder? Or at least negligent homicide. It’s a bit beyond civil law by now.”

Hell yeah!

Charge them with murder.

Hell, charge them with terrorism, and stick them it Gitmo.
Vik says:

January 30, 2009 at 8:37 pm

You are a moron. Just as not all liberalism should be tarred with the same brush, neither should all of the free market. There is a role for the government to setup quality standards and to enforce those standards. Regulation directed correctly works. Just as the free market in many respects works far superior to anything you can come up when people are able to act on their entrepreneurial spirit unfettered by a bureaucratic bullshit. Find what works and keep it. Find what doesn’t and get rid of it. That’s a hell of a lot smarter than some Rachel Maddowish snark on the free market.
Rudy says:

January 30, 2009 at 9:40 pm

Exactly. Let the market sort it out. If enough people get sick and die from tainted peanut products, companies will stop using that particular supplier. Ain’t the free market system a beautiful thing?
SFC B says:

January 30, 2009 at 10:58 pm

How does the “free market” take the blame for the FDA failing to inspect a food shipment it logged and tracked which was returned due to being contaminated?
Rudy says:

January 30, 2009 at 11:15 pm

It may have a little something to do with the way Bush and his corporatist cronies crippled Federal regulatory agencies in a cynical effort to increase profits at the cost of the public good.
jr says:

January 30, 2009 at 11:54 pm

Michael “Brownie” Brown types at every position of authority under Bushco
Duros62 says:

January 31, 2009 at 12:20 pm

It’s MOI-der!

There is a role for the government to setup quality standards and to enforce those standards. Regulation directed correctly works.

Too bad it didn’t. Like at all.
Any word on whether PCA was a big GOP donor?
durablend says:

January 31, 2009 at 12:22 pm

matt621 wrote: We should totally do it like China does!

Execution? Works for me!

But then who would you righties have to look up to if all your heroes have been fried?
Rudy says:

January 31, 2009 at 12:33 pm

I think we should be more like Japan, where disgraced executives at least perform the service of committing suicide.
rachel says:

January 31, 2009 at 12:46 pm

Doesn’t anybody wonder how “metal fragments” can possibly be a “filthy, putrid or decomposed substance”? I mean, they’re not exactly healthy to eat, but they shouldn’t of themselves carry e. coli.
anotherbozo says:

January 31, 2009 at 3:51 pm

From what I hear the salmonella peanuts came from Georgia. The metal-fragment peanuts came from Canada. Two diff events.
Zython says:

January 31, 2009 at 5:43 pm

Doesn’t anybody wonder how “metal fragments” can possibly be a “filthy, putrid or decomposed substance”? I mean, they’re not exactly healthy to eat, but they shouldn’t of themselves carry e. coli.

They could be rusted.
Duros62 says:

January 31, 2009 at 8:26 pm

So, wait, they accepted salmonella contaminated peanuts in Canada, put metal fragments in them and then sent them back?

And then we used them anyway?

Oh yeah, fewer regulations and food safety are definitely in order.
Rudy says:

January 31, 2009 at 9:38 pm

But corporations will be crushed under the weight of that sort of unfair bureaucracy!
locus says:

February 1, 2009 at 9:10 pm

Rudy said:

“It may have a little something to do with the way Bush and his corporatist cronies crippled Federal regulatory agencies in a cynical effort to increase profits at the cost of the public good.”

Rudy, you’re a little late. The problems with FDA began in 1994 after the Republican Revolution. Gingrich and his boys flatlined the FDA budget. For the last 13 years (even during the Clinton years) the FDA’s budget hasn’t come close to keeping up with the pace of development in industry. If you have several thousand new companies to inspect while the number of inspectors never goes up, it’s a problem waiting to happen. This says nothing about the advances in production technology that FDA should be keeping up with internally. (Their training budget also suffered.) It should be no surprise to anyone that FDA has had to change its inspection practices to focus on the highest risk situations. They don’t have the money or manpower to do anything else despite what the law says they should be doing.