How many times have you been eating a nice spinach salad and hear on the news that there is an outbreak of E. Coli due to contaminated spinach? (The associated photo is an electron microscope image of that bad actor). For the next two days we hear that more people are being sickened by the spinach. But eventually we discover that the farm is in California. Bad Farm! But even later we hear, "Wait, the E. Coli is really in lettuce from Florida"! It would be terrible if this happened once, but it happens frequently.
So what consequence does this have on the good farms that produce spinach? They lose business unnecessarily, and the spinach gets a bad rap. And, it has occurred with other vegetables. And, of course poultry with salmonella and so forth. How do these chain of events propagate? The media and the FDA, (Food and Drug Administration)! One goes way too fast to beat the competition, and the other moves to slow due to poor practices.
In journalism the rule used to be don't publicize anything until you can answer the What, Why, When, Where, and Who. So much for due diligence!
Despite the fact that FDA employee's make good money with great benefits, they still say that they are understaffed. Welcome to the wonderful world of bureaucracy! Seems like a priority problem to me. We can kill a single enemy combatant 7 thousand miles away with a drone, but we can't find the E. Coli. Maybe we should let private companies do the job that the FDA seems not to be able to do. Just a thought.
So what consequence does this have on the good farms that produce spinach? They lose business unnecessarily, and the spinach gets a bad rap. And, it has occurred with other vegetables. And, of course poultry with salmonella and so forth. How do these chain of events propagate? The media and the FDA, (Food and Drug Administration)! One goes way too fast to beat the competition, and the other moves to slow due to poor practices.
In journalism the rule used to be don't publicize anything until you can answer the What, Why, When, Where, and Who. So much for due diligence!
Despite the fact that FDA employee's make good money with great benefits, they still say that they are understaffed. Welcome to the wonderful world of bureaucracy! Seems like a priority problem to me. We can kill a single enemy combatant 7 thousand miles away with a drone, but we can't find the E. Coli. Maybe we should let private companies do the job that the FDA seems not to be able to do. Just a thought.
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