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Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms of Iowa, two Iowa-based dairy farms, have collectively recalled 550 million eggs due to a salmonella outbreak, the largest such recall in recent history. Both have close ties to Jack DeCoster, an agribusiness owner. Now, Rep. Rosa DeLauro wants to know more about DeCoster, and what federal regulators knew about them:
A key member of Congress plans to send a letter to federal regulators Monday seeking a detailed explanation of what they knew about the activities of an Iowa egg producer at the center of a salmonella outbreak and massive egg recall.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration and Agriculture Department about Austin “Jack” DeCoster, who owns Wright County Egg. DeLauro chairs the House Appropriations agriculture subcommittee [...]
DeLauro’s questions are aimed at getting more information about how much federal regulators knew about DeCoster’s poor compliance record and what steps were taken to ensure safety at DeCoster’s facilities.
In the past 20 years, the DeCoster family operation, one of the 10 largest egg producers in the country, has withstood a string of reprimands, penalties and complaints about its performance.
The Food and Drug Administration has been systematically dismantled over 30 years of deregulation, underfunding and conservative neglect. Eighteen months of the Obama Administration’s renewed focus have yet to overcome these obstacles. The FDA simply does not have the resources to prevent outbreaks like this or to inspect every plant, nor do they have the authority to administer the kind of penalties that would actually force compliance, rather than the producers seeing it as the cost of doing business.
Rick Perlstein coined the term “e.coli conservatism,” which chronicled this deregulatory fervor. It has continued under a Democratic Administration because it’s hard-wired into the funding streams and the regulatory apparatus.
The House passed a food safety bill last summer that would have at least reversed some of this trend, but it’s been, say it with me now, stalled in the Senate, and while a tentative agreement has reportedly been reached, many see the Senate product as having little to do with “food” or “safety”. It’s possible the egg recall will act as a corrective and force through something more legitimate, but in the meantime, we’re still living under accumulated rules from Presidents who didn’t care much at all about food safety. And that’s why this recall happened, with more recalls expected and more people sure to get sick.
Free safety tip in this article: Don’t eat undercooked eggs.
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Hey, it’s cheaper to let people get sick than it is to do the proper inspections.
Everyone knows it’s just good bidness to work that way
The FDA is too busy giving passes to dodgy drugs and harassing smaller farmers. You’d think, the priority for regulators are the larger farms, particularly the top 10. If they can’t manage that before everything else, they aren’t doing their job at all, no matter how many staff they have.
Know what you’re getting– Good post about reading egg carton labeling:
Cracking the Code.
http://gigabiting.com/?p=863
I live 3 miles from one of the Hillendale Operations. Lucky me!
Plenty of fertilizer about?
How’s this for irony. What better motto for the modern GOP then “Caveat emptor” (Let the buyer beware!)
My best friend buys the guano for his farm across the road. Best crops around.
Pig shit OTOH really reeks on our factory farms. We call it the smell of Money.
The Senate should be abolished. Its one hundred elite members treat it as a good ol’ boy network. Every damn one of them are bought and paid for by any combination of giant agribiz, big oil, big pharma, the MIC, big telco.
They have no usefulness to the public, except to do it harm.
I have paid no attention to this. How does e. coli get into an egg? Is the shell porous enough for that to happen?
My neighbors got 14 chicks in June who they said would be laying by October. I know at least one’s a boy, as I recently heard him start to practice his cock-a-doodle-doos. But I’m hoping the 2 of them have plenty of eggs to supply the one of me, when the laying begins. They I won’t have to think about it again, at least for myself.
General point about FDA, sigh.
Public health tends to suffer under conservative/libertarian governance. The Right don’t address public health because it just doesn’t compute in their ideology. They are in denial of human interconnectedness. It’s no accident that the infant mortality level in the U.S. started to go up under Bush-Cherney for the first time in 40 years–this after reaching an historic low under Bill Clinton.
Welcome to the Dome
my sister-in-law just adopted 5 chickens, themselves.
“E.coli conservatism” is a shorthand for conservative policies that made Americans sick. It shouldn’t be precisely connected to this outbreak, which is about salmonella. I believe it got its start during the outbreak with the e.coli-tainted spinach.
Thanks.
So how does the salmonella get into the egg?
Eightteen months of the administration have not overcome much. When do we see progress?
It gets into the feed that gets into the uterus where it lodges in the yolk.
Sorry quick driveby or would drop a link.
That’s good enough. Thanks.
Good policy for anything that came from an animal, I think. I like beef rare, but I’ve even been more careful about that lately. It’s clear our government isn’t up to inspecting the places that produce this food, and there’s too much incentive for them to cheat from time to time.
I’ve been told that the only rare meat that’s unsafe is ground meat. As explained to me, the bad stuff is on the surface of the meat and gets killed in the process of cooking. In ground meat, OTOH, the original surface is all mixed up, so the cooking must go thru & thru. If someone knows that to be inaccurate, let me know.
Bush certainly did everything he could to dismantle regulatory agencies but Obama has done little to rebuild them, clear out the Bushbots, and push legislation to give an agency like the FDA the power to issue its own recalls. Instead we get this litany of good corporate citizens, like Don Blankenship (Massey Energy), Tony Hayward (BP), Jamie Dimon (JPM), Lloyd Blankfein (GS), John Mack (MS), and now Jack DeCoster.
These are the faces of modern corporatism. They will steal from you, poison your environment, make you sick, even kill you on occasion. Ain’t crony capitalism grand?
Did you know that the FDA can Only issue a mandatory recall on Baby Formula? It’s true. All other recalls are just requests. The requests take time and are negotiated with the company. Big Cow and Big Pig also cut a deal with the FDA /USDA to not allow the public to know the names of the stores that ecoli laced beef was shipped to, it is considered proprietary information. (from the book Mad Cow USA)
That’s my understanding as well. I eat burgers and meatloaf well done (and the occasional pot roast as well) but the various steaks, are medium rare to rare.
(all pork and chicken also cooked well of course)
Actually, regulatory and enforcement agencies and their orientation has been one of the more pleasing aspects of the Obama presidency, Interior Dept. and Salazar aside. The EPA is actually enforcing the Clean Air Act and will be rolling out an alternative climate change policy starting 2011. The SEC has been more active in the past 6 months than it has been in the past 10 years. The Labor dept under Hilda Solis has been wonderful at redirecting the focus back to worker rights and not unions. They’ve been running this great ad campaign on getting workers educated on their rights and fighting for them if they aren’t given. The civil rights division of the justice department has also had a similar re-orientation. Now, of course, the administration isn’t perfect (*cough*dispersants*cough*) but there are substantial differences in the outlook and vision of these agencies under a democratic president and its important for us to realize and remember this difference.
There are many things I’m upset with the administration on, but I think it’s important for us not to become hopelessly cynical and see failure when it isn’t there. Now only if I would take my own advice :)
“Don’t eat undercooked eggs” can’t be the answer to this issue and I believe there is going to be tremendous pressure for it to be the answer. If the proper farm food safety procedures and inspections are in place to make sure there is no “bad stuff” on the inside or the outside of the eggs or the meat,there should be no problem with eating eggs over easy or not well done hamburgers too.
I remember reading about this fellow’s ought to be crimes back in the 70′s in the Maine Times. At some point the government has to run these people out of business. I think his operation mostly left Maine because the state started to come down on him.
http://robertreich.org/post/985703357/corporate-rotten-eggs
The bacteria are passed into the hen’s bloodstream after she eats rat turds, and then passed into the forming eggs.
A former meat inspector (I heard on a radio interview some ten years ago) reported that before deregulation, meat-on-the-hoof was decontaminated in the corrals leading to the slaughterhouse. After Phase 1 deregulation, power hoses removed the fecal matter from the hanging and moving skinned carcasses. Now, the consumer is expected to lick it off.
Wright County Egg and Hillandale are dairy farms? I didn’t know chickens could lactate :^)
You stupid stupid naive unenlightened communist social fascist marxists.
You’re underestimating the beauty, majesty and divine glory of the invisible holy hand of the unfettered free market.
Sure you’re kid might get salmonella and die, and sure you might have lost a son, but the egg company has just lost a consumer! Think of how much the companies going to suffer because your child died! He’ll never eat another egg again so that’s going to impact their bottom line. They’ll cry their eyes out while they wipe themselves with 100 dollar bills on golden toilets.
If people get sick and die they’ll never buy eggs again and the free market will correct itself with it’s divine and omniprescient will. When they see they lost a few hundred dollars a year because of dead consumers they’ll happily spend thousands of dollars to raise the quality of their facilities so they don’t lose a few hundred dollars…yea that’s the ticket!
If you don’t want to get sick then don’t eat tainted food…if you do eat tainted food never eat that tainted food again and you’ll stick it to those guys.
Tch, naive libruls!
Good sarcastic rant!
Eventually, researchers will likely find the origins of salmonella somewhere in the United States Senate. Voila! – at that point it can be quarantined by order of the surgeon general and put out of bounds and out of business. No need for an amendment. Let them fester in their own guano!