Cantaloupe vs. al-Qaeda: What's More Dangerous???...

[Indi Guy]

[font size="5"] O[/font][font size="3"]ne of the most important revelations from the international drama over Edward Snowden's NSA leaks in May is the exposure of a nearly lunatic disproportion in threat assessment and spending by the US government. This disproportion has been spawned by a fear-based politics of terror that mandates unlimited money and media attention for even the most tendentious terrorism threats, while lethal domestic risks such as contaminated food from our industrialized agribusiness system are all but ignored. A comparison of federal spending on food safety intelligence versus antiterrorism intelligence brings the irrationality of the threat assessment process into stark relief.[/font]

In 2011, the year of Osama bin Laden's death, the State Department reported that 17 Americans were killed in all terrorist incidents worldwide. The same year, a single outbreak of listeriosis from tainted cantaloupe killed 33 people in the United States. Foodborne pathogens also sickened 48.7 million, hospitalized 127,839 and caused a total of 3,037 deaths. This is a typical year, not an aberration.

We have more to fear from contaminated cantaloupe than from al-Qaeda, yet the United States spends $75 billion per year spread across 15 intelligence agencies in a scattershot attempt to prevent terrorism, illegally spying on its own citizens in the process. By comparison, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is struggling to secure $1.1 billion in the 2014 federal budget for its food inspection program, while tougher food processing and inspection regulations passed in 2011 are held up by agribusiness lobbying in Congress...

more ... http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/18715-cantaloupe-vs-al-qaeda

[Nye Bevan]

1. What's the highest number of people killed by cantaloupe

in a single year?

[progressoid]

3. If I were one to live in fear, I would find food to be more fearful than TERRA

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/5/5/99-0502_article.htm#tnF1

We summed illness attributable to foodborne gastroenteritis caused by known and unknown pathogens, yielding an estimate of 76 million illnesses, 318,574 hospitalizations, and 4,316 deaths. Adding to these figures the nongastrointestinal illness caused by Listeria, Toxoplasma, and hepatitis A virus, we arrived at a final national estimate of 76 million illnesses, 323,914 hospitalizations, and 5,194 deaths each year (Figure).

Since I'm generally OK with what I eat, I'm not too worried about Brown Bombers either.

[Electric Monk]

2. 44 recs and counting

here http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023671552