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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThere’s a Major Foodborne Illness Outbreak and the Government’s Shut Down (Maryn McKenna, Wired)
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/shutdown-salmonella/Late-breaking news, and Ill update as I find out more: While the government is shut down, with food-safety personnel and disease detectives sent home and forbidden to work, a major foodborne-illness outbreak has begun. This evening, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture announced that an estimated 278 illnesses reported in 18 states have been caused by chicken contaminated with Salmonella Heidelberg and possibly produced by the firm Foster Farms.
FSIS is unable to link the illnesses to a specific product and a specific production period, the agency said in an emailed alert. The outbreak is continuing.
This is the exact situation that CDC and other about-to-be-furloughed federal personnel warned about last week. As a reminder, a CDC staffer told me at the time:
I know that we will not be conducting multi-state outbreak investigations. States may continue to find outbreaks, but we wont be doing the cross-state consultation and laboratory work to link outbreaks that might cross state borders.
That means that the lab work and molecular detection that can link far-apart cases and define the size and seriousness of outbreaks are not happening. At the CDC, which operates the national foodborne-detection services FoodNet and PulseNet, scientists couldnt work on this if they wanted to; they have been locked out of their offices, lab and emails. (At a conference I attended last week, 10 percent of the speakers did not show up because they were CDC personnel and risked being fired if they traveled even voluntarily.)
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There’s a Major Foodborne Illness Outbreak and the Government’s Shut Down (Maryn McKenna, Wired) (Original Post)
swag
Oct 2013
OP
gopiscrap
(23,767 posts)1. Oh shit!
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)2. .
.
Warpy
(111,437 posts)3. Well, we knew it was going to happen, didn't we?
Wars are essential. Keeping filth out of the food at home is not, apparently.
SunSeeker
(51,797 posts)4. We should send packages of Foster Farm chicken to Boehner. nt
progressoid
(50,013 posts)5. oh, the market will sort this out.
joshcryer
(62,287 posts)6. This is how the zombie apocalypse starts.