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It was a wonderful life.

In August 2002 Dr. Niemtzow was admitted to Presbyterian Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania with a liver infection. For a man two years this side of one hundred, he was remarkably resilient. “Eat lots of protein,” his doctor told him as he was being sent home to recover. This was sound advice, but it plunged Dr. Niemtzow into a medical nightmare as bad as anything he had ever confronted in his small family practice.

Listeria is a common bacterium. So common it is found in the soil under the Rittenhouse Square gardens, carried by the dogs that walk through the park and the cats that graze the trash barrels behind the upscale restaurants just off the square. For the most part, listeria is as harmless as it is commonplace. But Listeria monocytogenes is a nasty bug—the strain you want to avoid. It is psychrophilic; it thrives in cold. In your refrigerator Listeria is as robust as the green-black mold growing on that chunk of parmigiano you bought two years ago. Once you eat it, it’s like a time bomb; it can take up to two months in your body before it makes you sick. If your immune system is suppressed, if you are pregnant, if you are very old or very young, just a small amount of it can kill you.

Frank Niemtzow was careful about what he ate. He was Jewish and avoided pork, and he did not eat the fatty foods that have turned us into a high-cholesterol nation. When the doctor at Presbyterian told him to eat lots of protein in order to rebuild the strength the liver infection had cost him, the old family practitioner doubled up on prepared, ready-to-eat deli turkey. What could be safer? Soon he was back in the hospital. When a doctor specializing in infectious diseases told him he had listeriosis, Niemtzow, who knew a good deal about public health, was shocked. He couldn’t imagine how he had been exposed to the bacteria. When he learned he had contracted the disease by eating “ready-to-eat” turkey from one of two regional meat-processing plants infested with Listeria, he thought it a piece of bad luck.

It was much worse than that.

The industry doesn’t want you to know it, but “ready-to-eat” meat is not ready to eat. A USDA website warns that ready-to-eat meats—cold cuts—if not thoroughly cooked, are a risk to pregnant women, the young, the old, cancer patients, anyone whose immune system is suppressed. The industry has successfully fought to keep that warning off packaging labels and grocery-market coolers. Do you know anyone who cooks ready-to-eat deli meats? Almost all of it is perfectly safe, but every now and then a Listeria-tainted batch of luncheon meat or hot dogs makes it into supermarkets and restaurants. Some of the people who eat it die: five hundred a year in the United States.

Late in his second term Bill Clinton responded to a deadly outbreak of listeriosis in the Midwest by starting the slow process of writing rules to require USDA testing in all plants that process ready-to-eat deli meats. He faced the usual opposition from the industry, but by that time, Clinton had turned the USDA and its Food Safety Inspection Service into something that was beginning to look like a public-health agency. Clinton’s Listeria regs were ready to be printed in the Federal Register—which is to say, put on the books—when George Bush moved into the White House in January 2001. The Listeria regs were immediately put on hold by Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card.

They were on hold when Frank Niemtzow ate his ready-to-eat deli turkey.

They were on hold when he checked out of Presbyterian Hospital for the second time, terribly weakened by his devastating bout with listeriosis.

And they were on hold when the Niemtzow family was sitting shiva to mourn the death of their father and grandfather.

Frank Niemtzow was a very old man. He would have died of something before long, even if he hadn’t gotten listeriosis. But Clinton’s USDA rules were written to catch the very food-borne bacteria that led to Dr. Niemtzow’s death