Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [64]
It was a year too late for Dr. Niemtzow.
It was also what the resident public intellectuals at the Coffee Station in Crawford, Texas, call a chickenshit deal. To use a slaughterhouse metaphor, Bush’s political appointees at USDA gutted the Clinton rules. They dropped the key requirement: that companies test meat products at the end of the process anytime testing turns up two positive incidents of Listeria contamination in the plant environment or on food-contact surfaces.
Niemtzow’s son Stuart is realistic. His father, at ninety-eight, didn’t have many more years to live. But he was living independently, full of life, with a sense of adventure lacking in many younger people. Three months before he died, he was visiting his son and grandsons when they decided to go out to eat. Stuart mentioned Big George’s Stop-n-Dine—a West Philly soul-food restaurant Bill Clinton likes. “That sounds interesting,” the old doctor said to his reluctant grandsons. They were the only white people in a restaurant full of African-Americans, and the family patriarch urged his grandsons to be a little more adventuresome in what they ate. “This is really pretty good,” he said, urging the two white kids from the suburbs to try something different.
When Dr. Niemtzow died, he still had a plane ticket for Florida. The doctor may not belong on a listeriosis poster. He was old, but the appointed hour of his death should not have been determined by the failure of a government regulatory agency to do its job.
“It was a national crisis, and they were not providing the information needed to solve it,” said Stuart Niemtzow in mid-December. “We didn’t have any idea. When we first heard listeriosis, when he got sick, we started asking ourselves all these questions. Did this happen at a Mexican restaurant where we went to eat? Did I give him soft cheese, and did that make him sick?”
Stuart Niemtzow now wonders: where was the USDA?
He first heard of an “outbreak” while driving and listening to the local all-news radio station. He wonders why the government agencies that were aware of the outbreak didn’t warn the public.
Even though the USDA had the information, no one had called the hospital. No one informed the Philadelphia Health Department. No one provided the doctors at Presbyterian Hospital the information that might have saved Frank Niemtzow’s life.
Stuart Niemtzow came to a simple conclusion about what had happened to his father. “The government regulatory agencies failed to protect the people. Under the Bush administration, the regulatory agencies are the wolf guarding the chicken’s nest. My father, oddly enough, was a fan of Bush.”
When he realized his government had failed to protect his father and offered him no remedy, Stuart Niemtzow did what many people do. He called a lawyer. He had read about a class-action lawsuit filed by Chicago trial lawyer Kenneth Moll. Both Stuart Niemtzow and his father, weakened though he was before his death, were angry because it looked as though there had been a cover-up. “My father felt as though he had nothing to lose. He didn’t want this to happen to other people. He would have been happy to have the money, but it was not something he cared about. He kept saying, ‘I’ve been wronged. This should not happen to anyone else.’ ”
Dr. Niemtzow had the small satisfaction of seeing the lawsuit filed in a Philadelphia court before he died. “At his age, he needed all the help he could get to recover,” his son said. “And the government agency responsible for food safety never let us know.”
GUT REACTION
Where’s the Beef?
Would you like some shit to go with your quarter pounder?
They don’t ask that question at McDonald’s. But a leaked USDA memo shows there is more than red meat in the ground beef that ends up in the nation’s fast-food chains, school cafeterias, and home kitchens. The memo was released to the press by the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit, public-interest group that works with whistle-blowers. It was