Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [66]
Felicia Nestor of the Government Accountability Project warns that “feces is feces whether it’s fibrous or not. . . . The USDA is abandoning the zero-tolerance standard for any fecal contamination on beef and replacing it with a new standard: ‘wholesome unless there is gross contamination.’ It’s impossible for this standard to coexist with the agency’s claim that it makes decisions based on science. ‘Gross’ is an inherently subjective standard.”
BUSH v. the trial lawyers
Who You Gonna Call?
Reading Peter Perl’s Washington Post Magazine story about the last big listeriosis outbreak in 2000 is chilling.
The Bil Mar Foods case attracted little public attention in 1998, partly because the news media were riveted on Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial and the U.S. bombing of Iraq, while the public was additionally preoccupied with the holiday season. But it was also because the Agriculture Department—in contradiction of its own policies—failed to issue a press release informing the public of the danger, even though the CDC had reported four deaths.
The listeriosis in Bil Mar’s Michigan meat-processing plant killed twenty-one people and sickened more than one hundred.
Four years later, in the fall of 2002, no one was impeaching the president, but the public was so preoccupied with Iraq and the holiday season that when fifty-four fell ill and eight died, they received little notice. The cause was listeriosis.
We can even apply a line from Perl’s reporting on the earlier public-health tragedy to the one reported in this chapter two years later.
“No action was taken by the USDA—until it was too late.”
Too late for Lois Wagner,* of Union County, New Jersey. A neighbor called Wagner’s daughter and son-in-law when she noticed newspapers in Wagner’s yard and mail in the mailbox. The son-in-law arrived to find Lois lying crosswise on the bed. “She was conscious,” he said, “but I thought she must have had a stroke.”
Her daughter said, “I spoke to her, but what came out of her mouth was not understandable.”
Lois Wagner didn’t feel old despite her seventy-seven years. She lived alone and cooked for herself. She mowed her own lawn and raked her leaves. She drove to the store or to Pennsylvania to visit relatives and walked four miles every day.
Lois Wagner was still in intensive care when doctors from the hospital’s infectious diseases staff told her family she had listeriosis. After two weeks in the hospital, she was still in intensive care and unable to communicate, although if pressed she could come up with a person’s name. The family was told to expect a very slow recovery. The woman who walked four miles a day could take only tentative steps on the sidewalk in front of her house.
The Listeria had caused meningitis, so the extent of the damage was revealed only gradually. Wagner’s brain had been traumatized by the swelling. “They told us it’s going to take time.”
After the Union County Department of Health called Lois’s daughter and asked her to write down everything Lois had eaten over the past several months, the daughter realized the impossible situation she and her mother were in. Her mother couldn’t begin to recall what and where she had eaten.
She was faced with either full-time assisted care at home or life in a nursing home. By the time Lois Wagner got home, she was coherent enough to know that she needed assistance—and a lawyer.
Her son-in-law tracked down Kenneth Moll, a Chicago trial lawyer who tried the Bil Mar case in 2000 and had filed a class-action suit against Wampler Foods in a Philadelphia court