Corporations and factories have been allowed to participate in many unsafe practices and the government hasn’t done a thing to promote food safety habits. Due to this, Wright County Eggs and Hillandale Farms are responsible for the recent outbreak of salmonella in eggs, and have recalled about half a billion eggs in May 2010. Salmonella causes fever, severe vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and can cause fetal infections if it gets into the bloodstream. Their have already been 1,300 cases of salmonella between May and July but only about one in every 38 cases of salmonella are actually reported. So the numbers are actually much higher and approximately in the ten thousands.
Austin “Jack” DeCoster is Wright County Eggs owner and also has family ties to Hillandale Farms, which also come together because they manufacture and buy their eggs from the same places. He has a long list of animal and environmental abuses, and Secretary Robert Reich, writer of the Christian Science Monitor blog on August 24, commented, “DeCoster agreed to pay a $2 million penalty (the most we could throw at him) for some of the most heinous workplace violations I’d seen. His workers had been forced to live in trailers infested with rats and handle manure and dead chickens with their bare hands. It was an agricultural sweatshop.”
In a Forbes investigation in 2006, a detailed report of the conditions at Ohio Fresh Farms showed similar conditions to those at the Wright County Egg Farms and stated, “In the three years of its existence the company has incurred dozens of enforcement actions from the state, up to seven issued in a single day, for such violations as promoting swarms of flies at ‘extreme levels’ and discarding empty vaccine vials, mixed in with manure in a vacant field.” Investigators also added that they had discovered Salmonella on the site and the factory had one of the worst ammonia emissions, which cause skin and lung irritation.
Their is an outcome of about 9,000 deaths each because of 81 million cases of food-related illnesses. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for overseeing corporations in the food industry and has 450 inspectors for about 156,000 different sites. These companies are visited by the inspectors about once a year which tells us that instead of protecting consumers, they are contributing to the population in not knowing that our food really isn’t safe. The corporations are enabled to continue business, despite their violations and unsafe practices.
Heres a link to daily food recalls and outbreaks:
http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/default.htm
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