What deregulation brings

Is not freedom nor open healthy markets nor sensitive-to-the-consumer corporations, but this:

RALEIGH -- Federal authorities are hunting the mastermind behind a "horrific case" in which bacteria-laden syringes shipped from an Angier plant sickened at least a hundred people and killed five.

Two men pleaded guilty Monday in U.S. District Court in Raleigh for their roles in ignoring sterility standards at the former AM2PAT Inc. plant. Conditions there appeared more consistent with a textile factory than a pharmaceutical facility.

The men -- plant manager Aniruddha Patel and quality control director Ravindra Kumar Sharma -- were each sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison for fraud and allowing tainted drugs into the marketplace.

And this:

Washington — Even after Peanut Corp. of America learned its products were tainted with salmonella, it kept shipping them to unsuspecting customers, apparently putting profits ahead of public safety, according to documents and testimony presented at a congressional subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

Company president Stewart Parnell and Sammy Lightsey, manger of the Blakely plant at the center of one of the biggest food poisoning cases in recent history, refused to answer questions from a House panel, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to present self-incriminating evidence.

[snip]

Even in the heat of the nationwide outbreak, Parnell seemed more worried about his company’s profits than with food safety, according to regulators and congressional investigators.

On Jan. 19, Parnell sent an e-mail to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pleading with the agency to let it continue its business. He wrote that company executives “desperately at least need to turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money.”

U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, (R-Gainesville), said the company’s actions not only hurt consumers and revealed problems with food safety, but also decimated the peanut industry that is central to Georgia’s economy.

We will always need regulation because hardwired into the human DNA is short term greed and selfishness. How many times have we been persuaded by eager corporations that we should just let them do what they do best... and then we die from their products?

Peanut!

Peanut Butter!

The recalls are stacking up.

I had no idea peanuts were used in so many things...

Dozens of peanut butter and peanut paste products, including many produced by well-known brands such as Kellogg’s and Keebler, and sold by retailers such as Kroger Co. and Safeway Inc., are being pulled from store shelves — and consumer cupboards. Msnbc.com readers shared their reactions to the outbreak.

Dana Daley, 23, an aspiring graduate student from Long Island, N.Y., said it pains her to contemplate tossing four cases of Keebler Toast & Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers because they might be linked to a Georgia plant where the Typhimurium strain of salmonella was confirmed.

[snip]

For every single case of salmonella illness reported, there may be 30 actual cases, said Smith, citing figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Salmonella infection must be confirmed through a laboratory analysis.

“It actually may be 30 times or more greater than the 40,000 cases we see each year,” Smith said. [snip]
But for consumers such as La’ Kersha Gleaton, 33, a mother of four from Columbia, S.C., the latest example is “the last straw.”

“It was the beef, the chicken, the jalapeno pepper. It’s like you’re afraid to eat anything from the grocery stores,” she said.

Gleaton already frequents farmers markets, but she said the peanut butter problem makes her want to learn to grow food herself.

“It makes you want to go back to the days when people were tending their own plot,” she said. “You have to have the skills to do it yourself.”

Yes. Buy local, grow your own....

Update 1/22: the FDA recall site.