This Is Not News

Though some might not agree, it cannot be a coincidence that less than a year after the death of Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, the Food and Drug Administration finally succeeded in doing what it had been trying to do for ten years – getting the herbal supplement ephedra off the market. Bechler’s death from heatstroke in 2003 was linked to his use of the diet pills containing ephedra. Though doctors had known for years that the active ingredient in ephedra supplements could cause dangerous increases in both heart rate and blood pressure, putting users at increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and related ailments, Bechler’s death gave the media a high profile casualty to link with the drug.

Some might say that it is too cynical to presume that without a martyr, the FDA ‘s case against ephedra might never have made it this far, but history tells a different story. In fact, due to the double standard in how supplements and drugs are regulated, it might actually be surprising that the ban has happened at all. Read the remainder of this entry »

One of my first forays onto the Not News soapbox was a look at the culture of debt in this country. In that piece, I briefly mentioned the movement (or lack thereof) of bankruptcy legislation in Washington. In the past three years, many Americans have ridden a roller coaster of financial disasters including corporate scandals, fallout from 9/11 and general economic slowdowns. In that time, the proposed legislation to revamp the many Americans deal with their debt has changed very little — and it has made very little progress.

Many in Congress are quick to lay blame at the other party for the eleventh hour demise of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2002, but a closer examination of the bill’s provisions tells a different tale. For reasons that few in Congress ever mention, this bill had it coming. And, from a “consumer protectionâ€? standpoint, its 2003 cousin is asking for it, too. But, since we at Not News prefer to dispense constructive criticism, I am not going to spend any more time simply trashing what’s wrong with bankruptcy reform. I’m going to present my own personal bankruptcy reform wish list. Read the remainder of this entry »

For those of you who haven’t read Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal, forgive me for giving away some of the mystery – fast food is bad for you. It contains lots of fat, salt, calories, cholesterol, and other things that can, over time, be hard on your health. Good, with that out of the way, we can get down to what this book is really about – and it ain’t just French fries.

Much to the dismay of the meat and poultry industries, since its publication in early 2001, Schlosser’s book has put their business under the national microscope as much as it has the actual purveyors of fatty fare, if not more so. Why? Well, Schlosser takes the reader beyond the fast food outlets back to the source of the food – back to the potato fields and processing plants, the cattle feedlots and slaughterhouses, back to the poultry farms.

Whether you agree or disagree with Schlosser’s politics (and they are pretty obvious from the onset), you can’t help but be intrigued or even alarmed by the allegations he makes about the safety of the America’s food supply. He alleges that the meat industry – urged by its largest buyers, the fast food chains – have compromised public health safety in their quest to get meat from “farmâ€? (a loose term since animals rarely graze anymore) to slaughterhouse to market quickly and cheaply.

In the aftermath of the “mad cow� scare, several high profile meat recalls, and with some now worrying that our food supply is vulnerable to terrorist attacks, food safety is high on the national radar. But are we doing anything about it? Frankly, it doesn’t seem like it. Though Schlosser’s allegations created a media stir last year, fast food sales have not plummeted. Beef and poultry sales remain steady. Consumers seem content to remain willfully ignorant about the possibility that the meat they serve may not be entirely safe. The consumer’s mantra: “I try not to think about it.�

I thought about quoting some of the more colorful excerpts from FFN and a series about meat safety that PBS’ Frontline produced earlier this year but, in the interest of space and for those who can’t stomach it, I’ll simply link to them.

I will, however, highlight some of the major concerns that have been raised about the American meat supply. These include compelling arguments that modern methods of feeding, slaughtering and packaging meat actually increase the likelihood that the resulting product will contaminated by E. coli, salmonella, and other foodborne bacteria. In addition, there are huge gaps in the authority the federal government wields over the meat-packing and poultry industries. For example:

• Incidents of E. coli contamination have increased in the past fifty years because this bacteria does not live in the intestinal tract of cattle fed grass. It is only since cattle began eating largely corn diets that deadly strains of E. coli were able to thrive in their bodies and end up in the meat. Why do cattle eat corn instead of grass? It fattens them up faster, and an animal fed corn can go from birth to the slaughterhouse in 12 to 14 months instead of 3 to 5 years. In 1993, several people died of E. coli after eating hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box food chain on the West Coat. Since then, fast food chains have required that the meatpacking firms test their meat before take possession of it. However, most meat sent to supermarkets is not tested.
• As meat operations merge and consolidate, the number of animals raised and processed under one roof reaches the hundreds of thousands. According to the CDC, this increases the likelihood that pathogens will pass from “one animal to anotherâ€? and on the processing line “from one carcass to another.â€?
• The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) cannot order a mandatory recall of meat once they know it is contaminated. They must notify the firm in question, which then issues a voluntary recall. While no firm has refused to comply, this system causes delays. Carol Tucker Foreman, Director of the Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of America, writes, “I sat in rooms and negotiated voluntary recalls with companies. And their lawyers would quarrel and quibble and hold out for day after day, and by the time you finally got them to recall the meat, guess what? A lot of it had been eaten.â€? Statistics show that the amount of meat returned in recent high-profile national recalls averages around 20%.
• The USDA is designed with an inherent conflict of interest – it is charged with both the regulation and promotion of meat and poultry products.

The major stumbling block to resolving these and many other issues about the safety of the food industry is the industry itself. The beef and poultry producers in this country comprise a powerful lobbying force. The have successfully lobbied to delay new USDA food testing systems and at least two times have blocked bills that would have given the USDA greater authority.

More recently, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, then-chair of the Senate Agriculture committee, proposed the Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction Act of 2002 (S. 2013). Despite being co-sponsored by several key senators including Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), the bill never made it out of committee.

There have been instances in recent years where public outcry did help stop some of the delays in legislation and move food safety bills forward to become law. But for that to happen now means that American consumers, not just the media, have to want to really think about what exactly is on their plates.

In the meantime – or perhaps as a starting point to get more involved on your own – there are places on the Net to go where you can learn more about safe meat handling and cooking, general food safety procedures, and alternatives to supermarket meat, including the USDA’s Food Safety site. One such place is the web site for the Whole Food Markets chain of stores. They update their site with the latest news about food safety regulation, heath advisories, recalls, and other information. And, Whole Foods Markets’ site also gets high points for its “Take Actionâ€? page, which allows you to search for your own elected officials, find out which elected officials are on which legislative committees, and more. Well done, Whole Foods. And here I thought you just made great bread.

It may be hard to imagine that any good could come from the recent scandals involving the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy, but, slowly and quietly, there has been some change for the better. That change is that many state legislatures are recognizing that the statutes of limitations for civil and criminal action in these cases need to be extended. Or, in my opinion, eliminated altogether.

Statutes of limitations, which are rarely discussed outside episodes of Law and Order, determine the length of time a state or an individual has to bring criminal or civil charges against someone else for a crime or damaging act. These statues often vary from state to state for every nearly every crime (except murder) and they vary widely in sexual abuse and molestation cases. For example, New Jersey has no statues of limitations on child abuse cases while Massachusetts, ground zero of the recent scandal, has a 15-year limit for child rape and a six-year limit for “sexual touching�. There are now twelve states with no time limits on prosecuting sexual offenses against children. More states, including Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and California have several bills in their legislatures to or extend or eliminate their statutes. Hopefully, before the scandal fades from public memory, there will be many more states that do the same.

The question I ask in all this is: Why do we need statutes on these crimes at all? I do understand the need for statues of limitations in theory. Former Massachusetts Assistant District Attorney Barton Aronson writes:

[S]tatutes . . . ensure that prosecutorial resources are well used. Prosecutions are not like wine: they generally get worse, not better, with age. When a prosecutor first learns of a crime is when he or she is in the best position to investigate and decide whether to prosecute. That is the moment when memories are freshest and evidence most accessible. If the case isn’t worth prosecuting right away, it usually isn’t worth prosecuting at all.

But Aronson is also quick to point out that this is precisely why statues of limitations don’t work in child abuse cases. Prosecutors often don’t learn of child sex abuse cases right away. Most children who have been abused often do not fully realize that what has been done to them is a crime. In other cases, the children are threatened so that they do not reveal the abuse. In still other cases, the children block out the memories of abuse only to “recover� these memories years or even decades later. These frequent delays make it difficult to pinpoint exactly when the “clock� on a statute starts running. In some states, the clock starts with the crime itself; in others it starts with the discovery of the crime, or when the child in question tells another adult what has happened.

In the recent clergy abuse scandal, the Catholic Church was instrumental in hiding evidence of sexual abuse with a tangled web of payouts to families, clergy transfers, hidden files and other acts of deceit. A strict interpretation of the law means the statues have run out on hundreds of these cases. But victims and their families argue that the abusers shouldn’t benefit from the church’s deceit. And, due in part to the public pressure surrounding this case, legislators are listening to their arguments. They are recognizing that the lengths of the original statutes in child abuse cases had little to do with the actual length of a victim’s pain and suffering.

What the writers of those statues and, evidently, many church officials did not realize is that abusing a child robs him of the innocence and trust he desperately needs in his formative years. A child abuser takes what is wonderful about being a child and, in effect, murders it. And, as we all know, there is no statute of limitations on murder.