Over in Socialist England, they’ve figured out how to stop salmonella in eggs by vaccinating chickens, using what appears to be a free market solution:
There are no laws mandating vaccination in Britain. But it is required, along with other safety measures, if farmers want to place an industry-sponsored red lion stamp on their eggs, which shows they have met basic standards. The country’s major supermarkets buy only eggs with the lion seal, so vaccination is practiced by 90 percent of egg producers, according to Ms. Cryer.
Thomas Humphrey, a food safety professor at the University of Liverpool, said that producers in the United Kingdom turned to vaccination after other measures, similar to those now required by the F.D.A., failed to show significant results.
Meanwhile, 142,000 Americans got sick every year from eating eggs inflected with salmonella.
Indie Tarheel
The Randians have this one covered. Their free-market solution involves food tasters.
Zandar
The Incredible Indelible Egg.
Nice.
Meanwhile if we tried it here, the eggs that would get the “industry sponsored” stamp would face the high bar of safety regulations like “Not covered in foaming, leaking gunk” and “sniffed by Gulf Coast seafood inspectors”, followed by Reasonoid screeds on how we’re crushing the egg industry with draconian standards when the consumer should really have the choice of eating funky, diseased eggs.
Michael D.
Good thing we have the Best Healthcare in the World®
steviez314
What’s Jenny McCarthy’s position on vaccinating chickens?
morzer
Isn’t there a Constitutional Amendment protecting the Right to Salmonella? I think I read that on a teabagger flier somewhere. Or maybe it was in Leviticus. One gets confused about these things.
me
@Indie Tarheel: I thought that their solution is for educated customers to use their X-ray vision and avoid buying infected eggs.
Punchy
Christ, you’d have 5 million autistic chickens if we did that in the US!
p.a.
This is just a natural Galtian reaction for salmonellaistas to the threat of Death Panels(tm) and waiting lines resulting from the soshulist medical system . USA USA USA USA USA!!!!!
I believe this sort of small-to-medium sized business consortium effort is pretty common on the continent, esp in Italy and France- DOC wines, cheeses, etc.
L Boom
Sure, they’re not catching salmonella but is it making all their chickens autistic?
On a more serious note, that seems like such an elementary idea, dare I ask why American farmers aren’t doing it now? Just curious if it’s anything other than the 25 cents a chicken it probably costs.
Peter
This just serves to remind me that I have a bunch of eggs in my fridge that I think might have gone bad.
Steeplejack
__
Fix’d by the spelling police.
MTiffany
But vaccines cause autism! The chick with the nice rack said so. Jenny McCarthy too. Think of the chickens! Those poor autistic chickens!
beltane
@Zandar: You are so right. An industry sponsored stamp would mean nothing here because the supermarket chains, led by Wal-Mart really do not give a crap about what they sell to consumers. Such a stamp would be just another meaningless marketing tool. We are a post-capitalist society where the usual market mechanisms have broken down.
Violet
Our country is so much larger and our myriad of state and local regulations make a large scale effort like that a lot more difficult.
geg6
I no longer trust our foods.
I was a victim of the e coli outbreak caused by spinach a few years ago. It taught me a very strong lesson.
Buy local and in season. Or don’t buy at all and grow your own.
Dennis Doubleday
It isn’t necessarily a good idea, either. Widespread preemptive use of antibiotics is hastening the advent of super bugs. Bacteria are very good at adaptation.
I’ve never heard of a vaccine for bacterial infections before, so I don’t know how this works, but it sounds more like “give them lots of antibiotics just in case.”
Indie Tarheel
@me: HA!
bartkid
>inflected with salmonella.
Spillczech fale.
Mike Toreno
In this case, vaccination is a way to prevent diseases caused by filth, and can work without cleaning up the filth. And Dennis Doubleday’s objections seem reasonable. If the process is not vaccination, but loading up the chickens with antibiotics, the objections are not just reasonable, but compelling.
What needs to be done is to clean up the filth, whether or not vaccination should also be done.
artem1s
I don’t think the issue is really vaccinations. We use plenty of antibiotics, vaccines and chemical interventions in the US. The real problems is that the ‘free market’ in the US won’t allow the government undertake wholesale slaughter of entire flocks when disease infects a farm. In most other European countries one chicken gets sick and the bonfires start up. Yesterday on NPR an Ag lobbyist was whinging that we couldn’t POSSIBLY undertake such draconian measures here. Letting all of your customers get sick is far preferable to the egg industry.
mistermix
@Steeplejack: Thanks.
dr.luba
Dennis,
The point of vaccinating in this case is to prevent excessive antibiotic use in poultry.
Vaccination against bacteria is comomon in humans: meningitis, pertussis, hemophilus influenzae, pneumococcal pneumonia, BCG (for TB) are commonly given vaccines. More of our vaccines are for viral illnesses, because anti-virals are generally less effective in treating viral infections than antibiotics are in treating bacterial ones, but bacterial vaccines are utilized as well.
terraformer
The negative publicity is far outweighed by the profits made by avoiding (or even having) regulations. Publicity lasts a few days, maybe weeks, while the profits are forever, dontcha know.
People aren’t going to stop eating eggs (or spinach, or ground beef, or lettuce–but you never see people getting sick from them…no, wait).
morzer
@Dennis Doubleday:
This article says that the vaccine uses bacteria:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100825/ap_on_bi_ge/us_egg_recall_salmonella_vaccine
Someone more scientifically learned than I would have to tell you what this means, but it doesn’t sound like a massive application and abuse of antibiotics. Any scientific/medical people out there who can tell us more?
someguy
@Punchy:
How is that different from the Republican warmongering base we have now?
geg6
@someguy:
I’m thinking that would actually be fewer than the Republican base, so it would be an improvement, IMHO.
morzer
@someguy:
Headless chickens aren’t the same as autistic chickens.
jonas
Every year, about as many people are killed by salmonella and e.coli as died in the 9/11 attacks, and hundreds of thousands of others fall seriously ill, sometimes suffering life-long injuries as a result. The vast majority of this carnage is attributable to poor food handling and unsanitary farming and slaughter practices that could be remedied with some common-sense regulations. Yet our government’s response is “meh.” It’s really hard to wrap your head around. Large agribuisiness literally believes that killing a certain number of its customers each year is just something you have to price into the cost of doing business.
Luthe
@someguy:
You win the thread, sir.
chopper
@steviez314:
i’m not feeding my kid autistic eggs. it might retard her.
chopper
@geg6:
eat local or grow your own, you can still catch nasty stuff. at the same time, most of these outbreaks can be traced back to bad sanitary practices at megagrowers. while their sanitary practices are better than a backyard grower, the whole reason outbreaks happen is because of cross-contamination which isn’t a huge deal to the backyard gardener. but you still have to be careful.
chopper
@Mike Toreno:
indeed. vaccination is easy, but sanitation is the best defense. i mean, you look at some areas in the third world that are rife with cholera because of poor sanitation, the best fix would be improving sanitation, not ‘coming up with a vaccine for cholera’. not that the latter is a bad thing (and in some cases it would be the easier, more affordable option). i just think it has the habit of avoiding the bigger issue for a quick-shot cure.
likewise, sanitation in the food industry doesn’t merely revolve around one disease. clean up the industry and a number of foodborne pathogens start dropping away, not just one.
Eric S.
Remember, our free market champions tried to prevent a private firm from testing beef for mad cow disease.
Michael
@morzer:
On the positive side, either type could become the Governor of Alaska.
YellowJournalism
@someguy: That was inspired. I think we can already point to a specific case with the woman who stood up at the town meeting last year and cried hysterically about the Muslim Obama and how she’d lost her country.
Brachiator
French pharmaceutical company? Why, that’s reason enough to oppose vaccinating Real American(tm) chickens!
But I find it just amazing to read that even though the British program eliminated the problem, American egg producers didn’t think that there was enough evidence to start a vaccination program here. Unbelievable.
morzer
@Brachiator:
You mean a “healthy chicken and good cheese eating surrender monkey pharmaceutical company”?
El Cid
Big gubmit approaches work too. And don’t depend quite so much on a cycle of antibiotics / vaccination to deal with a dirty production process.
I weep for the lost freedoms of Sweden’s meat producers.
Paris
You probably wouldn’t need to vaccinate chickens if you didn’t raise them on factory farms. Most agricultural regulations like this are so we can tolerate sloppy, dirty farming. The latest thing is ‘irradiated’ meat so the producers don’t have to remove (or prevent) the fecal matter sticking to your tenderloin.
How about a label ‘factory farm produced: may contain salmonella’ and let the free market decide?
Bob L
@Indie Tarheel: thus increasing employment! Sure a certain percentage may die but the market will compensate for these economic martyrs! Egg tasters- they gave their lives so you can enjoy your egg McBaggel.
Magic free market ponies rule!
Gunner
Good to hear that the British poultry industry has found a use for all those vats of red dye #2 they had around from the ’70s. So do kids in England color their eggs white for Easter?
evinfuilt
I think I know why this won’t happen. A law will be passed that out-laws this stamping because it unfairly labels all the eggs without it as potential disease carriers, and thats just unfair to those companies.
Oh, and then they’ll say that this stamping will mostly effect only Farmers Markets, making it unaffordable for them to get stamped, so no one will buy there (even if they have no evidence that this will occur.)
Remember, we allow lead on our childrens toys now because it would be unfair for people who make toys for their kids to be forced to test for lead on them (I wish I hadn’t actually heard that from someone, but it sums up why we never seem to pass regulation.)
evinfuilt
@Eric S.:
Damn, there’s another example of what I was meaning right above this. We fight in this country to make sure you can’t make some other product look inferior. Don’t want the actual free market interfering with our perfect free market.
RSR
Here in PA the Dept of Ag attempted to prevent dairies from advertising their milk as growth hormone (rBST) free, as doing such would be disparaging (or in the words of PASecAg “confusing”) towards dairies that were not rBST free.
That’s how your free market solutions work in the good old US of A.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#rBGH_.28recombinant_Bovine_Growth_Hormone.29)
Brachiator
The NY Times has a number of companion articles about the salmonella issue. Typically, the guy from the Cato Institute refers to an unnecessary “panic” involving the recalled eggs, since, apparently, salmonella is a “natural,” but minor hazard, and the best solution is the after-the-fact identification of the bad egg producers.
Of course, he kind of glides over the fact that it was the government that traced the source of the illness in the first place, and that government regulations are behind the decline in salmonella hazards in food.
Roger Moore
@jonas:
Lots of businesses have to include the cost of killing some fraction of their customers into their business models. For example, car companies could probably make safer cars and kill fewer customers, but they’ve decided that it’s too expensive. It’s often impossible or prohibitively expensive to make a product that’s perfectly safe, so businesses have to make some kind of compromise. The problem is that the Department of Agriculture has undergone complete regulatory capture, so big Agribusiness can lean way too far on the low cost side rather than the safe customer side.
LanceThruster
Creekstone Farms was actually prevented from doing their own tests for Mad Cow.
see: Mad cow watch goes blind – http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-03-our-view_x.htm
So much for the free freakin’ market.
Glen Tomkins
Yup
Under even the best conditions, chicken behavior is such that they are prone to fecal-oral contamination. In layman’s terms, they eat their own, and worse, each other’s, shit, as they peck for food on the same ground that they shit on.
Now, if the number of chickens feeeding and pooping in the same yard is small, the fecal flora tends to remain benign, just the mix of commensal bacteria that at least do no harm, and usually some help, to their hosts. But once the population of cross-contaminators becomes big enough, the intestinal pathogen “business model” becomes “profitable” compared to the practices of beneficial commensals. That model includes causing diarrhea to enhance transmission to new hosts, rather than the long-term relationships with their hosts that beneficial commensals establish.
The result is that all poultry, even that from small-time producers, needs to be handled as if it were contaminated with intestinal pathogens, because large percentages of it, from even the most careful producers, is contaminated.
Now, only some of this high percentage of hens that are contaminated will also produce contaminated eggs, so you can work down the percentage of contaminated eggs to fairly low (never zero) levels with careful practice and handling. I haven’t heard of this vaccination and can’t say how effective it is, but certainly that approach of one simple intervention, a vaccination, is theoretically much better than trying to handle the hens and their eggs carefully at every step in their lives. The inherent limitation is that you can only cover specific intestinal pathogens with a vaccine, and the different species and strains that are intestinally pathogenic are legion. But if Salmonella is the only seriously bad actor in terms of contaminating eggs, then, yes, an effective Salmonella vaccine would be the best way to go.
David E Clark
This free market approach will stop working once the industry rating agency labels all the eggs AAA, even the sub-prime ones. Just a matter of time.
TooManyJens
@Brachiator: from your quote:
How are consumers supposed to shun their wares? Is the producer listed on every carton of eggs? I don’t buy eggs much, so I’ve never noticed.
On a different but related note, it seems to me that it would be helpful for the corporate parent to have to be listed on every product along with the brand. That way it would be more obvious that huge conglomerates own almost everything (and more obvious which products really aren’t owned by huge conglomerates, so that consumers can more easily find those products if they so choose).
valdemar
The UK mark for eggs from vaccinated chickens is a little lion stamped on the shell. The US equivalent could be a little eagle – it’d be cute. Customers could simply choose whether to buy ‘eagle eggs’ or not. Or, more likely, stores could choose whether to stock any other kind. Most probably wouldn’t, because sick customers are not good for business – if it’s a genuine, competitive business.
Brachiator
@valdemar:
Of course, this might confuse the morans who thought that supermarkets were now selling actual eagle eggs.
SapphireCate
Just to add to this thread (a little bit late): last night Mr. SapphireCate made chocolate mousse with lots of raw eggs and wonderful chocolate. We licked the bowl, licked the spoon and then ate the mousse chortling to ourselves as, while he was whipping egg whites, I was reading aloud from the Huff Po about the egg recall.
I love living in the UK. Despite the constant f-ing rain.
+1 (but it’s belgian and 10.5%)
blogreeder
I found this handy dandy graph from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and from what I can tell, it’s reporting a lot fewer salmonella cases per year than this article cites from the F.D.A. What gives?
Larkspur
@El Cid: Thank you, El Cid. That was cogent. The preceding was sincere.
I have heard that Sweden is located over the biggest hellmouth since Sunnydale, and the Swedish government’s sensible, long-term solution seems to prove it, because everyone knows you can’t vanquish all the salmonellas, you has to recruit them, and those demon-infested Swedes are probably weaponizing them as we
ditherspeak.b-psycho
So on this issue — barring, of course, throwing out our entire ag policy and breaking up the factory farms that resulted from it like mad, so one producer can’t screw breakfast for half the country — you can either have a strict national strategy like Sweden, or have a market standard like Britain.
Note that both require producers and regulators that actually give a fuck…
It’s the culture. We’re evil, folks, face it.