Take a bow, Austin “Jack” DeCoster! The Galtian Genius responsible for the recent recall of half a billion salmonella-tainted eggs may have been responsible for introducing salmonella to America’s egg supply:
… Mr. DeCoster’s frequent run-ins with regulators over labor, environmental and immigration violations have been well cataloged. But the close connections between Mr. DeCoster’s egg empire and the spread of salmonella in the United States have received far less scrutiny….
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Farms tied to Mr. DeCoster were a primary source of Salmonella enteritidis in the United States in the 1980s, when some of the first major outbreaks of human illness from the bacteria in eggs occurred, according to health officials and public records. At one point, New York and Maryland regulators believed DeCoster eggs were such a threat that they banned sales of the eggs in their states.
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Records released by Congressional investigators last week suggest that tougher oversight of Mr. DeCoster’s Iowa operations might have prevented the outbreak, which federal officials say is the largest of its type in the nation’s history, with more than 1,600 reported illnesses and probably tens of thousands more that have gone unreported.
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Fifty years ago, Salmonella enteritidis (pronounced enter-IT-idis) was a minor cause of illness. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the number of cases began to grow worldwide. In this country, the Salmonella enteritidis epidemic appeared first in New England, where Mr. DeCoster was the largest egg producer. The first spike of illness there showed up in epidemiological records in 1979. That same year, Mr. DeCoster sold his Maine operation, although it kept the name DeCoster Egg Farms. He provided financing to the new owner, the Acton Corporation, and some of his managers stayed to help run it, according to former employees of the company. Mr. DeCoster began building new egg farms in Maryland.
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The first enteritidis outbreak recognized by public health officials came in July 1982, when about three dozen people fell ill and one person died at the Edgewood Manor nursing home in Portsmouth, N.H. Investigators concluded that runny scrambled eggs served at a Saturday breakfast were to blame. They traced the eggs to what the Centers for Disease Control reports referred to as a large producer in Maine; interviews with investigators confirmed that it was Mr. DeCoster’s former operation…
Another triumph for St. Ronnie’s blessed deconstruction of nanny-state frills like ‘food safety’! Most of the people who’ve died from eating tainted eggs over the past 30 years have been old, chronically ill, or too young to work for their own living anyway — mere parasites draining valuable resources from society’s Real Producers, fine Christianist men like Jack DeCoster.