Once, while debating the role of the government with a young neo-con in favour of total/extreme de-regulation, I presented the food processing industry (and the monitoring thereof) as one example of a vital regulatory function of the government. He responded by saying that he saw no need -- that the market, even in this instance, was capable of monitoring itself. Since it would be bad for business to allow contaminated meat into the market, business could be trusted to monitor itself and keep us all safe.
The thought of allowing every operation out there, from the neighbourhood butcher right on up to the commercial processors, police themselves with piecemeal, individual standards for what was safe, horrified me at the time. Now, however, in light of this listeriosis outbreak, I'm not so sure of my point. With the current Harper government at the helm, at least, it would seem that government oversight hasn't kept us any safer than the good graces of the Maple Leaf company (who seem to have conducted themselves as well as can be expected in the circumstances, even if our government should never have allowed these circumstances to arise in the first place) would grant us.
Our current Minister of Health, Tony Clement, is quoted in the article I've linked to above as saying of the current outbreak: "This is a case where the surveillance system worked."
Really Tony? And just how the hell do you figure that? How did the surveillance system work when some reports have the death toll related to the food contamination as high as 15 -- so far (the bacteria has an incubation time of something like 70 days, so we may not have seen all that we're going to see of this). If the "surveillance system worked", wouldn't they have caught this sooner, or better yet, prevented it from happening in the irst place?
Seems to me that THIS is a case where the surveillance system FAILED -- big time.
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onelessthing) wrote,
