Big deal or no big deal

Is the salmonella outbreak, which has sickened over 1,000 - and made many tomato handlers substantially poorer - a big deal? Here is an interesting take passed on by Doug Powell of the Food Safety Network from NextGov on comments by David Acheson.

As of today, nearly 1,000 people have been sickened, one person has died, and at least $150 million has been lost by tomato growers and sellers (and probably more now that peppers, onions and cilantro are becoming suspects) because of a salmonella outbreak as of yet unknown origin.

Not to worry, though. It isn’t a big deal.

To quote Dr. David Acheson, food safety chief of the Food and Drug Administration, “We’re a nation of 300 million people who eat two-to-three times a day. To have 800 people sick is not that big of a deal.”

OK, Acheson has a point: 1,000 out of 304,554,835 (according to theUS Census population clock as of this post) is only 3.2834809534381550698415278811778e-6 percent, if my fingers hit the calculator correctly. [Which they didn't the first time - it should be .00003% - which a sharp reader caught - see comments below.]

But that perspective leads, of course, to the question of what does the FDA believe is a BIG DEAL?

Is it 3,000 people sick? 100,000? Even a million is only a statistical blip.

Or how about deaths? About 5,500 people die every day in the United States. One person dying from salmonella over a couple months is not a Big Deal either to the FDA, I gather from Acheson’s comments.

So, exactly what is the level necessary for the sick or dying to be considered a Big Deal?

Of course, not only do we need to know what a Big Deal is in relation to a single event, but also from a multiple event perspective.

Over the last decade, there have been 13 salmonella outbreaks from tomatoes alone. And this count doesn’t include other food-borne problems, like E. coli or Hepatitis A. (Remember spinach and green onions?)

Once we know what FDA's Big Deal risk threshold is (and what's the Agriculture Department's as well for meats and dairy products -- remember Taco Bell?), we can then start to figure out the true cost/benefit to putting in a food tracing system that Allan Holmeswrote about.

In fact, we may find that we don’t even need an FDA, as the late Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman argued.