Parents of Sickened Children Ask for Tighter Rules on Food

A priority of the group is to crack down on the cow manure that finds its way into meat products and becomes a source of E. coli illness. Tracing tainted meat and poultry early and obtaining the full cooperation of meatpackers to identify that meat is another goal of the group. What it does not want, members of the group said, is to be faulted for their children's deaths.

"The meat companies let cow manure get in the meat, and then they tell the victims that if we had only cooked it to 160 degrees my child would not have died," Mrs. Kowalcyk said.

Rosemary Mucklow of the National Meat Association said that the industry did not need greater regulations but that consumers needed to be educated.

"The biggest issue is to get the consumer to cook the meat thoroughly," Ms. Mucklow said. "People don't like that. They say you're blaming the consumer. But you wash lettuce and grapes thoroughly." [read more]

This really pisses me off. How can someone tell a parent, who's child has been killed by your product because it had shit in it because your company was too fucking cheap to keep the shit out, that it's all the parent's fault? How low can a person get?

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Poop on poultry
The Bush Administration serves up another stinker
by Molly Ivins

Have you had a terrible stomach illness lately? It's quite likely you should blame the Bush administration. I know, that sounds like some demented spoof of left-wing paranoia, but it's actually an especially visceral example of one of life's iron rules -- you can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to.

Unless you have reason to suspect that your nearest and dearest are putting arsenic in your food, your bad stomach was likely caused by tainted meat. It is not hard to connect the dots on this one -- the massive meat recalls of recent months have now culminated in the largest in the nation's history, 27.4 million pounds worth, due to suspected contamination by the killer bacteria Listeria. [read more]