aschie,

At what point does the risk become "unacceptable" and what do you think dictates that? Do you think political or economic motivations dictate when, all the sudden, some risk becomes "unacceptable?"

total numbers, but that's not applicable here
significant shift in the base which I suspect is the concern here
economics and politics have no role...strictly a public health issue

I don't think an equivocation on a ban on something that is a known risky food that arguably kills 15 people per year is going to erode confidence in our regulatory system

as I've written a couple times, politics has not role and so allowing it to have a role calls into question motivation....on this and many other issues

I don't see how the FDA's decision to decline to regulate "facilitates" a personal choice to eat oysters

regulatory agencies are told what to regulate....they don't get to "decide to decline to regulate"

I think it's unfortunate that they caved to political pressure. Once they had determined an unacceptable risk they should have told industry and congressmen to go f***k themselves.

Yeah, shame about that "democracy" thing.

Not to beat a dead horse, but my point about peanuts (a cheap source of protein -- hey, like warm water oysters!) is that, despite those with peanut allergies paying very careful attention, and despite all the warnings about stuff having been manufactured in or near a place that also comes in contact with peanuts, hundreds, not a dozen, die. And among those hundreds are many kids. Not the adult, already ill oyster slurpers. The case for a total ban of peanuts is thus immeasurably stronger, but only if you follow your own logic. That's not something the government necessarily does. Being logical, I'm not saying that a total peanut ban is silly. But if the fatality-minimizing policy permits peanuts, it can't reasonably exclude warm water oysters.

auxen1 wrote:

I don't see how the FDA's decision to decline to regulate "facilitates" a personal choice to eat oysters

regulatory agencies are told what to regulate....they don't get to "decide to decline to regulate"

I think, also, that people tend to assume that if something is allowed, it must be safe. It's not an unreasonable assumption; to paraphrase it, one might say, "We've got an FDA. If eating this food could kill me, there's no way this place would legally be allowed to serve it to me. It's on the menu. Ipso facto, it must be safe. I'm going to go ahead and eat these." We make that kind of reasonable assumption a hundred times a day, in all kinds of situations. We assume the CTA bus driver has an appropriate license, and don't ask to see it when we board the bus, for example. Imperfect as the FDA is, most Americans go through their day assuming that the FDA is pretty much doing its job to prevent the possibility of deadly foods being consumed. You and I might know this not always to be the case, but do we want to penalize Americans who aren't as properly skeptical as we are by exposing them to foods that might kill them? An FDA which took a laissez-faire approach to potentially deadly oysters very well might "facilitate" someone's personal choice to eat those oysters, its inaction fostering the (very possibly incorrect) impression that they were safe to eat.

I'm not disregarding Jeff's point that the case for banning other foods may be even stronger.

riddlemay wrote:

auxen1 wrote:

I don't see how the FDA's decision to decline to regulate "facilitates" a personal choice to eat oysters

regulatory agencies are told what to regulate....they don't get to "decide to decline to regulate"

I think, also, that people tend to assume that if something is allowed, it must be safe. It's not an unreasonable assumption; to paraphrase it, one might say, "We've got an FDA. If eating this food could kill me, there's no way this place would legally be allowed to serve it to me. It's on the menu. Ipso facto, it must be safe. I'm going to go ahead and eat these."

Yup - that's why I have no intention of kicking my 5-pack a day habit of unfiltered Camel's . . . of course I have a shot and a beer with each smoke. It's allowed, so it must be safe. Thank you Gum'mit for making my life safe!

Kman wrote:Yup - that's why I have no intention of kicking my 5-pack a day habit of unfiltered Camel's . . . of course I have a shot and a beer with each smoke. It's allowed, so it must be safe. Thank you Gum'mit for making my life safe!

I think it's pretty safe to say that if the FDA had jurisdiction over everything the BATF regulates, it'd all be banned.

Jeff, you make really solid points. What's so challenging about this is that the product is perfectly safe to eat the majority of the year, whereas to a certain population, peanuts are deadly each and every day. I don't know this, but it could be that on an exposure basis the oysters are equally dangerous.

I'm going to ask a couple people in the know about FDA triggers and if I get verifiable data I'll post.

nr706 wrote:

Kman wrote:Yup - that's why I have no intention of kicking my 5-pack a day habit of unfiltered Camel's . . . of course I have a shot and a beer with each smoke. It's allowed, so it must be safe. Thank you Gum'mit for making my life safe!

I think it's pretty safe to say that if the FDA had jurisdiction over everything the BATF regulates, it'd all be banned.

Of course the FDA *does* have oversight on cigarettes . . . and allows them . . . so they must be safe, despite the various groups that attribute tens of thousands of deaths in the US alone to cigarettes. That's a lot more than 15. Seems rather contradictory to me. Or I'm just buying the wrong brand of tinfoil for my hats.

Today's Illness-related Oyster news

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/12/06/oy ... index.html

"The U.S. government warned consumers Sunday to avoid oysters from San Antonio Bay in Texas after investigators found the oysters caused a highly contagious virus.

Consumers who bought San Antonio Bay-harvested oysters on or after November 16 should throw them away, the Food and Drug Administration announced. The agency also advised restaurant managers and grocers not to serve or sell the Texas oysters.

About a dozen cases of norovirus-related illnesses in North Carolina and South Carolina were "definitely linked" to oysters recently harvested from the San Antonio Bay, FDA spokeswoman Rita Chappelle told CNN."

leek wrote:Today's Illness-related Oyster news

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/12/06/oy ... index.html

"The U.S. government warned consumers Sunday to avoid oysters from San Antonio Bay in Texas after investigators found the oysters caused a highly contagious virus.

Consumers who bought San Antonio Bay-harvested oysters on or after November 16 should throw them away, the Food and Drug Administration announced. The agency also advised restaurant managers and grocers not to serve or sell the Texas oysters.

About a dozen cases of norovirus-related illnesses in North Carolina and South Carolina were "definitely linked" to oysters recently harvested from the San Antonio Bay, FDA spokeswoman Rita Chappelle told CNN."

There they go again, those nanny-state bureaucrats.

Not at all. They put out information. People can act on it as they see fit.

That's entirely different from shutting down a centuries-old industry for something we've all known all along (I assume few oyster eaters have not heard the months with R thing).

leek wrote:Today's Illness-related Oyster news

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/12/06/oy ... index.html

"The U.S. government warned consumers Sunday to avoid oysters from San Antonio Bay in Texas after investigators found the oysters caused a highly contagious virus.

Consumers who bought San Antonio Bay-harvested oysters on or after November 16 should throw them away, the Food and Drug Administration announced.

Crap! The guy at the store assured me those oysters had a shelf life of at LEAST a month!

Kman wrote:Crap! The guy at the store assured me those oysters had a shelf life of at LEAST a month!

Guess you'll have to throw them away now...on the plus side, this should clear up some space on the top shelf of your pantry.

It's worth a read through the comments on the NYT article that was the initial catalyst for this thread. Many folks echoed our opinions, stating that you also can contract the same virus swimming in warm waters, or that it also exists in all shellfish along the mid- and south-Atlantic. Of course, there were the posts from the handful of Northeasterners (whose industry I personally suspect this ban is meant to protect), taking pop shots at Gulf oysters and what they perceive to be their inferiority.

In Sifton's Blog post on the proposed ban, he states that 2/3 of all of our oysters are from the Gulf, and 40% of those are harvested in warm weather months.

Comments on the proposed ban

NYT article on how Hurricane Ike decimated Texas oyster industry

I was a little bored today, so I dug up a little info.

I was looking for some number on where these "15 deaths" a year occurred, surprisingly enough I couldn't find any info.

I found one article from 1993 that said 9 people in Florida died that year (out of 20 country wide) from local Murderous Oysters (MOs). Now the population of the state of Florida in '93 was about 13 million, not counting the tourists. That means in '93 the number of people killed by these MOs was .00005% or so.

Some more quicky math on the gulf coast in general, the five largest metropolitan areas on the gulf have a combined population of just under 10 million based on recent numbers. Assuming all 15 killed by MOs were from these five metro areas, the percentage is around .00015 of the population. (A terrible assumption, but I don't feel like researching/adding the actual numbers. In reality the percentage would be much lower because it would come out of a much larger population.)

.... I did it anyway, the states that are on the Gulf (not including Texas, I just don't think of it as a Gulf state even though Houston was included in the metro areas used above) have a combined population of around 30.2 million, meaning if all 15 were from one of those states the percentage would be .00004.

If you fed every American a MO, about 12,080 people would die, or about one third of the number that die in car crashes every year. So go ahead east Warm Water Murderous Oysters, it's safer than driving!

SSDD

PS -- I don't like Oysters, and I didn't proof read this before posting, and I can think of a couple of logical issues with it.

Headcase, this is not the best way to think about the relative risk. The better question is, if I eat an oyster, what is the probability that I get sick.

If someone jumps off the top of the Willis Tower, they will die. The population of Chicago is just under 3 million. It would not be correct to conclude the risk of dying from jumping off the top of the Willis Tower is 1 in 3 million.

Mike G wrote:Not at all. They put out information. People can act on it as they see fit.

I'm sure you agree that there is some threshold of danger beyond which merely putting out information isn't a sufficient response. For instance, if the FDA discovered botulism in Farmer McGillicuddy's Canned Peas, you wouldn't consider it sufficient for the FDA just to issue a "heads-up" saying, "Oh, by the way, you might get botulism if you eat these peas. Entirely up to you, of course! Carry on." I'm pretty sure you'd expect (and wish) the FDA to remove those peas from grocers' shelves. I could be wrong about that, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that's my guess.

Now, with the oysters, reasonable folks can disagree whether 15 deaths a year is sufficient cause for more than a simple advisory. I know you feel it isn't, while I think it might be. That's fine. We're not going to resolve that. But we can agree, I hope, that there is some number of deaths that would justify a more aggressive response than "caveat emptor."

I'm sure you would agree that there is some threshhold beyond which 300-year-old industries should not be put to death by the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen, just because that bureaucrat has suddenly decided that a risk which has been known and acknowledged [i[long enough to have entered the common store of folklore[/i] falls under his ever-widening purview... demands ACTION NOW!... and, not coincidentally, would benefit one particular side of the industry with whom he is chummy.

Mike G wrote:I'm sure you would agree that there is some threshhold beyond which 300-year-old industries should not be put to death by the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen, just because that bureaucrat has suddenly decided that a risk which has been known and acknowledged [i[long enough to have entered the common store of folklore[/i] falls under his ever-widening purview... demands ACTION NOW!... and, not coincidentally, would benefit one particular side of the industry with whom he is chummy.

I would agree with that. I'm not sure we have any evidence that the last part (about benefiting one part of the industry at the expense of another being part of the bureaucrat's agenda) is anything more than speculation that has occured on this thread--do we know anything that would cause us to suspect that, or is it just our natural suspiciousness?--but certainly a balance has to be struck. It sounds like we have agreement on one basic idea: There is a number of deaths that is too small to justify government intervention, and there is a number of deaths that is large enough that mere "information" (caveat emptor) isn't a sufficient response.

Mike, how long does an industry need to be in existence before it is safe from the bureaucrat's pen?

I don't know, but a presumption in history's favor would be a good start before action is taken unilaterally.

Mike, standing athwart the seafood aisle yelling "Stop!"

Darren72 wrote:If someone jumps off the top of the Willis Tower, they will die. The population of Chicago is just under 3 million. It would not be correct to conclude the risk of dying from jumping off the top of the Willis Tower is 1 in 3 million.

Ah. But if I jump off the Willis Tower while eating a Murderous Oyster, does the Pope crap in the woods?