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Comment by showerst | Hacker News Reader

(Note i still think the author is right) -- If eating that pizza kills one in 100,000 though, you'd have no idea. But the USDA saying "Go ahead, eat the pizza!" would kill dozens of people a year.

Advice to huge numbers of people skews the odds of "this is probably fine", which I think is the root of this. Aside from the fact that quantifying just how many zeros are in front of that probability hasn't (can't?) be done. It probably _is_ reasonable to estimate based on prior science that if 300,000,000 people leave pizza out a few times a year, there's a one in a billion chance of warm cheese making someone super sick.

I also wonder how much lawsuit culture plays a part in this, it only takes one bad luck case.

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If eating that pizza kills 1 in 100,000 we would absolutely have an idea. Apparently about 3 Billion people buy pizza year in the US alone. Probably 1 Billion of those pizzas, at least, are then eaten cold overnight. But we don't have 10,000 people or more dying of cold pizza a year.

> Apparently about 3 Billion people buy pizza year in the US alone. Probably 1 Billion of those pizzas, at least, are then eaten cold overnight.

If by “cold overnight” you mean unrefrigerated, I doubt that anything like 1/3 are.

here's the thing too though... even if it doesn't kill you there are many food borne illnesses that don't show their effects until many days later some even over a month later so the pizza borne illness wouldn't be tracked back to that. it's almost impossible to track those back to their sources unless you have an outbreak of it. now a quick acting food borne illness would have a more quick cause and effect that would aid in diagnosis.

https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/what-you-need-know-about-...

"Lawsuit culture" is mostly a myth created by wealthy corporate defendants who don't like being held accountable for their negligence, and partly due to the lack of socialized healthcare in the US.

It seems more reasonable to me, and with a roughly equal amount of evidence, that lawsuit culture was created by a mixture of media sensationalizing a couple of lawsuits and lawyers capitalizing on the fear.

I had a friend try to sue a company. It turns out it has sizable out of pocket costs, the lawyer fees are steep, and you aren’t compensated for the time you have to spend on the case, even if you win. But the worst part is, most issues you can sue over, the most you can recoup is what you can prove as damages. So if a company literally steals $500 from you, that is all you can recoup after dealing with all of the hassles of the lawsuit, chance of losing and being out thousands of dollars in costs, the time (years usually), etc. And if you settle, those proceeds are also income taxed.

If anything, there should be more lawsuits against companies and they should be punished punitively.

> If eating that pizza kills one in 100,000 though, you'd have no idea.

I'm going to guess this is wrong. I went to a large private university of around thirty thousand. I'd estimate, on any given week, the average student has eaten leftover pizza in the morning once. This alone puts us at a hundred and twenty thousand overnight pizzas consumed per month. Millions per year. At just one university! Surely we'd hear cautionary tales of overnight pizza at 1 in 100k or even 1 in a million, as deaths from it would be far more common than binge drinking.

My estimates may be off a bit, but probably not by as much as you'd think. Student organizations buy copious amounts of pizza because it's popular and cheap.

To offer a counterpoint, college students aren't exactly a randomly distributed sample. They're young adults who are (on average) in the prime of their lives from an immune response perspective, and self-select for a certain minimum level of health besides that. One would expect their responses to food-borne illness vectors to skew dramatically to the less severe side than the general population.

I'm fascinated by the assumption by many in this thread that eating pizza left out overnight is common. I've never done it, and I went to college. We had refrigerators. I mean, if you have a refrigerator why not put the pizza in there?

I agree. If nothing else, a community of the young and hungry might mean that there never is any leftover pizza.

Same reason I often leave pizza out even though I'm years removed from college. Pizza box big, refrigerator small.

It's cheese and cured meat and bread. If its covered I'm not too worried about it.

I think your estimates are way, way off. I doubt the average college student eats leftover pizza once a week, let alone pizza that's been left out all night.

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