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When evaluating why rules might differ between countries, the less strict rule shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as "putting corporations before health" or the like; it's absolutely possible that US consumer safety bodies determined that the added risk from some tradeoff isn't high enough to warrant the additional cost, but some other cultures have different risk tolerances.
Such tradeoffs are very normal and very okay for regulatory bodies to do (provided they're doing so with sound justifications, which I haven't seen any reason to doubt here).
* Massively using DDT, therefore seeing the problems before others or worse than others, so banning it.
* Putting commercial interests ahead of safety in food production, then having issues with that and snapping back with inspection regimes. (things seem to have swung back the other way significantly on this one though – the various food lobbies seem to have a lot of power)
* Putting easy business and fast growth ahead of worker safety, then noticing the problem with that (broken workers are not efficient workers!), and establishing OSHA to try deal with the issue.
So the US looks to have a high risk tolerance generally, but when a limit is passed things snap back hard. A few things seem to be overdue a snap-back: HFCS levels in food, guns, etc. – maybe we'll see these in coming years.
I wonder how much of an influence thalidomide was. The US failed to authorise thalidomide essentially because one person in the FDA put up a huge fight. This was, in retrospect, clearly correct, and would have given a lot of political cover for introducing safety regulations (in the thalidomide aftermath the FDA was a leader in introducing more modern safety requirements, say).
The stuff you’re talking about is old, though. It’s more difficult to find areas where the US is _still_ leading on this. For better or for worse, the EU is increasingly the world’s regulator (in much the same way that California is the US’s regulator on certain matters; when a really big market regulates, it tends to drag everyone else along with it).
On food, in particular, the US has a slightly weird approach; certain things which would clearly never be approved today are allowed if they’ve been around long enough. The US is virtually the only place to allow use of potassium bromate in food, say; if it was submitted today it would likely be barred as a carcinogen, but it predates the ban on carcinogens in food.
(a) because safety, as a concept, has somehow become highly politicised in the US (albeit recently in weird directions; bundling of anti-vax-ism into the far-right and increasingly the mainstream right has lead to the odd situation where the traditionally anti-safety faction are pushing for _higher_ regulation in one narrow area) and
(b) because the US's regulatory apparatus is much more politically influenced than that in most developed countries, due to how the US civil service works.
The reason is simple - food lobby, pushing for example HFCS everywhere despite everybody knows how damaging it is to health, for decades. But half of US grows corn. I am sure there are few categories where US leads but that's not overall trend.
It goes deeper, much deeper, see Boeing 737 Max and global loss of trust in FAA, that was just too big to fail corporation pushing through regulation like knife through butter, until SHTF repeatedly and they couldn't keep blaming foreign pilots for incompetence anymore.
US is simply much more corporate friendly rather than population friendly compared to say Europe, be it employee protection, general food safety, fines to corporations etc.
This is the crux of my point though, everything is relative and composed of trade-offs. A more strict standard is not necessarily better.
We know mercury is toxic and builds up over a lifetime: why is it acceptable to sell any fish which is known to aggregate mercury? Why not only allow extremely low mercury fish?
We know red meat has some carcinogenic effects: why not ban its sale, or only allow species of animals with less of this effect?
> We talk about baseline [...] how safe are the cheapest things that are legally sold in given market.
This is the other side of that trade-off here. Everyone wants access to products. We could reduce the risk of basically any product by increasing its cost.
A very reasonable heuristic for regulators might be "Find an acceptable risk point at which further risk reduction would not warrant the marginal increase in cost". Another reasonable heuristic might be "Minimize risk at all costs: if the market can't bear the product, so be it". Another reasonable heuristic might be "Label all risks, then let individuals sort things out".
We're focusing on the first one here, but we accept the others in different cases: the second applies more to medical testing, the third to items like tobacco and alcohol.
I'm all for reducing the risks that we can reduce -- nobody is arguing against keeping turpentine out of your juice.
My whole point is just that we can't look at two acceptable safety limits, see one that's more stringent, and then conclude that it's a better regulation.
Not that I'd blame it on figs, but one look at the US healthcare system (i.e., costs, as well as the health / illnesses of the people who need that system) and it highlights the need to question *everything*.
The problem with say "X is low amounts is safe" and "Y is liw amounts is safe" is that we don't understand the effects of X + Y, nor what happens when adding some unknown Z.
The more that comes out on gut bacteria (i.e., maybe the human body can handle X and/or Y, but our bacteria friends can not) the more our safety levels look suspect.
Many other countries ban corporate donations to political parties entirely.
https://www.idea.int/data-tools/question-countries-view/529/...
https://www.idea.int/data-tools/region-view/26/55
Corporate political influence in the U.S. depends primarily on the popularity of the products, jobs, and investment returns they produce.
And successful companies create rich people, who sometimes make a lot of personal donations to politicians and parties. That gets lumped in with corporate influence depending on the details, even though they are personal donations.
Possibly, trying to find ways to make government officials less susceptible to outside influence in non traditional ways. Or, in the case of police, paying much better than minimum wage. Where I am, I think they make something like 42,000/yr.
Or maybe they just all need some meditation practice? Some mindfulness and maybe they won’t think they need to soak up so much money.
The US and EU limit is the same - 20 ppb.
https://www.efisc-gtp.eu/data/1433337461EFISC-%20Code%20of%2...
EU:
> For maize and all products derived from maize, including processed maize products, maximum limits (μg/kg) of 2,0 ppb for Aflatoxin B1 and 4,0 ppb for sum of Aflatoxins B1+B2+G1+G2 are set
> For Food (incoming material): Maximum limits (μg/kg) of 5,0 ppb for Aflatoxin B1 and 10,0 ppb for sum of Aflatoxins B1+B2+G1+G2.
> For feed: Feed materials 20 ppb for Aflatoxin B1
So presumably EU and US food has similarly low levels for things like milk, even though the max cutoffs for milk are different.