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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

> By the time the outbreak had ended, the agency documented 61 cases in 19 states. Sixty of the victims were hospitalized.

> Ten people died.

[…]

> Information released by the FSIS in response to multiple Freedom of Information Requests revealed that the agency had been aware of major deficiencies at the Boar’s Head production facility since October 2022, but had taken no action to suspend production or order a clean-up. These deficiences were described as posing an “imminent threat to product” in a Food Safety Assessment conducted in September/October 2022.

I guess if the FDA was aware of this, the company must have been as well, right? Hospital bills are quite expensive nowadays, is there any caselaw on trying to recover the costs of medical bills incurred by the sanitation policies of Boar’s Head?

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Has it actually come out why "imminent threat to product" for over a year didn't result in a shut down?

I know this is a popular topic to blame Trump on for some reason (happening 2 years into the next admin), but surely the fda still has the ability to shut down locations some times.

My gut is it just got lost in the bureaucracy of the agency, but I'd love to see an actual explanation.

I have no idea, it seems quite weird that they weren’t made to shut down.

What’s Trump have to do with? I don’t like him or his policies, but I don’t think we need to trace all bad decisions back to him or anything like that.

Trump's administration loosened inspections to allow more self-reporting in places like meat packing plants.

Assuming what you said was true, it sounds like they knew about it anyways over a year earlier.

I mean, I’m worried about the general loosening of regulations. But this situation sounds like it was discovered in 2022 and then the outbreak happened in 2024.

Edit: just to be explicit, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that cost-cutting or whatever resulted in fewer inspections, which resulted in less discovery of issues. But since the issue actually was discovered… I dunno, it seems more like a decision making problem, if a health issue is known about for two years without any action taken. Maybe there’s some other way to blame budget cuts there… I don’t see it though.

That's assuming the Biden team had it on their radar as something to undo. They kept a lot of Trump-era policies unchanged. Changes done in one administration don't end just because the other party is in power. It's a cumulative effect.

Is the decision to close one factory (or impose penalties until they clean up) on any elected official’s radar? I’d expect that to be handled at a lower level, but I don’t know how that stuff really works.

It's not about the one factory and it not being on elected official's radars is exactly the problem of why it didn't get fixed (+ it's easier to cause damage than repair things). As another person highlighted, Trump gutted the USDA [1]

> During the Trump administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers published and funded objective analyses of issues such as climate change, the efficiency of food assistance programs, and tax cuts that mostly benefit the richest farmers. It wasn't received well.

> Trump officials proposed deep cuts to USDA research agencies. When Congress wouldn't go along, the administration came up with plan B: Move two agencies — the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Economic Research Service — far away from Washington.

Doing this gutted the ability for the USDA to execute and stay on mission and this was intentional. This kind of outbreak would be the natural result.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/02/963207129/usda-research-agenc...

"What’s Trump have to do with?"

I suppose because he cut spending on government work in general, that is not police and army related?

(But I lack insights into whether he cut any budgets related to this)

They had enough money to make Costco recall butter not labeled as a diary product.

I'm not sure this explanation holds water

Get DOGE to examine the failures.

As if DOGE had any competency at that. Most of their proposals are deeply flawed because they didn't bother to dig into details - not the behavior you want when examining failures.

Examining failures isn't very efficient. Probably best to just carry on as is, nothing we can do.

Exposing food manufacturers to widespread civil suits like this would surely depress domestic production of food just as opening up fabric manufacturers to fire-related civil suits (e.g. Chapman v Brown) destroyed domestic fabric production. Even if the manufacturer wins 99% of the time, the proliferation of suits like this is sufficiently costly to force production overseas. You still end up with the same (or greater) risks, but the system routes around the legal friction by reducing production in the costly legal regime.

I think there is a way to distinguish between blanket liability any time someone gets sick eating your product, and suing Boar's Head for continuing to operate with deficiencies that were documented in a report and known to the company. It is regrettable that the FSIS did not enforce harder, but I think someone who's family died because of this should be able to sue.

> I think there is a way to distinguish between blanket liability any time someone gets sick eating your product, and suing Boar's Head for continuing to operate with deficiencies that were documented in a report and known to the company.

I would generally expect the latter to be accomplished by regulatory fines; it's simpler and cleaner than an array of individual civil suits.

The greater issue is that I'd be very surprised if many of those civil suits were effective, and especially so for being cost effective (for either side).

Citizens will need to prove beyond a preponderance of evidence that their relative's infection was due to Boar's Head, which is going to be very difficult. Everyone is exposed to dozens of potential Listeria sources every day; it's hard to prove it was Boar's Head and not Chipotle or McDonald's or whatever else they've eaten/touched.

It genuinely probably makes more sense to do a regulatory fine on Boar's Head, and then distribute the fine to affected people via a mechanism with a lower bar. Maybe everyone who had a Listeria infection around that time, which is much easier to prove than the source of the infection.

Your understanding of how liability works is flawed.

Manufacturing products overseas doesn't exempt you from liability for selling t-shirts that are too flammable. I can still sue The Gap for selling me a dangerous item that they made in Bangladesh as easily as I can sue them for selling me a dangerous item that they made in San Francisco.

You can test clothing for flammability, then again if the design materially changes.

Food doesn't work this way - each jar has a low chance of contamination, so spot testing won't catch the problem. Small changes in manufacturing procedure can result in big changes in safety.

source: worked in the wholesale food industry, across 300+ categories.

Is the spot we're testing the blood and mold on the factory wall?

Try suing LOBNDX for their faulty charger you bought on Amazon.

> Try suing LOBNDX for their faulty charger you bought on Amazon.

That's why I don't buy LOBNDX, I only buy LUOATIP, sold with 【No Burn House Down】feature.

Really, that's why I try to just never shop at Amazon.

The odd rounded-inside-bracket-things that show on these product listings are kind of funny. I wonder if future archaeologists will track them like pottery shards, haha.

I am curious to the usage of those. Like, why that character instead of the more common square brackets? Why do these sellers commonly choose that symbol? To me it's often kind of a flag of potentially questionable quality, so I'd like to know why they do that.

If anyone has insight to share I'd love it.

I have no actual insight, but I’ll offer this theory up in the hopes that I’ll learn something by being corrected.

I assumed they were the default on some Chinese site (alibaba or temu or something like that), and just got copied over by default.

I wouldn't doubt it's some default from whatever cross listing tool that's common but I have no knowledge of. Definitely a deep world to explore that I currently only have a surface level knowledge of.

Always another rabbit hole to explore.

And yet manufacturer liability was a significant causal factor in domestic textile production collapsing

The suit you cited happened in 1961. However, in the 1950s every domestic textile category had seen at least double digit declines (97% for wool!), while imports had seen triple digit growth (cotton fabric imports tripled). The industry was already well on its way to failure, so I have a hard time believing there is a causal relationship.

As I stated before, the liability still exists even when you manufacture outside of the country. There are no net cost savings from a liability lawsuit standpoint to be had by moving production overseas.

Making sure they employees don't all die in horrendous fires is why US textile production collapsed? Do you have a citation for that? Because that sounds insane. I thought it moved overseas because they can pay children pennies, not because they literally want to roast their peons alive.

I linked to the cited case in my comment; it's an interesting read, and I suggest that you check it out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452760

If you produce food without meeting the bare minimum standard of don't make people sick then your operation absolutely should get, as you say, depressed.

The problem is that there are a lot of spurious and dubious cases, and class-actions are very expensive and risky to defend, even when the defendant is innocent, largely because they're seen as unsympathetic 'piggy-banks' (whereas the plaintiffs are often very sympathetic).

> Exposing food manufacturers to widespread civil suits like this would surely depress domestic production of food just as opening up fabric manufacturers to fire-related civil suits destroyed domestic fabric production.

"Requiring safe standards is bad for business" is possibly true (at least in the short term), but I'm not sure that the alternative is better.

EDIT: I inadvertently read the parent post uncharitably, as suggesting that there should be no enforcement at all. gizmodo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452514) points out that arguing against civil liability is not arguing against effective regulation and enforcement.

There are different mechanisms for requiring safe standards. The point is that 'enforcing standards through civil liability' is bad for business. There is also 'enforcing standards through regulation and regulatory agencies'; which is arguably better for both safety and business compared to the civil suit. On the other hand, civil suits are more insulated from the regulatory wims of the current administration.

Thank you. This is a good point. I definitely misread my parent post as arguing against all enforcement of safe standards, rather than just against enforcing them through civil liability.

It's more efficient to treat food safety standards as a criminal matter rather than a civil matter. If it's frequently treated as a civil matter, it results in endless (and endlessly costly) civil suits. The standards for successfully pursuing a civil judgement have to be extremely high in situations like this to discourage destructive ambulance-chasing.

10 people died from the Boars Head contaminated meat. I guess I don't really mind if a few lawyers chase those ambulances and extract a lot of money out of that company?

A) It's not going to stop at the most egregious cases

B) I hope you like meat imported from China

No. Treating everything like a criminal matter gets you Italy. It didn't actually fix anything because the process is reactive not proactive.

The EU mandates testing of food products, monitoring of farms and processing facilities, and enforces strict trade controls on potentially contaminated products. This works just fine and drastically reduces disease due to pathogens such as Salmonella relative to the US.

A lot of the EU relies on basically slave labor for agriculture so I'm not inclined to believe that everything is universally enforced, especially on the periferry.

We can look at the number of infections per year to quantify the effectiveness of the regulations. In the US there are approx 1.35 million per year [0], i.e. 1 in 255 people, with around 450 deaths. In the EU there are approx 70k reported cases [1] i.e. 1 in 6500, with around 90 deaths. Moreover the number of cases drastically dropped in the EU since regulations came into force earlier this century. The data here is very clear that regulations save lives.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html

Second link should have been: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/SAL...

Italian food is good.

I'm not saying to do this for every single industry, just for food

Thanks for the citation of 'Chapman v Brown', it's an interesting case that I hadn't heard of: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/1...

It seems much harder to move meat production overseas. You can use destructively high tariffs to prevent it. You can also require imports to follow the same standards including domestic inspection.

Any suits that fail 99% of the time are frivilous and the normal method of dealing with same is punishing claimants who should have known better by fining and disbarring lawyers and making claimant bear costs.

Ways exist to distinguish between a frivilous and non case in this category.

-Has responsible party exhibited a pattern of failures of their normal duty of care according to testimony and evidence that would be collected by the government as part of reasonable investigations and inspection

-Is it more likely than not that present issue is related.

It seems unreasonable that we must either open up bobs meats to lawsuits with every sandwich or ignore the fact that Bob killed dozens because he has been known to be a filthy pig for years.

I think it would be really hard to show causation there; I’d expect, at least, that higher wages and higher regulation would be pretty correlated (more well off populations might be less willing to sacrifice lives to industry). Maybe the fabric industry moved out because American workers weren’t cost-competitive.

> "Maybe the fabric industry moved out because American workers weren’t cost-competitive."

That seems like a likely factor, but insurance against product liability suits can be very expensive in some (litigious) industries, and is also a factor in total cost analysis.

The obvious answer is to find a way to open up overseas production to the risk of being sued.

Perhaps putting all liability on the importer, distributor, or retailer for imported goods.

> Perhaps putting all liability on the importer, distributor, or retailer for imported goods.

Standard product liability law already has joint and several liability for manufacturing defects on all parties in the chain of commerce, so each of the retailer, distributor, importer, and manufacturer already bear full liability.

> "Perhaps putting all liability on the importer, distributor, or retailer for imported goods."

These parties do carry extensive liabilities when there's a product defect or fault, as was the case in the cited case. The issue is that manufacturers usually produce larger volumes, and are thus vulnerable to more of these lawsuits, as well as class-actions. Class-action cases are often extremely and expensive, even when there was no clear fault.

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