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Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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

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

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