Good news. While Trump is blowing millions of dollars each day on a little military pageant in Washington DC, they are cutting programs that study food borne illness
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly and drastically scaled back the country’s most comprehensive system for tracking the food-borne illnesses estimated to sicken millions of Americans each year.
Public health experts consider the program, called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (or FoodNet), to be one of the most critical ways to protect against the dangerous pathogens, such as listeria and vibrio, that cause food-borne illnesses. For years, it tracked eight of them. As of this summer, it will only track two.
The sprawling effort involves three federal agencies and 10 state governments, which work together to root out food-borne illnesses early and study their origins. The government has other systems for tracking pathogens, meaning people will likely continue to learn about outbreaks. But public health experts said they worried that scaling back FoodNet could present long-term health risks.
“You will clearly miss cases,” said Dr. Glenn Morris, a physician and epidemiologist in Florida who helped establish FoodNet at the Department of Agriculture.
A C.D.C. spokeswoman said that the department had determined that some of the program’s processes were “duplicative,” namely that other C.D.C. programs also track food-borne illnesses. She also noted that the two pathogens FoodNet would continue to monitor — salmonella and a strain of E. coli commonly referred to as STEC — are among the country’s top contributors to food-borne illness, hospitalization and death.
But other programs are less thorough than FoodNet, and the pathogens cut from the program are also dangerous. Two of them, campylobacter and listeria, killed a total of 72 people in 2022, and made thousands sick, according to FoodNet data. The others are cyclospora, shigella, vibrio and yersinia.
Don’t worry. The vegetable crops are all dying in the fields and the meat packing plants have no employees because we’re deporting all the workers so this won’t be a problem. There are always canned goods. Yum yum. Unfortunately they’ll probably get rid of all the regulations that prevent botulism so that could be a problem too.
Just take some Ivermectin and drink a coke made with cane sugar you’ll be fine.