Killer Tomatoes, Or Maybe Not

In the tradition of last week's post on news items, the NY Times (and many other sources) are reporting on that the great tomato salmonella outbreak of 2008 may have nothing to do with tomatoes. What is the real culprit? Well, no one really knows. And maybe we never will.

But I would like to ask a more fundamental question: How do we even know there was an "outbreak"? It's not as if there had been no cases of salmonella last year or the year before. The CDC tells us that every year there are 40,000 reported cases, but those are only the ones that actually get reported and "the actual number of infections may be thirty or more times greater." So there are possibly at least 1.2 million cases per year, or 100,000 per month. This "outbreak" has involved 869 people in about 2 and a half months. This is an outbreak?

Of course, they will tell you that this is a rare strain of salmonella, which only 3 people were reported to have in 2007. And there were apparently common factors found among those that were ill: 1.) "consumption of raw tomatoes" and 2.) "persons who ate at restaurants." Now seriously, how many of you (at least, before the FDA/CDC generated scare) had ate a raw tomato and ate at a restaurant within the past week? I would guess this group of people is something like half of the U.S. population. And a few hundred people got sick.

My guess is that the effect is actually random, but government agencies and the media like to see patterns where none exist. Fooled by randomness. And once the "outbreak" is announced, I'm sure that more people get tested, thus more reported cases. Some of those around 1 million unreported cases are now getting reported. And the false outbreak scare has cost the food industry at least $100 million (I've seen estimates more than double that).

Now Lou Dobbs is one-upping Krugman and calling for Bush's impeachment over this. Seriously? Oh yes, I'm sure if you doubled the FDA and CDC budgets, they could get to the bottom of this, plus prevent all those 1.2 million cases from happening in 2009. Yeah, right. We live in a risky world, much less risky than the past, but still risky. It would be better if we the people, the government, and the media just acknowledged this fact.