8 comments

  • instagib 1 minute ago
    >>On Monday, however, the FDA said that the "false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for [the] FDA's ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms." The agency added that its "traceback investigation and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico."

    The false positive "doesn't call into question the conclusion of the outbreak investigation," McEntire said. Had the positive test been confirmed, "it could've resulted in a substantially expanded recall." <<

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-farms-cyclospora-outbrea...

    I like the part where they say “No Taylor Farms branded products are involved in this recall.” As in there are other brands they do not mention which were but do not list them which they could own and distribute under.

    https://www.taylorfarms.com/newsroom/taylor-fresh-foods-stat...

  • ashleyn 8 minutes ago
    Only slightly unrelated, but I've been thinking a lot lately about prion disease and whether or not you can still trust the meat you eat. Easily a food safety concern that is ten times worse than getting a little diarrhea from your salad, and the same institutional rot can contribute to it. And it would take 5-10 years to really see the damage done from it.
    • jm4 2 minutes ago
      A guy gets a worm in his brain, somehow becomes secretary of health, loosens all the rules so the rest of us have a higher chance of getting a brain worm. This is comic book villain kind of stuff. Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
  • thomascountz 9 minutes ago
  • devin 38 minutes ago
    Of course they did. Look at the disaster around the messaging.
  • pm90 20 minutes ago
    The US Federal Government has been meaningfully degraded by the brazen corruption of the people in power. Already there was a crisis of faith in authority; this is just going to make it much much worse.

    I wonder if its time to rethink some of these institutions. It seems like Food Safety is especially important to the welp being of society; it might make sense to have food testing labs in every major population center/distribution hub. Funded by a tax on the food companies or perhaps even locally. Its just unbelievable that the entire US population is so vulnerable… what if a bad actor did something nasty deliberately?

    • projectileboy 10 minutes ago
      Well… the system mostly worked for a pretty long time. As I used to tell my kids, if you try hard enough to break something, you’ll probably succeed.
      • davidw 7 minutes ago
        Breaking things is also a lot easier than building complex things.
    • jiqiren 10 minutes ago
      Seems because of Supreme Court ruling practically every federal agency likely needs to be re-chartered to have the same structure as the Federal Reserve.
  • bagels 31 minutes ago
    How can anyone trust them to provide food safely if they can give Trump money and suddenly the recall disappears?
  • davidw 8 minutes ago
    "No shit?" jokes aside, it seems like a bad corporate strategy. Rather than owning up and doing what they can to protect their customers, they kept trying to hide, and now Taylor Farms is going to forever be associated in customers minds with explosive diarrhea.
  • lettergram 41 minutes ago
    It was a false positive for what it was worth - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-says-taylor-f...
    • mlyle 37 minutes ago
      It's my understanding that it was traced definitively to Taylor Farms, but the only positive test may have been a false positive.

      You don't always get a positive test, but this doesn't necessarily prevent you from concluding the cause of food contamination.

      • pudgywalsh 31 minutes ago
        > but the only positive test may have been a false positive

        Software getting flagged by anti-malware as a false positive is a great way to get an evil corpo tale of woe to the top of HN with 800 points.

      • stogot 36 minutes ago
        > It's my understanding that it was traced definitively to Taylor Farms, but the only positive test may have been a false positive.

        So it’s a false positive?

        • Terr_ 30 minutes ago
          > So it’s a false positive?

          It sounds like you're trying to browbeat the other person with a fallacy of equivocation over the scope of "it."

          These things are not equivalent:

          1. A biological test for a parasite in a sample of equipment/material from the factory. (Claimed as false-positive.)

          2. The analysis of the supply-chain for the food that sickened people which led to that facility as a common factor. (Presumably still accurate.)

          ___________

          To use a criminal-investigation metaphor: Suppose a dead woman is found covered in knife wounds, and the circumstantial evidence leads to one Knifey McStabberson, who previously dated the woman and had sent death-threats via text-message. He has a collection of hundreds of knives, and investigators notice one that looks bloody, and test it... It's her blood! Wait, oops, false-positive.

          What is your takeaway from that story? Is it that Knifey McStabberson is a "false-positive suspect" and obviously totes innocent, or is it that maybe they should check the rest of the knives?

    • conception 36 minutes ago
      Taylor Farms also gave Maga Inc a million dollars six days after the FDA pushed a food safety rule back.
    • Tostino 38 minutes ago
      At this point, why would I trust what they say?
    • pacomerh 28 minutes ago
      How can you believe this?, look at the signs. Its too obvious someone got paid to say that.