they shipped peanut butter laced salmonella [I]knowingly.
[/I]
Peanut Corp. of America went ahead and shipped peanut butter products despite getting test results showing salmonella was present, U.S. health officials told Bloomberg News Tuesday.
Now, senior congressional and state officials are calling for a federal probe into whether these actions were criminal, according to USA Today.
The company’s actions “can only be described as reprehensible and criminal,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who oversees Food and Drug Administration funding, told USA Today. “Not only did this company knowingly sell tainted products, it shopped for a laboratory that would provide the acceptable results they were seeking. This behavior represents the worst of our current food safety regulatory system.”
Lawsuits are no substitute for proper public safety legilsation. I’m sure the CEO would hate to have his company fleeced in a lawsuit . But not as much as a few years of sharing a cell with a big dude who lovingly refer to him as “my little peanutbutter-man”.
Oh, I absolutely agree. While government action and civil lawsuits are gonna kill this company, safety laws with appropriately-funded enforcement are how you prevent this sort of crap from happening in the first place.
Yeah, but who wants to bet these guys aren’t the only company shipping contaminated food? These guys just got caught due to the scale. Think of all the times you ever got an unusually upset stomach after a meal you prepared with prepackaged ingredients.
But as FLOWERS* has mentioned before, these guys don’t get real jail time because of lack of previous convictions. Although it will be interesting to see if criminal charges of murder are brought against the people responsible. A murder conviction might not be as easy to get around. Any criminal/prosecution attorneys around (Rywill??) to take a stab at guessing if they could be up for murder?
*in caps because I mis-attributed this knowledge before and I’m reminding myself.
shrugs Then change the law. Minimum 6 months/2 years/whatever prison sentence, regardless of attentuating circumstances. I mean, if he raped and killed a little girl and then ate her afterwards, he’d go to jail no matter what, right? The point is that those responsible/in charge must know they face personal consequences if they step out of line.
True. (Man, I need to take Irony 101 at night school. If everyone keep taking everything I post at face value I’ll end up in big trouble).
Last fall, Maple Leaf Foods, the largest producer of prepackaged deli meats in Canada, was hit with a scandal when several people, mostly elderly, died from listeriosis. The listeria outbreak was linked to a Maple Leaf meat slicing equipment in a Toronto. The company had followed regulations on santizing the machines but the bacteria managed to grow inside one of the machines.
The company did the right thing by doing a nation-wide recall of dozens of products made at the affected plant, costing them $20 million, and took a major hit in its stocks (they fell 22%, or C$257 million, as of August) as a result of the bad publicity of the deaths and illnesses. The CEO of Maple Leaf Foods publicly apologized over the incident.
You mean after the judgement? No. That would all come out of the sale. If you mean in order to avoid going to court, I doubt it. I would guess such things would have to be settled prior to sale.
Take the number of [peanut butter jars] in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.
Short answer is no. If they did it with that intention, or some other intention of evading responsibility, that would be criminal, or alternatively, the second company would be acquiring the liabilities as well, so they would transfer.
