‘Superbug’ scourge spreads as U.S. fails to track rising human toll

> If there is a legitimate public interest then the government should create an inspection scheme The problem is that the public doesn't always know any better or know what is going on without the undercover folks investigating and making a big deal about it. It would be different if we could trust policy makers to investigate some of the stuff or listen to the science, but at this point (at least in the US), that's not happening.

>That's the government's job, not private activists Sure, maybe it is the government's job technically. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work. In addition to the above, many governement oversight programs are underfunded or have had their power legistlated away. On top of all that, companies aren't always upfront with letting an inspector see the normal daily operations.

Ancedotes I worked as a CNA in a nursing home. They were commonly understaffed. This is fairly common with nursing homes in the state I was in. There was a state agency that checked such things, but it seemed the nursing homes always had a notice when they were going to visit. Suddenly, they had a lot of manditory and voluntary overtime available and stuck to the rules. If the visits were sporadic, more often, and they checked things like logs and historic staffing levels, I'm guessing this would change. I think the only way to get this improved would be for enough private activists to gather evidence from many different places and get state laws changed after making a public outcry.

Ancedote 2 I worked in a food factory for a day or two. Now, they were horrible employers for various reasons, but the facility was clean and there was a lot of focus on meeting food prep safety guidelines. In fact, there were USDA employees assigned to that factory, and they could not run without it. Actual oversight. But food factories might not have been like this had it not been for private activists, and it still isn't perfect. One still hears horror stories in small towns with a meat processing plant, for example, but I have no clue if they are true or not.

I'm sorry for your loss. Hopefully we as a society can devote more resources to minimize the occurrence of this cruel disease.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12444330 and marked it off-topic.

>I know it's not, we reap the benefits in lower food prices, but does beef really need to be cheap enough we can eat it 7 days a week?

No it is. The total cost to society has to include healthcare costs as well. Saying, 'This lowers our cost at the dinner table' is only looking at part of the equation.

Never mind that people don't eat dinner together which is a by product of having super cheap convenient packaged calories available. Eating as a family increases child development significantly, it's like the cheapest thing you can do to give kids a good start.

Never mind that we don't really need nearly as much corn as we produce. When the farm bill came out and started picking agricultural winners, we turned garbage farm land into prime producers of a crop that we don't need. Then we added tariffs to sugar imports, then we put corn into everything, providing a cheap source of calories and diabetes, heart disease, perhaps cancer (most of the links here are still from correlation and haven't been proven as causation). Corn moved from a side dish to being in everything you eat unless you are cooking all (most) of your own food.

We have the (possible) super bug issue from our meat sources.

It takes like 50 gallons of water to grow an avocado but we do that anyways because irrigation water is subsidized in many states even as we start to drain our reservoirs.

It takes 2 calories of fossil fuel to make one calorie of food. We do this because it's still cost effective because of subsidies.

The whole picture makes it look not quite as cheap, we've just pushed the cost into other categories to hide it.

What was the process for that like, if you don't mind me asking?