Oh, the fear. There's a ton of it around us. We are a nation of quivering, nervous nellies.
Former CBC Dragon and screwball-guitar man Kevin O'Leary, for instance, is terrified of Rachel Notley. He is beyond alarmed. O'Leary has described the election of the New Democratic Party in Alberta under Notley as "a horror movie unfolding," "a disaster" and "a horrible experiment."
Soon, I expect, O'Leary will lead a torch-lit procession to Edmonton and demand that the monster be destroyed. Which is all very odd, since Notley seems nice and, to many, a lot less scary than O'Leary.
The federal government, under the wise guidance of Our Glorious Leader, wants us to fear terrorists. The buggers are everywhere, apparently. Never mind the price of oil, bank fees and a stalled economy. Never. Mind. It's not safe to leave the house because there are terrorists among us by the thousands. Hence the current fad for people being arrested on suspicion of terrorism without charges being laid. Phew.
It's mind-bending, the fear that envelops us. So we stuff ourselves with food. Sure, it's well known that nervous people have a wicked appetite. Why, the other day I had a pizza for lunch and a chicken cassoulet for supper. A delectable dinnertime dish. I was starving after a day spent fretting about Alberta and looking around for no-goodniks bent on destroying our way of life.
My mistake, it turns out. What we should fear is food. Poultry, especially. Seriously now.
Frontline: The Trouble with Chicken (PBS, 10 p.m.) examines a major salmonella outbreak and what it calls "a broken food safety system" in the United States. It is terrifying stuff.
It opens with footage of a young boy. "He was the happiest baby you have ever seen," his mother Amanda says. The boy is 18-month-old Noah from Phoenix. After eating some of the chicken the family was having for supper, he became ill. Doctors couldn't figure it out. His parents pointed out that the boy's grandmother had recently had salmonella poisoning. The doctors said no, it wasn't salmonella. A fever persisted for weeks.
Eventually an abscess on the brain was discovered. Noah had a brain infection. He was in surgery for four hours and then in a coma. It was, in fact, a common strain of salmonella – Salmonella Heidelberg, resistant to most antibiotics.
The program then looks closely at the largest salmonella poultry outbreak in U.S. history, when chicken from Foster Farms, the biggest poultry producer on the U.S. West Coast, sickened more than 600 people over 16 months. And it wasn't the first time the company had salmonella problems. It was a decade-long issue. We're told that a common bacterium has become even more dangerous and difficult to treat. The safety net system meant to protect consumers cannot cope. In one instance from a few years ago, in Seattle, doctors saw a spike in salmonella cases and simply went to a nearby store and bought packaged chicken. They found all of it contaminated. Then there was the Jack in the Box hamburger problem. E. Coli was the cause and four kids died.
The program suggests that many poultry producers resist increased inspections – only one company allowed Frontline inside their plant – and that U.S. Department of Agriculture testing is, in any case, inadequate and spotty. Sometimes, it tests less than one poultry bird a day.
Essentially, we are told, various court decisions stripping away the power of the USDA have had a withering impact on poultry safety – "it's the consumers' problem."
The major anomaly that is exposed is this: While the USDA has acted quickly and decisively in the matter of contaminated hamburger meat, it is much less pro-active in the inspection and testing of poultry.
Frontline correspondent David E. Hoffman, who has been covering this issue for years, says, "Between 1998 and 2012, chicken and turkey have been associated with 278 salmonella outbreaks in at least 41 states, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, since most cases go unreported or unsolved. Is it fair to make consumers shoulder so much of the risk of foodborne illness?"
So that's the United States. And we're here. After watching this Frontline, I looked up cases of Salmonella Heidelberg in Canada. A Cornell University study and a Public Health Agency of Canada notice both indicated that in 2004 there were 45 cases in Canada. Last month, the Auditor-General's report included a warning that the Public Health Agency of Canada has no national plan to deal with drug-resistant bacteria.
Now that's something to fear. That's your "horror movie unfolding."
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