The Complete Patient

I recently read an astounding statistic in one of the major newspapers, attributed to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), so astounding I had to confirm it for myself. Sure enough, I found it on the CDC web site: the agency estimates in a research paper that each year, 76 million people become ill, 325,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die from foodborn illness.

I took out my little calculator to handle that one. We just celebrated having 300 million Americans, so based on that, more than 25% of the population is getting sick each year from foodborn illness. And one-tenth of one per cent is being hospitalized.

Equally astounding, more than 80% of the illnesses are from “unknown agents.”

I’d say the cat is out of the bag.

The government is planning elaborate stings of dairy farmers and intimdating farmers to put RFID tags on their cattle, all while Rome is burning. The authors of the CDC paper spend much of their time worrying how to get better data—they came to their estimates based on a determination that there is gross under-reporting of food born illnesses around the country.

Agriculture and public health bureaucrats definitely need to be spending more time reading their own researchers’ data. If they did, they’d know that NAIS isn’t appropriate—why worry about preventing epidemics when you already have one?