Take a copy of the Castleberry’s recall list and go through your canned goods NOW. Botulism has spread across the nation in the past four weeks, starting in Indiana, moving to Texas, and now reported in Hawaii and California. Botulism, right after Anthrax, tops the list of bioterrorism agents against which national preparedness and defense programs are aimed. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars went into “preparedness” against the Cat A BT agents.
The six “Category A” Bioterror agents are:
Anthrax.
Botulism.
Plague.
Smallpox.
Tularemia.
Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers (Ebola, etc.)
Look, this isn’t a scare tactic. Check your canned goods. It won’t say “Castleberry’s” in bold script across the labels of many, if not most, of the recalled items.
Unlike E. Coli and Salmonella, Cryptosporidium and Shigella and even Hepatitis A, though, BOTULISM KILLS. Nastily. Not quickly.
Historically, Botulism was a hazard of canning/preserving at home. Commercial (ie factory) operations were supposed to be safe; and in fact, until THIS MONTH, the last commercially-canned foods implicated in a botulism outbreak were produced in the 1970s.
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thank you sarah
seriously, i get so pissed when i think about the fact that i get more information from my blogmate than i do from the press and gummint on these matters. i mean, who knows what other poisons are in my food because some rethug crony got the bush administration to lay off the regulation? people are dead for no good reason except incompetence and greed.
I took a can off the store shelf Friday
Salvage stores (aka scratch’n’dent, may have other names in other parts of the country) are at the very bottom of the chain of “commercial” food distribution of items sold for home consumption; the only thing beyond that is food pantries that get and distribute charitable donations for free.
Not giving the name or exact location because the intent here is not to get them into trouble, it is to illustrate how UTTERLY FUCKED the information distribution system on this recall is. ChiDy, you are absolutely right, bloggers are putting out more information than the FDA is.
There was one person working at that store who had even heard of the Castleberry recall and she was a part-timer; the regular workers knew nothing about it. No list of the 90 items had been sent to them at all, by anybody either federal or state.
Stores like this get most of the stock they carry from central warehouses which in turn get cosmetically-damaged-but-(theoretically)-sellable goods from stores all over. This place in west Tennessee gets theirs out of a distributor in Streator Illinois fer chrissakes.
How exactly this works i am unclear, as far as how many stores a particular truck makes drops at. But they told me back during the cat-food recall that they were still getting “bad” lots at least a month after the scandal had been more or less forgotten everywhere else.
Food pantries really worry me, and also, as Sarah points out, shit people store at home. It isn’t just Mormons and nutso survivalists who keep stocks of canned goods; anybody who’s ever been through an emergency, particularly one involving a lengthy power outage, knows to do this.
Keep talkin’ to your neighbors, folks. Hell, stick a sheet with the list of Bad Cans up on whatever passes for a community bulletin board in your neighborhood. A light pole will do in a pinch.
Take a copy to church and pass it out in Sunday School
…hand a copy around at Daycare, get a geek to put a crawler on your local cable access channel.
Stick it up on your chess club’s website.
Seriously.
This is NOT the Nanny State I’m talking about here. It’s life and death.