Why Isn’t This Guy In Jail???

Posted By elissa on Sep 23, 2010 | 3 comments

A while back, I discussed the recent egg recall, and opined that the owners of the egg farms in question should be put out of business.

I need to update that statement. At least one of them – Jack deCoster, the owner of Wright County Egg – should be put out of business… and put into jail.  While I noted that there were “previous sanitation and safety violations” on his egg farms, I didn’t know just how bad they were.  But – according to this New York Times article – apparently Mr. DeCoster’s operations have been sickening (and sometimes killing) people for over 20 years!

On a July night in 1987, scores of elderly and chronically ill patients at Bird S. Coler Memorial Hospital in New York City began to fall violently sick with food poisoning from eggs tainted with salmonella.

“It was like a war zone,” said Dr. Philippe Tassy, the doctor on call as the sickness started to rage through the hospital. By the time the outbreak ended more than two weeks later, nine people had died and about 500 people had become sick. It remains the deadliest outbreak in this country attributed to eggs infected with the bacteria known as Salmonella enteritidis.

…Farms tied to Mr. DeCoster were a primary source of Salmonella enteritidis in the United States in the 1980s, when some of the first major outbreaks of human illness from the bacteria in eggs occurred, according to health officials and public records. At one point, New York and Maryland regulators believed DeCoster eggs were such a threat that they banned sales of the eggs in their states.

“When we were in the thick of it, the name that came up again and again was DeCoster Egg Farms,” said Paul A. Blake, who was head of the enteric diseases division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980s, when investigators began to tackle the emerging problem of salmonella and eggs.

I just don’t get it… how is it that there are no criminal penalties for a pattern of behavior that has affected so many people? An apology doesn’t exactly cut it.