Should we ban salmonella tainted peanut butter because a subset of the population might be at risk?

[HamdenRice]

This poll is a bit facetious, but I'm posting it anyway because I think that there is a misunderstanding at the core of certain arguments about vaccine safety and the analogy to the safety of other products.

For example, peanuts are a natural (if highly selected) crop. Peanut butter is a minimally processed product made from that crop. People who are allergic to peanut butter are allergic to peanuts. No one is responsible for "doing something wrong" in the manufacturing process of peanut butter if a susceptible person ingests peanuts or or peanut butter.

On the other hand, if peanut butter is contaminated with salmonella because the factory is filthy, then someone has "done something wrong," for which they are liable. Some people will get very sick from eating salmonella contaminated peanut butter, but even so, some people will not. Yet we hold the manufacturer liable.

The government does indeed "ban" peanut butter that is contaminated with salmonella.

Another argument that seems misplaced is that just because vaccines save lots of lives, we should not hold vaccine makers accountable if they destroy a lesser number of lives as a cost. That means that you are asking some randomly selected people to pay a very high cost for the benefit of others without compensating them. Would anyone propose, for example, that we institute a lottery selecting, say, 1 out of 10,000 people to be organ donors before they die of other causes simply because that one lost life would save the lives of two kidney transplant recipient, one liver recipient, one lung recipient, one heart recipient, the sight of several cornea recipients, and so on? On a strict cost/benefit basis, we might say that killing one person is worth saving 20 others; but we hold life to be a supreme value that cannot be taken, no matter how much good that killing does.

By the analogies I've read here, it should also be perfectly acceptable for a local water company to deliver polluted water because without water we would die, so the company that delivers it shouldn't have to make it "perfectly safe."

So, should we ban peanut butter that has been negligently contaminated with salmonella even if it only injures or kills a small proportion of the population?

[hlthe2b]

1. Nuts (literally). Everyone is susceptible to Salmonella

with the possible exception of someone who had recently recovered from the same subtype (strain).

So, your original premise "ban salmonella tainted peanut butter because a subset of the population might be at risk?" doesn't really hold. YOur peanut allergy analogy would have been a more logical path for your point.

[thesquanderer]

3. subset

in the context of the rest of what he wrote, I thnk he was saying that only a small subset of the population is at risk of dying from salmonella. Certainly far more people are at risk of getting ill from it (though I don't know for sure that everyone is susceptible, or that everyone is susceptible to getting sick from equally small amounts). Carrying the vaccine analogy further, some percentage of people do get mildly sick (but not deathly so) from some vaccinations.

(None of this is meant as any comment on the poster's actual point, which, in my early morning fog, I admit I find rather vague.)

[flyingobject]

6. right. Lets just require a "religious exemption" to opt out of poisoned peanut butter

we can be JUST LIKE CHINA!!!!!

Yippee!

[DrDan]

2. this needs to go one level further . . .

if the processing in these filthy conditions was done so knowingly . . .

then not only should it be banned, someone should go to jail. (Obviously an overstatement - but charges should be considered)

[trotsky]

4. You repeat a couple of misunderstandings in your post.

1) That a known toxic bacteria contaminant is somehow equivalent to a mystery ingredient that no vaccination opponent can identify (is it thimerosal? aluminum salts? "toxins"?) yet which has tested safe in countless animal experiments and millions of vaccine doses.

2) That vaccine makers aren't accountable for vaccine deaths. You (and a lot of the anti-vaccination gang) seem to have a very difficult time grasping the concept of public health and shared risk. Vaccine makers ARE accountable for quality issues - as has been pointed out numerous times in this forum with vaccine recalls, fines for factory conditions, etc. But they are shielded to a degree by the government from vaccine-related reactions. This is done in the interest of public health - our government (not just the evil Bush cabal - muah ha ha ha! - this goes back a century) decided that it was more important to have widespread vaccination than to make sure absolutely NO ONE suffers as a result of vaccination. We as a society accept the slight shared risk (for which the vaccine court exists - to compensate those who WERE harmed from vaccines, and the standard is set low to make sure we err on the side of compensation) in order to achieve the greater social good (herd immunity from horrible diseases). Because unlike in your analogy of harvesting organs, should a disease get a foothold, several orders of magnitude more could die or be injured.

I guess what it comes down to is understanding that it is a very sad and unfortunate reality that sometimes life in a society involves some pretty cold, calculated decisions in order to achieve what is best for the group as a whole. No, we don't go and kill someone to harvest their organs. But we accept a tiny statistical risk for some activities in order to benefit the rest. You do realize that vaccination is far from alone in that group of activities, right? Because if this is truly about saving lives, then you should be attacking the auto industry for not making cars 100% safe. 3 million injuries and over 40,000 deaths each year. Get back to me when vaccination approaches even a fraction of those.

[flyingobject]

5. We should give free salmonella peanut butter after creating a mandatory vaccine for all US citizens

This will make Big Pharma happy and also those who favor giving more and more vaccines.

We don't have nearly enough vaccines, so lets create one for salmonella tainted peanut butter
and most definitely one for male impotence.

[uppityperson]

7. You had me for a bit, then lost me at this point...bad comparison...

"Another argument that seems misplaced is that just because vaccines save lots of lives, we should not hold vaccine makers accountable if they destroy a lesser number of lives as a cost."

You seem to be comparing salmonella tainted peanut butter with vaccines. That is a false comparison, or an inaccurate one. If you were to compare plain old peanut butter with vaccines, that would be more comparable. Comparing peanut butter and vaccines is a good one in that there are a small amount of people who react wrongly to each of those.

Or compare salmonella tainted peanut butter with X-tainted vaccines. Both of those should be pulled and any company that continues to make a tainted product that they know is tainted should be held liable. Should peanut butter manufacturers be held liable for those people who react badly to peanut butter?

However, comparing tainted product X with untainted product Y is not a good comparison.

[HamdenRice]

8. "compare salmonella tainted peanut butter with X-tainted vaccines"

I think that actually is the comparison. The X could be mercury, or it could be live virus when a killed virus or some virus antigen would be safer.

[uppityperson]

9. So, should be ban a product totally because some of it is tainted?

I think that is what we are saying. No, we shouldn't. But those who make tainted products after they know they are tainted, they should be prosecuted.

For the rest, there are no guarantees that anything is absolutely safe. It seems to me that there is so much uncertainty in the world, so much uncontrollable, that people try to control some little bit. May not always be rational attempts, fears may not be rational in comparison with chances of encountering the issue in real life, but many people focus in on something they perceive as controllable.