For over 30 years I have been beating the same drum and the past few days have been no exception.
I’ve been posting about public health officials and the FDA sending out outbreak documents with the names of companies, growers, processors and retailers in black behind gray boxes. My position has not changed over the past 30 years. Most of those edits should never have been made in the first place. Naturally, readers responded.
I welcome the backlash. Some of it is thoughtful. I agree with some of this. So, rather than just leaving my inbox to respond to your arguments about secrecy, let me put them all on the table – every justification for non-disclosure I’ve heard over the years – and tell you exactly what I think about each one.
“There is no written policy, but this is how we have worked for many years.”
I keep hearing my mother’s voice. “Just because so-and-so does it doesn’t mean you have to do it too.” Practices are not policies and “we’ve always done it this way” are not reasons. Like all government habits (and, let’s be honest, like anything you wear around your neck), change is a good thing.
“The outbreak is over, so there is no immediate public health threat.”
To be honest, this is true of most foodborne illness outbreaks. In almost every outbreak I have seen, the cause was discovered long after the peak of the disease had passed. But that misses the point of disclosure. Informing the public who grew, processed and sold contaminated food will not only help prevent today’s outbreaks, but also provide consumers with a track record so they can know which companies have strong food safety records and which companies keep appearing in the same sad stories.
“Naming the company jeopardizes our cooperation on this and future outbreaks.”
If a company cooperates only on the condition of participation in a witness protection program and a promise of permanent anonymity, that tells you everything you need to know about their commitment and our government’s commitment to safe food. Cooperation purchased in secret is not cooperation. These are hostage negotiations where the public never gets a seat at the table.
“A bad reputation can cause economic hardship for a company.”
truth. But better business practices than avoiding bad press include: It’s about not harming customers. The economic hardship caused by the outbreak is the responsibility of the companies that caused it, not the responsibility of consumers, who are left to guess.
“It was an unknown source, so naming the service point would be unfairly blaming the company.”
This actually makes some sense and I’ll explain why. But ask clear follow-up questions. Is this the first time this restaurant or retailer has been burned down by a faulty supplier, or is it a pattern? And even if it’s your first time, do you still have some of those nameless products lingering on a shelf or walk-in cooler somewhere? Fairness in service delivery cannot be achieved at the expense of the people it serves.
“The product is perishable, so by the time we announce it, it has already been consumed.”
I’ve heard this many times, especially in outbreaks of leafy greens, and this is what I find most cynical. Yes, Romaine is long gone. But the reason the public should be left in the dark about the types of products that are making people sick and the growers and shippers behind them is because this is exactly the information they need to decide who to buy from next time. “I already ate it” is not a reason to hide it, but a reason to reveal it.
“Revealing a point of service before the investigation is complete undermines the dynamic.”
I completely agree with this. This is a difficult ask. This, I suspect, is what is causing the most real anxiety among public health officials. They are balancing the need to have enough data to make public and protect people from the risk of being too quick to criticize. We’ve all had that experience: “It’s a tomato. No, wait, it’s a pepper.” The answer is not to remain silent forever. The answer is simple. Do not proceed until the investigation is complete. Then move forward and move fully forward.
“We are afraid of making an investigative mistake, the tomato-pepper problem.”
This is why the law does not allow public health officials to be held accountable for the good-faith decisions they make to protect the public. The system already accounts for honest errors. Fear of making an honest mistake does not guarantee permanent silence.
“We don’t have enough funding for surveillance and we don’t have the resources to complete the investigation.”
There is no doubt that this is true, and it is this claim that concerns me most. Because that’s not really an argument for secrecy at all. This is a confession. I have watched investigations come to a halt over the past few years. Laboratories that do not perform genetic fingerprinting to link sick people to a common source. Backtracking becomes stagnant due to lack of manpower needed to find the root cause. That is a scandal in itself, and the answer is to fund the work. It’s not about fixing how to admit that the work isn’t done.
Now let me tell you what the FDA will never do. There’s no need to guess whether transparency will make the sky fall, because we’ve already run the experiment. For the past 20 years, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has designated manufacturers of contaminated meat and, since 2008, retailers who sell it. Trade secrets in the beef and poultry industries have not been destroyed. Consumer confidence is up, not down. Chicken Little, the sky did not fall.
The FDA, which oversees about 80 percent of the food supply, may have learned that lesson from its sister agency 20 years ago. Instead, it still hides behind ‘confidential commercial information’. And it’s not difficult to draw a line. The formulation, ingredients, and product manufacturing methods are trade secrets. Who supplied the contaminated raw materials, who made the contaminated products, and where the contaminated products were sold are unknown, especially during an outbreak. The most serious case I know of was the 2017 outbreak linked to IM Healthy soy butter (a fancy name for a product that carries pathogens) that sickened dozens of people, some of them seriously ill children. A recall has been announced. Retailer not specified. The company was bankrupt and in no position to help. The public was left to fend for itself.
I just saw that same instinct coming back. In the fall of 2024, a multi-state E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to romaine lettuce hospitalized dozens of people, sent children into kidney failure and killed someone. The FDA put a few lines on the table, closed the file, and never issued the full, named notice it had issued for all similar romaine outbreaks before. Processors and growers were free to sit behind gray boxes and tell anyone who asked that the evidence did not point to them. It was like that. That’s what the name says on the record. I once had someone bother to remove the box from the organ.
So, with over 30 years and countless revisions to the document, where does that leave me? That’s where I started. Strip away the budget excuses, collaboration concerns, and trade secret theater, and one question remains: Who decides what the public is allowed to know about foods that could kill them?
For me the answer is easy. The public has a right to know and to use that information as it sees fit. And people, especially public officials, don’t have the power to decide for others what we should be allowed to find out and what we shouldn’t find out.
