The reason only 250 get sick is because of the notification. Traffic accidents aren’t contagious. Comparing a static risk and a dynamic risk is inappropriate.
If lettuce is contaminated with ecoli at the source and you don’t recall/stop people eating it, you will have much more adverse health events. Different outbreaks have different responses and sometimes that includes notifying the at risk population and the source of the risk. [0] (this list includes lots of norovirus outbreaks and the response for them)
We should also be educating people about food borne illness, but this isn’t exclusive to outbreak control.
73 million Americans are infected with E.coli every year and 5,000 die. Only 5 died in this outbreak. You think that number was significantly reduced because it was announced that there was a single small outbreak?
The outbreak was minor, but the effect on the economy and people's state of mind was overwhelmingly more powerful. It's fine to notify an at risk population if you can, but what do you gain if just a few less people get sick? What do you lose when people stop supporting an entire industry?
Sorry, I misquoted: it's 75 million cases of food borne illness in general, and 5,000 deaths, using older statistics from smaller population sizes.
Using your stats, this outbreak was responsible for 0.1% of e.coli illnesses and 1/6th the deaths. But it's also 1/300,000 of the overall food poisoning illnesses, and 0.1% of the deaths.
So it hit the lettuce industry significantly harder than normal, even though the actual effect on health was minimal compared to the norm.
It’s pretty hard to compare the value lost to the lettuce industry vs the illnesses and deaths.
The EPA values a life at $7.4M for policy purposes [0]. So 1351x7.4M is about $10B. In 2015, the value of all US farm output was $136B. [1] So you could argue that you’d want to save more value from lives than from market impact, if you wanted to be purely utilitarian (that I hope no one in thread does).
But there’s a big impact from illness. I think many people underestimate the impact of food borne disease because they are young and healthy. I’m glad you pulled up the impact because it’s a big deal.
Hopefully as people better understand the danger, we’ll be able to avoid reductive math where we only worry about things when they are big, and way harder to fix.
If lettuce is contaminated with ecoli at the source and you don’t recall/stop people eating it, you will have much more adverse health events. Different outbreaks have different responses and sometimes that includes notifying the at risk population and the source of the risk. [0] (this list includes lots of norovirus outbreaks and the response for them)
We should also be educating people about food borne illness, but this isn’t exclusive to outbreak control.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/multistate-outbreak...