Health diary

The late Irving Kenneth Zola was going to chair my dissertation committee, but he died the day I learned I had received funding for the study. Irv, among other physical problems, was diabetic, and as can happen with diabetes he had a heart attack and was not aware of it due to neuropathy.

Anyway, in his seminar Problems and Issues in the Sociology of Health and Illness, he asked us to keep personal health diaries -- write down every day whatever we could about our state of health and experience of health and illness, however defined. I certainly don't want to inflict such a narcissistic project on the world, but I think my recent - nay, still current - bout with a food-borne illness is mildly instructive. I was out in the country finishing up work on my rustic cabin and as I often do I bought lunch at the local general store. They offer an unappealing assortment of bland deli salads but they are also the only place in town, and I mean that: there is exactly one store of any description.

Well, it hit me at about 12:30 a.m. on Sunday. I got no sleep that night. I was in and out of the bathroom every 10 minutes, and it lasted all the next day. Since it was a Sunday I wasn't missing out on a whole lot of productivity by lying on the sofa between excursions to the water closet and watching steroid abusers in plastic armor beating the shit out of each other. However, I'm still pretty groggy today and I have continuing abdominal pain. If the timing had been different I would have missed a day or two of work -- not a huge deal maybe but the economic costs add up, or at least they would if I did anything of economic value.

CDC estimates that 76 million Americans get sick from food-borne illnesses every year, that's about one quarter of us all, so we've all been there. It's mostly just an extremely unpleasant experience and a sick day, but there are 300,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths, so on the whole it's well worth making a significant investment to avoid it.

And here, once again, is a compelling example of why "free markets" are a hallucination. As a consumer, you have absolutely no way of knowing whether the food you buy is going to make you sick. The contamination is invisible and you can't observe how it is handled at any stage from farm to factory to grocery or restaurant. In some cases you might be able to make a pretty good guess about what meal it was that made you sick, but that doesn't empower you as a consumer either. I don't know whether the problem was with the way the salad was handled at the General Store, or their immediate supplier, or someplace way up the manufacturing chain, e.g. the mayonnaise factory. So boycotting the store isn't going to do me any good.

The only entity that can protect us is Big Government -- the nanny state. I suspect that there is no Board of Health of any kind to inspect the General Store, but we generally depend on local governments to inspect grocery stores and restaurants. Good luck with that. The Dept. of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service is responsible for producers of meat, poultry and eggs, and the FDA is basically responsible for everything else. However, the FDA contracts half of the work out to the states, and it doesn't do nearly enough to assure that the states are doing the job -- which to a substantial extent they are not. As for imported food, fuggedaboudit. "Just 1.3% of imported fish, vegetables, fruit and other foods are inspected — yet those government inspections regularly reveal food unfit for human consumption."

As I sit here with my abdomen cramping, I am displeased. Of course, it's not influenza so it doesn't matter.