Health Law

Diarrhea and Hollywood

By Marler Clark

Relax, this is not a first account of Lindsay Lohan, um, "losing control" during another jail stint. It's far less irrelevant than that.  What Upton Sinclair started with his brief, though sordid descriptions of Chicago's stockyards in The Jungle, Hollywood has finally chosen to finish with an expose on the often-ugly underbelly of our country's food supply.  I don't know how much diarrhea and vomiting we'll see in the soon-to-be-released film titled Food, Inc.--please, not another yellow vomit scene like in Supersize Me--but I do know that the devastating effects of E. coli O157:H7 and hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) will be prominently featured in the story of Kevin Kowalcyk, who died as a young boy as a result of his HUS illness.  His mother, Barbara Kowalcyk, is a passionate food-safety advocate, and has been instrumental in bringing this topic to the fore.  Who knows, maybe a slap from Hollywood will do to food manufacturers what hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions, in losses from past outbreaks has not???

Full post as published by Food Poison Blog on April 17, 2009 (boomark / email).