I read this weekend about a young girl paralyzed by eating a hamburger tainted with bacteria.

In the 1900s, reporters and journalists — among them Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell — wrote articles and books detailing, among other things, the unclean practices in meat-packing factories. 

One hundred years later, we still read about tainted meat.  Not in a third world country.  Right here in the USA.

It seems that most of the strides made in sanitary food preparation have been lost in the era of de-regulation. 

We need more and better inspectors and real, catastrophic economic sanctions against operators of packaging companies that produce tainted food.  In some of the most egregious cases, the unsanitary conditions are obvious to the untrained eye.  We need to make it too costly to produce unhealthy products.

How many more children must die or be crippled by E Coli or other dangerous bacteria festering in our food production plants?