Bad Apples

This article just came out in the NYT. It's about contaminated food not being flagged quickly enough due to the disconnectedness of the 3000 different food control agencies across the country. It's important for these agencies to quickly identify problems and get the word out. With the wide scale of transport around the country, contaminated goods find themselves in cabinets from coast to coast in as little as two weeks from leaving the processing plant. We can imagine this as a giant graph with nodes from suppliers to consumers and it's the officials job to cut the bad edges out of the graph to stop the contamination prorogation. As mentioned in the article, a few agencies not fully investigating and reporting problems can cause a disease's growth to be uncontainable. These diseases aren't like the ones we discussed in class because in many cases they aren't passed between "friends" but from a central point and once it strikes an individual, it disappears. But as I said above, the speed is exactly what makes it so difficult to handle.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/health/policy/20food.html?hp