Taylor Farms has rewritten its cyclospora statement four times in sixteen days
Taylor Farms has rewritten its cyclospora statement four times in sixteen days
Taylor Farms 在十六天内四次重写其环孢子虫病声明
A company’s public statement in the middle of an outbreak is not marketing. It is evidence — what the company said it knew, and when, published to the world at a moment when nobody had the benefit of hindsight. I have built cases on those statements since 1993. I have been reading and saving this one since the day the recall issued, and the sixteen days since are worth laying out end to end, because the words have moved a great deal and the substance underneath them has not moved at all. 在疫情爆发期间，一家公司的公开声明并非营销。它是证据——即公司在当时声称自己了解的情况，以及发布的时间点，彼时无人能拥有事后诸葛亮的视角。自 1993 年以来，我一直以此类声明作为立案依据。自召回发布之日起，我就一直在阅读并保存这份声明，而随后的十六天非常值得梳理，因为尽管措辞发生了巨大变化，但其背后的实质内容却毫无进展。
Start with the original. On July 17 the company posted a statement that opened with the people who got sick — the ill, their families, and Americans whose trust in produce had been shaken. It said that trust took decades to earn. It said the removal of product was based on information FDA had provided the day before. And it said something that has not appeared in a single version since: that FDA’s traceback was pointing to a specific independent farm, described as less than one percent of the United States iceberg supply, as the potential source. 先从最初的版本说起。7 月 17 日，该公司发布了一份声明，开头提到了那些患病的人——患者、他们的家人，以及对农产品信任动摇的美国民众。声明称，这种信任历经数十年才建立起来。声明表示，产品下架是基于 FDA 前一天提供的信息。它还提到了一点，而这一点在之后的所有版本中再未出现过：FDA 的溯源工作指向了一个特定的独立农场，并称该农场供应的冰山生菜不到美国总供应量的一百分之一，是潜在的污染源。
The recall was July 17. FDA reported a positive test on July 18. FDA retracted that result as a false positive on July 19. The July 17 statement therefore explains why the company pulled product at a moment when no positive laboratory result existed anywhere in the world, and the reason it gives is FDA’s traceback and the epidemiology. That is a party admission, and nothing published afterward reaches back and unsays it. 召回发生在 7 月 17 日。FDA 在 7 月 18 日报告了一项阳性检测结果。7 月 19 日，FDA 撤回了该结果，称其为假阳性。因此，7 月 17 日的声明解释了为什么该公司在全世界尚无任何实验室阳性结果的情况下就下架了产品，其给出的理由是 FDA 的溯源和流行病学调查。这属于当事方的供述，此后发布的任何内容都无法追溯并推翻这一点。
Two days later the same address served a different document. The July 19 version led with the assertion that FDA had apologized to the company. Sympathy for the sick moved from the first paragraph to the fourth and got shorter. The recall was recast in the completed past tense and attributed to an abundance of caution. The acknowledgment about the specific farm was gone. I wrote that night about how the victims ate the evidence in May, and I have not changed my view since. 两天后，同一网址发布了一份不同的文件。7 月 19 日的版本开头声称 FDA 已向该公司道歉。对患者的同情从第一段移到了第四段，篇幅也缩短了。召回事件被改用完成时态描述，并归因于“极其谨慎”。关于特定农场的确认信息消失了。那天晚上我写道，受害者在五月份就“吃掉了证据”，从那时起，我的观点从未改变。
There was no apology. I went looking for one in FDA’s July 19 update and what is there is a laboratory correction and a notification to the firm — and in the same paragraph, a statement that FDA continues working with the firm to ensure product implicated in this outbreak has been removed. The word implicated survived the false positive. The next day FDA answered in public without naming anybody: the false-positive sample does not change the basis for the investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the recall, and traceback and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico. Note the plural locations. The company had described one independent farm at less than one percent of supply and then stopped describing it at all. 根本没有道歉。我在 FDA 7 月 19 日的更新中寻找道歉声明，但那里只有实验室的更正和对公司的通知——在同一段落中，FDA 表示将继续与该公司合作，确保与此次疫情有关的产品已被移除。“有关”（implicated）一词在假阳性事件后依然存在。第二天，FDA 在公开场合回应，未点名任何人：假阳性样本并未改变调查的基础，也未改变支持召回的压倒性流行病学数据，溯源和疫情数据继续指向来自 Taylor Farms 墨西哥中部工厂的切碎冰山生菜。注意是“工厂”（复数）。该公司曾描述过一个占比不到供应量百分之一的独立农场，随后便完全不再提及。
By July 24 the page had been rewritten again, this time leading with money — more than two hundred million dollars a year in independently audited food safety protocols — and reporting that sourcing and central-Mexico production had been suspended since July 18 and independent experts commissioned for a top-to-bottom review. The apology claim was simply absent. No correction, no note, no acknowledgment it had ever been there. 到了 7 月 24 日，该页面再次被重写，这次以金钱为开头——每年在独立审计的食品安全协议上投入超过两亿美元——并报告称，自 7 月 18 日起已暂停采购和墨西哥中部的生产，并委托独立专家进行全面审查。关于道歉的说法完全消失了。没有更正，没有说明，也没有承认它曾经存在过。
On July 30 the company built something new, a Cyclospora information hub at its own address, and the old newsroom link now redirects there. It was revised again on July 31, and that revision created a problem. The FAQ list of states that received recalled product now runs to twenty-eight and includes West Virginia, which FDA added a week earlier. The distribution paragraph higher up the same page still lists twenty-seven and still leaves West Virginia out. West Virginia is one of the nine states in the federal outbreak. Now. All of that is about words, and I have spent enough of this outbreak on words. 7 月 30 日，该公司建立了一个新平台，在其官网设立了环孢子虫信息中心，旧的新闻中心链接现在会自动跳转至此。7 月 31 日，该页面再次修订，而这次修订引发了一个问题。常见问题解答（FAQ）中列出的收到召回产品的州现在增加到了 28 个，其中包括 FDA 一周前添加的西弗吉尼亚州。但同一页面上方关于分销的段落仍列出 27 个州，且依然遗漏了西弗吉尼亚州。西弗吉尼亚州是联邦疫情涉及的九个州之一。现在，所有这些都是关于文字的争论，而在这场疫情中，我已经在文字上花费了足够多的时间。
Here is the substance the words have never touched, in sixteen days and five versions. This is not the first time, and the record of it is long. In the summer of 2013, cyclosporiasis sickened 631 people across twenty-five states. Iowa and Nebraska accounted for 239 of them, and epidemiologic and traceback work by those two states, CDC and FDA tied their restaurant cases to bagged salad mix produced by Taylor Farms de Mexico in Doctor Mora, Guanajuato, and served at Olive Garden and Red Lobster. 以下是十六天、五个版本以来，这些文字从未触及的实质内容。这并非首次发生，且记录在案已久。2013 年夏天，环孢子虫病导致 25 个州的 631 人患病。其中爱荷华州和内布拉斯加州占了 239 例，这两个州、CDC 和 FDA 的流行病学及溯源工作将他们的餐厅病例与 Taylor Farms 墨西哥公司（位于瓜纳华托州莫拉医生镇）生产的袋装混合沙拉联系起来，这些沙拉曾在 Olive Garden 和 Red Lobster 餐厅供应。
I want to be exact here, because the number gets misused: the Texas cases that summer were tied to cilantro from an unrelated producer, and the cause of more than a hundred other illnesses was never determined. The salad mix link is to Iowa and Nebraska. FDA then published an environmental assessment of the processing plant and five ranches. Investigators analyzed roughly 835 product, water and environmental samples, including more than 269 human fecal samples collected from sanitary facilities on the ranches, and recovered the parasite from none of them — the assessment began five weeks after the last known illness. 我想在这里说明确一点，因为这个数字常被误用：那年夏天德克萨斯州的病例与一家无关生产商的香菜有关，而其他一百多起病例的病因从未查明。混合沙拉的关联仅限于爱荷华州和内布拉斯加州。随后，FDA 发布了对该加工厂和五个农场的环境评估报告。调查人员分析了大约 835 份产品、水和环境样本，包括从农场卫生设施中收集的 269 多份人类粪便样本，但没有从中发现任何寄生虫——评估工作是在最后一起已知病例发生五周后才开始的。
What survives from that document is its second recommendation, which told the firm to determine whether Cyclospora is a reasonably likely food safety hazard associated with the Guanajuato leafy green growing region, and if it is, to re-evaluate the wash step. That was November 2013. There is one more piece of the 2013 record, and it goes directly to the testing question. The company suspended shipments to the United States on August 9, 2013, and resumed them on August 25 with FDA’s concurrence. FDA said at the time that its decision rested in part on the environmental assessment and in part on its review of a product sampling plan for Cyclospora that Taylor Farms de Mexico had put in place. 那份文件中留存下来的是其第二项建议，即要求该公司确定环孢子虫是否是与瓜纳华托州叶菜种植区相关的“合理可能发生的食品安全危害”，如果是，则需重新评估清洗步骤。那是 2013 年 11 月的事。2013 年的记录中还有一点，直接指向了检测问题。该公司于 2013 年 8 月 9 日暂停向美国发货，并于 8 月 25 日在 FDA 的同意下恢复发货。FDA 当时表示，其决定部分基于环境评估，部分基于对 Taylor Farms 墨西哥公司制定的环孢子虫产品抽样计划的审查。
A sampling plan for this parasite, reviewed by a federal agency, as part of the price of reopening a plant — thirteen years ago. I have gone looking for a single published result from it and I have not found one. Reasonably likely hazard is not casual language. It is the vocabulary of hazard analysis, and the company’s own hub says its processing facilities operate unde 一份由联邦机构审查的针对该寄生虫的抽样计划，作为重开工厂的代价之一——那是十三年前的事了。我曾试图寻找该计划公布的任何一项结果，但一无所获。“合理可能发生的危害”并非随意的措辞。这是危害分析中的专业术语，而该公司自己的信息中心称其加工设施的运营处于……