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And yet good food regulations have saved many more lives from outbreaks than all the negative media combined. The media is good but it works best on saliency, the unusual. People, a very very large number, die every day in car accidents, but it rarely hits the headlines unless it is an unusual case.

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I'd like to see some statistics to back up this assertion.

I must admit I don't have any comprehensive stats to hand, even the WHO have only recently compiled worldwide occurrence stats but not correlation / causation stats.

However from a programming paradigm, which would you prefer? Bugs cleaned up only because "someone" reported them, or because you use CI and can fix the problem at source, can measure testing coverage, etc, etc. I think most programmers agree that the proactive systemic testing system is better than ad hoc.

So is that proactive systemic testing put in place because the FDA requires it, or because the food processing facility fears an outbreak that would bankrupt the company?

There is no FDA for bugs in software companies, which is far less consequential, yet most software companies invest a fairly reasonable amount of engineering time into quality control. So this begs the questions, how much good does the FDA really do?

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