Twenty-Three Days Before an Outbreak Is Visible, and Longer Before a Recall Notice
A recall notice arrives as a single event: a brand, a lot code, a date range, a list of states. Inside the machinery that produces it, the notice is one of the last steps. Before a product can be named in public, several separate systems have to finish running, in order. A person's immune system, a clinical laboratory, a courier, a state public health laboratory, a national genomic database, a round of interviews, and finally a paper trail held by firms with no direct relationship to one another. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes an illustration of the first half of that sequence. In it, a person eats a contaminated food on Day 1, and the outbreak is identified on Day 23. That interval is not a measure of effort. It is a sum of waiting periods belonging to different institutions, none of them working to a shared deadline. What the First Nine Days Consume In CDC's published timeline, nothing in the first nine days is decided by a food company or by...