A nice piece in the Telegraph today showing that the recall of all products contaminated with Sudan 1 will kill people:

It comes as some surprise, therefore, to learn that
the Sudan 1 scare may turn out to be entirely bogus. The chemical at
the centre of the crisis has never actually been proved to be dangerous
to human beings. Not only has it never been proved to be
cancer-causing, but there is no evidence that, when ingested as a
result of being added to Worcester sauce, it will do any harm at all.

Sudan
1 is one of the dyes invented by German chemists during the late 19th
century. It has a molecular structure that is similar to some compounds
which have been shown to cause cancer, or at least which have been
statistically linked to that group of diseases. Because of that
similarity, food safety experts and other chemists have raised the
theoretical possibility that, once Sudan 1 is in the body, it could
break down in a way that would mean it becomes indistinguishable from
cancer-causing molecules. If that happens, the theory predicts that
Sudan 1 would end up causing cancer itself.

That’s
the theory. But is there any concrete evidence that Sudan 1 actually
does cause cancer? At the moment, the answer is a resounding "No".
Thirty years ago, experiments on mice and rats found that Sudan 1 could
trigger bladder and liver tumours, but only if the chemical was
injected directly into the animal. Tests that involved animals eating
substances containing Sudan 1 – which is, after all, what human beings
do – rather than having those substances introduced into their bodies
via a hypodermic needle, proved to be entirely negative. Nothing
happened to the animals. There were no tumours, no cancers: as far as
the observers could tell, there was nothing at all wrong with them.

The
scientists were not satisfied with this result, however. They wanted to
check whether there was evidence that Sudan 1 could nevertheless cause
harm if it were ingested over a prolonged period. So they fed material
laced with Sudan 1 to rats and other rodents for months on end. Those
tests found some evidence that Sudan 1 could cause kidney and liver
damage, along with an increased risk of leukaemia and lymphoma. The
correlation was weak, but it seems to be there.

The
only problem is, the dose of Sudan 1 that it takes to produce those
consequences is colossal. To ingest Sudan 1 in the amounts that were
shown to cause harm in rats, a human would have to consume Crosse and
Blackwell’s Worcester sauce at the rate of three tons every day for two
years.

So that is showing that Sudan 1, as found in Crosse and Blackwell’s Worcester Sauce, will have no effect whatsoever on human health. How do I make the leap from there to saying that the recall will kill people? Premier Foods is spending some 100 million on the product recall that’s how. Remember that money we spend on one thing cannot then be spent on something else…if we spend 100 million on this recall at no benefit whatsoever then that’s 100 million that cannot be spent on something that would be of benefit. It doesn’t really matter what those resources would have been spent on if it were not for the recall…anything would be better than pissing it away in this manner.

This is the basic problem that we have in so many of our systems and decisions now. REACH Directive, the precautionary principle, the Farm to Fork initiative….all are forgetting that there is inevitably some risk attatched to the very process of being alive, and that we need to work through the risks in order, biggest risks first, in order to spend the resources we have (inevitably limited) most effectively.

In the end, in this particular case, more good would have been done if 99,999,950 pound coins had been buried at the bottom of a mine shaft and a  50 squid donation sent to feed a starving African child. We have to get a handle on the system folks, we’ve got to stop pissing away the wealth.