Crowding, lack of hygiene and cruelty in laying hens produce salmonella
As early as 1977, neighbors who lived near egg baron Austin "Jack" DeCoster's huge egg operation in Turner, Maine, began complaining about the lesser mealworm beetles that infested their homes. But soon he earned his crown as "salmonella king."
By 1982, one person had died, thirty-six were sickened in New Hampshire and four hundred were sickened in Massachusetts from eggs traced to DeCoster-owned farms. Five years later, in 1987, nine people had died, and five hundred were sickened in New York from eggs traced to DeCoster-owned farms. The salmonella scourge was so bad, the state of New York banned the sale of DeCoster eggs the following year.
Producing lethal, salmonella-infected eggs was was not DeCoster's only offense--he was also linked to crimes against workers, animals and the environment.
By 1996, DeCoster had racked up 20 health and safety violations-- including polluting groundwater with100,000 rotting carcasses of birds he let perish in a fire, improper asbestos removal and worker abuses like housing egg workers in cockroach-infested firetrap trailers and hiring children as young as nine.
"The conditions in this migrant farm site are as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop we have seen," said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich when he visited DeCoster's Turner facility in 1996. "I thought I was going to faint and I was only there a few minutes," said Cesar Britos, an attorney representing egg workers, when he tried to enter an egg barn.
But despite a decades-long rap sheet, DeCoster expanded his egg empire into Iowa, Ohio, and Maryland with the help of Boston public-relations guru George Regan; he even added hogs to the mix. And despite a state-of-Iowa ban against DeCoster starting or expanding his farms-- he was a "habitual violator" of environmental laws, said the attorney general-- he opened new farms with colleagues' help, according to the Associated Press.
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