Donald Trump rails against the kinds of FDA guidelines that might have saved the life of a customer who died after eating in one of his restaurants.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:

Last Thursday, the Trump campaign issued—and then quickly deleted—a rant against the “FDA food police,” listing it as one of several “specific regulations to be eliminated” in his new economic plan. Among other things, the campaign whined about the Food and Drug Administration’s standards for “farm and food production hygiene,” safe cooking temperatures, and even “dog food.” 

But these are the exact safety measures that help prevent foodborne illness outbreaks like the one that affected the Purgatorio family in 1989. In fact, the Trump business empire has a long and illustrious history of food poisoning cases and safety violations. 

According to a 1991 Associated Press report, Kathleen and Thomas Purgatorio, then in their sixties, ate the “salmonella-tainted mousse” at a restaurant called Buffet by the Sea in Trump’s Castle Hotel and Casino on Oct. 16, 1989. Kathleen felt sick afterwards, Purgatorio-Howard recalls, but nowhere near as ill as her father who she told The Daily Beast “went from walking into the hospital to being in intensive care on a ventilator in a coma.” 

“He was in critical care from October to December,” Purgatorio-Howard recalled. “We brought him home. We kept him in the living room in a hospital bed. He was in distress the whole time and then, in January, he went back to the hospital and died.”

Purgatorio-Howard, along with others, sued Donald Trump and her case was settled for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Apparently over 100 people were sickened over a span of four days by that same mousse dish.

And this is not an isolated incident either.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

Trump-owned restaurants have been cited over the years for serving month-old caviar, expired veal stock and yogurt, and eggs, cream and sausages that had been stored at unsafe temperatures. 

“The DJT restaurant in the Trump hotel (in Las Vegas) is described on its website as ‘elegant’ and ‘in a class by itself,’” reported KTNV-TV in a 2013 “dirty dining” exposé. “It is indeed in a class by itself this week, receiving the highest number of demerits of all restaurants health inspectors visited.”

Newspaper reports from 1992 show Trump’s properties had “the worst track record for food-related health problems among Atlantic City’s 12 casinos,” with five salmonella outbreaks dating back to 1984. 

“We find it highly unusual that most of our problems in Atlantic City have been associated with the Trump properties,” a health department official for the city said at the time. “The physical part of the [establishments] is top-of-the-line but it all boils down to extremely poor food handling.”

This guy cannot even serve a brunch that does not potentially place his customer's lives at risk and yet he wants to run our country?

And you know that if he were to be President that he would ABSOLUTELY attempt to water down those FDA regulations. And cut taxes for big businesses, and relax EPA restrictions, and do every other thing in his power to make it easier for his businesses to make a higher profit.

Because let's face it, EVERYTHING this guy does is to benefit himself in some way, and he cares NOTHING for the American people.

So what if his contractors don't get paid for the work they provide?

So what if the customers in his restaurants get sick and die after eating in them?

So what if the American people suffer immensely under his administration?

All that ever matters is the bottom line, and the bottom line is how much money can he funnel into his bank account?

I have no idea how people are fooled by this idiot. And the fact that he was chosen as the candidate for the Republican party is an indictment of the GOP.

If he were to win the election that would be an indictment of our whole country.

Another example of how the Bush administrations anti-science policies have put Americans at risk for the last eight years.

In an unusually blunt letter, a group of federal scientists is complaining to the Obama transition team of widespread managerial misconduct in a division of the Food and Drug Administration.

"The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the scientific review process for medical devices at the FDA has been corrupted and distorted by current FDA managers, thereby placing the American people at risk," said the letter, dated Wednesday and written on the agency's Center for Devices and Radiological Health letterhead.

The center is responsible for medical devices ranging from stents and breast implants to MRIs and other imaging machinery. The concerns of the nine scientists who wrote to the transition team echo some of the complaints from the FDA's drug review division a few years ago during the safety debacle involving the painkiller Vioxx.

In their letter the FDA dissidents alleged that agency managers use intimidation to squelch scientific debate, leading to the approval of medical devices whose effectiveness is questionable and which may not be entirely safe.

"Managers with incompatible, discordant and irrelevant scientific and clinical expertise in devices...have ignored serious safety and effectiveness concerns of FDA experts," the letter said. "Managers have ordered, intimidated and coerced FDA experts to modify scientific evaluations, conclusions and recommendations in violation of the laws, rules and regulations, and to accept clinical and technical data that is not scientifically valid."

Whenever I hear the claim made that the Bush administration has "protected" Americans ever since 9-11 it makes me gag. Just because nobody has flown anymore planes into anymore buildings does not mean we have been safe.

The truth is that the Bush administration has traded away public safety in the name of higher profits for the private sector. It is no secret that the political coffers of Republican politicians (as well as Democrats) are bulging with contributions from drug companies as well as medical insurance companies. This has resulted in our government giving a virtual free pass to the drug manufacturers and allowing more and more dangerous drugs to flood the market.

NOBODY has been protecting the American people from dangerous drugs and over prescribed medications. One of the worst things we have seen recently is the direct-to-consumer advertising that drug manufacturers have engaged in for the last ten years, and which has seen a dramatic increase since the Bush administration took power.

These commercials convince consumers to pressure their doctors to prescribe drugs that are unnecessary or that have not been adequately tested despite approval by a "broken" FDA.

The fact is that Americans are asking for, and taking drugs, that are causing them far more harm then good. Consumers are diagnosing themselves while sitting in front of their televisions and demanding drugs that will only poison their system and ultimately make them even sicker.

Doctors are trading away their Hippocratic oath in favor of lunches with pretty female drug representatives and the chance to attend conventions in tropical locations. Ethics and morals have no chance against golf trips in Hawaii and whiny patients demanding that drug on television that makes the people in the commercial so happy.

We need a return of responsible grownups in this country and I certainly hope the incoming Obama administration will help to usher that in.