At some point, you make your choice, you roll your dice, and you take your chances. Personally, I find it defies belief that a person in this day and age could consume raw oysters in a restaraunt in the US without first having seen (there, and likely elsewhere) multiple warnings against the practice. Banning a substance which can be safely consumed by the majority, out of concern some minority might (perhaps unwittingly) engage in risky behavior, reduces our choices to a nullity. There are those who can’t process complex protiens, nuts, wheat, and numerous other food stuffs. Those alergic to latex and certain plastics. Some for whom salt is dangerous, or sugar. To say nothing of the various contaminants present in everything, in some de minimus amount.

The only thing with a near 100% success rate we humans know is death, and even it has the occasional near miss.

Not to be insensitive, but we don’t live in a perfectly predictable world, we go through our lives with incomplete information at all times, and we knowingly take risks – some of which result in adverse consequences we may, or may not, have considered. To pretend otherwise seems deliberate ignorance.

FFS, people- 75 more people die every year being struck by lightning. Let’s ban lightning!

Bob

It makes me so angry to continue to see news articles that talk about how horrible this is for business. What about how horrible it is for the people who get sick and die from eating UNSAFE raw oysters unknowningly?

The oyster and restaurant industry want to talk about how people should know better if they are sick. Well, the fact is … they don’t know. Actually, many people who are considered at high risk from eating raw oysters don’t even know they are at risk, such as individuals with diabetes who have not yet been diagnosed or those with liver problems that are undiagnosed. There are countless other medical conditions that people may have and don’t have any idea that there is a problem eating raw oysters.

I can tell you from personal experience — my father died from eating raw oysters 2 years ago in Louisiana. My family had no idea that eating raw oysters had the potential to kill an individual, nor did we know that he was an at risk individual — nor did he. He ate raw oysters to celebrate his birthday and ended up dying from that meal.

FDA needs to finally do something about this and the oyster and restaurant industry need to stop thinking about just the bottom line and dollars and cents and start thinking about the safety of consumers and human lives.

There might have been a “rule” before refrigeration, but not in the last forty years.

In other words, not during the summer? (May, June, July, August)

Times Picaynue 10/18/09

*Possibly the little snot rockets from else where are not as safe as the ones harvested from the Gulf, and since they are not as tasty either why bother with them.

Tonight across America more people will die from automobile accidents than all year from oysters. Probably that many in Detroit from gunshots during the month.

If, in fact, eating raw oysters were as dangerous as the FDA nannies would have you believe then the streets and ERs of New Orleans would be littered with the bodies of the fallen. They are not and never have been.

W. Rogers Turner, Jr./Tulane ’88 is also correct Tabasco has been shown to kill the little buggers, but alas Dixie is no more, Abita reigns.

Somewhere, sometime this sh*t has got to stop, lest we as a nation become like the other English speaking nannie states of Less than Great Britain.