Because it was so well entrenched, the saccharin industry had no difficulty getting Congress to overrule the ban. But it took G. D. Searle eight years and an enormous investment to win FDA approval of aspartame, and those eight years of heavy saccharin use may have caused several thousand unnecessary cancers. Manufacturers of small, piston-engine planes have suspended production in the face of escalating liability. Beech continues to make a full line of planes but isn't making much money on them. All this leaves the field to dangerous secondhand planes that were placed on the market at an earlier point in the liability system's spiral.
Irradiation is the best way to kill salmonella bacteria in fresh chicken.
It isn't permitted. So we rely instead on an antiquated inspection system, and we get sick. Holland and Japan have rushed ahead of us in commercializing irradiation technology. Our paralysis in rationally comparing new and old risks, then, has made ours a riskier society. The scene is from the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno.