Edwina Currie uttered a sentence in December 1988 that would rapidly end her ministerial career and send Britain’s egg industry into an alleged “crisis“:
Most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella.
Was she entirely accurate? No. She should have said “much” or left out the word “most”. That wordplay doesn’t sound like a crisis, though. Was there a genuine health concern that needed addressing? Absolutely. Egg production in the UK was affected with salmonella and she was correctly saying they could do better.
Government data showed concerning links between infections and egg consumption. Cases in Britain had more than doubled between 1982 and 1988. She brought to public attention that there was a real problem. Currie’s assessment was correct, despite an imperfect delivery by including a vague word “most”.
Most of the time we shouldn’t say most.
What followed was a textbook case of self-serving defensive semantics as tactics, trying to avoid bad news, rushing to shoot the messenger to undermine the message. Notably, egg sales were suddenly reported by the industry to plummet overnight and they demanded the government give them handouts (penalty payments) while they slaughtered millions of their hens. The industry reported it lost tens of millions, demanding even further government handouts. How convenient for the salmonella spreaders they could so immediately demand victim status compensation.
The industry reaction’s effect on Currie? They forced her to resign in disgrace. The industry effectively capitalized on her report; a political moment was seized to secure government subsidies while deflecting attention from evidence of neglect in safety practices. The government provided £20 million in compensation without first establishing an independent investigation into the actual scale and cause of the problem being subsidized. Talk about ironic evidence of corruption in the food industry that had led to the poisonings in the first place. Who were the victims again? Did the 27,000 sick get any of those millions in compensation, ever?
The business tactic of explosive anti-accountability was perhaps as predictable as it was unfortunate. Public health warnings in England must be nuanced or they could naturally trigger fear responses known to “plague” them, if you get my drift.
…human ectoparasites, like body lice and human fleas, might be more likely than rats to have caused the rapidly developing epidemics in pre-Industrial Europe. Such an alternative transmission route explains many of the notable epidemiological differences between historical and modern plague epidemics.
Scientists keep trying to figure out what caused the plague, while cynical and cruel businesses always seem to have another model in mind…
There was an emergence of a social narrative that Jews had caused the Black Death [by] people who noticed that, in fact, getting rid of Jews was a way of getting rid of debt, as well as taking possession of their wealth. The eruption of the plague had simply given an external reason for this to occur.
Thus, consider how a proud “keep calm and carry on crowd” somehow was pivoted into excited self-serving behavior like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off at the very mention of a potential risk that needed thoughtful response. Instead of a measured action and patience about investigating a “most” eggs claim through scientific clarifications, somehow the egg industry was allowed to leverage mass panic to their favor, ginning up a hunt for…a very convenient scapegoat, a trusted source of concern.
Certainly, Currie’s delivery included a word that needed clarification. Who was more imperfect, the salmonella spreaders or the politician? Her use of “most” instead of very specific percentages transformed a targeted warning into an industry-wide condemnation. And in retrospect her job raising attention to a rising problem was effective. She was invoking the point that food poisoning from eggs jumped from 12,500 in 1982 to about 27,000 in 1988. That’s a lot of bad eggs, even if not most!
The “most” significant communication failure actually came after Currie had made her point. Industry representatives, media outlets, and government officials rushed into “don’t keep calm, don’t carry on” outrage instead of proper education. Rather than accept the criticism, contextualizing the risk, rather than providing leadership through the criticism and feedback, rather than providing consumers with practical safety guidance and goals, the egg industrialists under fire focused heavy return fire on destroying Currie herself.
How dare she say something was imperfect? How dare she focus on the bad things and bring attention on a worsening problem that had made 27,000 people sick?
The aftermath of the scandal presents a troubling paradox: the messenger who raised a very legitimate concern faced career destruction for a LOW imperfection in her delivery, while those who allowed salmonella to spread in the first place faced minimal scrutiny for CRITICAL imperfection in their delivery.
The egg producers who had failed to maintain adequate safety standards somehow emerged as the only victims of their own imperfections, while decrying any amount of imperfection as unacceptable in others. The industry stepped back in horror instead of forward into being potential contributors to resolving the real public health issue.
The British Egg Industry Council said it was seeking legal advice on whether it could sue Mrs Currie over “factually incorrect and highly irresponsible” remarks. A spokesman said the risk of an egg being infected with salmonella was less than 200 million to one. The National Farmers’ Union said it might seek legal damages.
The doubling of salmonella cases in five years to 27,000 people was effectively sidelined by industry representatives’ focus on defending their economic interests. Their claim of “200 million to one” odds of infection were foul, as it contradicted reliable government data showing rapidly increasing illness rates.
This pattern repeats itself regularly in public discourse to this day, and especially in security discussions with regard to technology such as the unsafe Tesla designs. We still see efforts to punish those who highlight uncomfortable truths, while counter-attacks are unleashed by those responsible for creating problems to avoid taking any accountability.
From whistleblowers to scientists warning about climate change, a tendency to attack messengers remains one of the most counterproductive social habits in risk management.
Currie’s egg scandal was about a collective inability to process warnings without feeling personally attacked, and trying to throw everything at the source to disarm the warnings. It highlighted a social response, if not a cultural one, where a panic instinct was to curate a simple villain story to avoid thinking hard about complex solutions.
The irony? The Lion Quality mark introduced after her scandalous “more” has made British eggs among the safest in the world. Currie’s warning, imperfect as any warning, ultimately is what led to very needed significant improvements in food safety.
…the industry did have a problem and was giving too many people food poisoning. Farms tried to clean up but the real breakthrough came in 1998 when the vaccination of hens for salmonella was introduced at farms backing the new British Lion mark. All the big egg producers put the marks on their eggs. From 1998 there have been falls almost every year in the number of human cases of Salmonella enteritidis. In 1997, there were 22,254 cases. In 2005, there were 6,677.
Perhaps it’s time we recognized someone who took the fall for speaking uncomfortable truths in British society, for her imperfectly delivered message bringing everyone a more perfect world.
She deserved “more” thoughtful responses than the unfair and imperfect panic and persecution in the place that prides itself on a decorum of perfection. In retrospect, all the claims of harm by the egg industry were targeted political propaganda that evaporated the power of a person whose job it was to improve health. Currie explained it herself later:
…the numbers of confirmed cases continued to run at about 30,000 a year for the next decade, with about 60 deaths a year. […] There really was a problem with eggs. The hens’ oviducts had become contaminated with a new variant of salmonella, which did not kill the birds, but showed up in infected eggs, and caused a particularly virulent food poisoning in humans. It resulted from laying stocks being fed “protein” that turned out to be ground-up dead chickens. Similar insane feeding practices led to BSE in cattle in the 1980s and 90s. […] Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food were equivalent to a bunch of lunatics. They’d appointed themselves apologists for the farming industry – not their role, as public regulators and advisers. They were unscientific and incompetent. […] I hadn’t made a mistake – not in the substance. I was public health minister. If something wasn’t done during the winter of 1988, I could foresee that we would have an epidemic on our hands…
The egg industry’s response went beyond mere defensiveness, employing legal threats, contestable statistics, and claims of catastrophic financial harm to undermine a health official raising legitimate concerns. The subsequent events raise questions about whether public panic was unfairly manipulated and leveraged to secure financial benefits by the very industry that should instead have focused on its obviously flawed safety standards.
One final thing to consider is just how much Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie had the support of the public, yet this wasn’t enough to keep her in office. That’s important context for how certain powerful businesses conspired to remove a servant of the public, even against the public’s wishes.
