"A Bug in the System: Why Last Night’s Chicken Made You Sick"

"Each year, contaminated food sickens forty-eight million Americans, of whom a hundred and twenty-eight thousand are hospitalized, and three thousand die." The federal food safety system under the Agriculture Department and other agencies fails to protect them.

"Late one night in September of 2013, Rick Schiller awoke in bed with his right leg throbbing. Schiller, who is in his fifties, lives in San Jose, California. He had been feeling ill all week, and, as he reached under the covers, he found his leg hot to the touch. He struggled to sit upright, then turned on a light and pulled back the sheet. 'My leg was about twice the normal size, maybe even three times,' he told me. 'And it was hard as a rock, and bright purple.'

Schiller roused his fiancée, who helped him hobble to their car. He dropped into the passenger seat, but he couldn’t bend his leg to fit it through the door. 'So I tell her, ‘Just grab it and shove it in,’ ' he recalled. 'I almost passed out in pain.'

At the hospital, five employees helped move Schiller from the car to a consulting room. When a doctor examined his leg, she warned him that it was so swollen there was a chance it might burst. She tried to remove fluid with a needle, but nothing came out. 'So she goes in with a bigger needle—nothing comes out,' Schiller said. 'Then she goes in with a huge needle, like the size of a pencil lead—nothing comes out.' When the doctor tugged on the plunger, the syringe filled with a chunky, meatlike substance. 'And then she gasped,' Schiller said."

Wil S. Hylton reports for the New Yorker in the issue dated February 2, 2015.