Only slightly unrelated, but I've been thinking a lot lately about prion disease and whether or not you can still trust the meat you eat. Easily a food safety concern that is ten times worse than getting a little diarrhea from your salad, and the same institutional rot can contribute to it. And it would take 5-10 years to really see the damage done from it.
A guy gets a worm in his brain, somehow becomes secretary of health, loosens all the rules so the rest of us have a higher chance of getting a brain worm. This is comic book villain kind of stuff. Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?