When I spent a year in Germany circa 1999 I thought the food labels sucked compared to food labels in the US. There were cigarette vending machines on the streets all over Dresden and they even had little candy vending machines below them.
When it comes to occupational health and safety you can't say European standards are better.
The established process for making plutonium fuel is to grind uranium oxide together with plutonium oxide in a high energy ball mill, then pack the powder into pellets, sinter them, and then have somebody stick the pellets into a fuel rod with gloves. The process creates Pu nanoparticles, once of which could give you lung cancer if it gets deep into your lungs.
In the factory Karen Silkwood worked at they couldn't control the dust to the extent that people could work without wearing respirators. The factory successfully made fuel for the Fast Flux Test Facility but being forced to wear respirators was a "normalization of deviance" that regulators would not grant to subsequent MOX (mixed-oxide) facilities in the US. In France on the other hand, wearing respirators was seen as just fine.
It was a difficult problem to determine the occupational hazard at that kind of factory, confused by the "Healthy Worker" effect such that people who work in almost any job are healthier than the average population. Circa 2015 the evidence was clear that MOX workers really do get lung cancer, I think it's no coincidence that the US shuttered a planned MOX factory around this time.
> I thought the food labels sucked compared to food labels in the US.
> When it comes to occupational health and safety you can't say European standards are better.
First off, US food labels aren't nearly as strict as most people think. There are a number of exceptions and cases where things simply don't have to be listed, and in others the label can outright lie. Tic tacs somewhat famously are listed as having "zero calories." They do not. But because tictac says the serving size is one and it has below a certain number of calories, they're allowed to round down to zero. But there are also allowances for simply not listing ingredients.
Another example is that US food manufacturers were required to label if a product contained allergens, but the whole thing has been watered down because they lobbied for an additional rule, which was that they could just slap a warning that a product might contain allergens and not have to test for allergens at all. Similar to CA' widely mocked Prop 65 labels. The reason those labels are worthless is because the industry lobbied to be allowed to just slap the label on everything and not have to test their products for toxic materials.
Speaking as someone who lives in the US: US food labels contain more because there's far more allowed to go into the product, because corps have said "let the market decide, if they don't want RED40 in their food they won't buy it." The industry also incessantly fights the FDA on what's considered toxic, and even if it is, trolls over "well there's only a very tiny bit of it, so you have to prove it'll ACTUALLY have an effect on people" which of course is very difficult if the risk is statistically small and there's a million other things that can be the same or greater risk.
In the EU, toxic crap for the most part isn't allowed in the food period, so there's less need to be so strict about what does or doesn't go into a food label, because EU consumers don't have to both educate themselves in what's toxic and check a label to see if it's got something that is toxic in it.
I think regulators just have different attitudes, often about arbitrary points. For a while the EU had many artificial sweeteners that weren't allowed in the US.
EU regulators seem less bothered by psychiatric medicines that have serious side effects (agranulocytosis) or might make you have your liver enzymes checked periodically. What you find is that EU regulators permit things that US regulators won't accept and vice versa.
When it comes to occupational health and safety you can't say European standards are better.
The established process for making plutonium fuel is to grind uranium oxide together with plutonium oxide in a high energy ball mill, then pack the powder into pellets, sinter them, and then have somebody stick the pellets into a fuel rod with gloves. The process creates Pu nanoparticles, once of which could give you lung cancer if it gets deep into your lungs.
In the factory Karen Silkwood worked at they couldn't control the dust to the extent that people could work without wearing respirators. The factory successfully made fuel for the Fast Flux Test Facility but being forced to wear respirators was a "normalization of deviance" that regulators would not grant to subsequent MOX (mixed-oxide) facilities in the US. In France on the other hand, wearing respirators was seen as just fine.
It was a difficult problem to determine the occupational hazard at that kind of factory, confused by the "Healthy Worker" effect such that people who work in almost any job are healthier than the average population. Circa 2015 the evidence was clear that MOX workers really do get lung cancer, I think it's no coincidence that the US shuttered a planned MOX factory around this time.