Chipotle Campylobacter Victim Featured in Consumer Reports Coverage on Tainted Chicken

Posted by Fred Pritzker in Food Safety

Within a few days of eating salad at a Minnesota restaurant in February 2009, Michele Lundell, a supervisor for a company that makes plastic tubing, experienced diarrhea, fever, and headache. “I kept getting sicker and sicker,” she recalled. A test confirmed Campylobacter. After her doctor prescribed antibiotics, Lundell said, she felt better for about a day, but then “all the same symptoms came back.” She said she was hospitalized for six days. A Minnesota Department of Health investigation found that 10 people who had eaten at the restaurant were stricken with Campylobacter and that the lettuce was most likely contaminated by raw or undercooked chicken.

This account of foodborne illness was featured in the current Consumer Reports investigation of Salmonella and Campylobacter in chicken. The piece itself has gone viral on the Internet, showing up all over the place with its major finding that Campylobacter was in 62 percent of tested raw whole chickens, Salmonella was in 14 percent, and both bacteria were in 9 percent.  Only 34 percent of the birds were clear of both pathogens.

Michele Lundell, who is from Apple Valley, Minnesota, is represented by our national food safety law firm, Pritzker Olsen Attorneys and her decision to share her story with Consumer Reports will help convey the need for greater prevention of foodborne illness in the United States. That’s a primary goal actively supported by our firm.

It’s one thing to report the numbers of good research showing a striking prevalence of human pathogens in our food. It’s even more powerful to report on the experience of people who are victims of these. Earlier this year, another Pritzker Olsen client, Jeffrey Almer, gave key testimony before a Congressional committee investigating the peanut butter Salmonella outbreak that killed nine people, including his mother, Shirley Almer.  The story of how Shirley overcame cancer, only to be stricken by Salmonella that contaminated the peanut butter on her toast, is still being used as a powerful instrument of change.

As for Michelle, her story has its own jarring impact: She still hasn’t fully recovered.

As she says in the magazine: “It’s hard to believe that a person goes out to eat and gets so sick that it changes your life.”