Family Cow Raw Milk Campylobacter Outbreak Looming Large as I Debate Raw Milk at Harvard Law School
I will be participating in a raw milk debate at Harvard Law School tonight sponsored by the Food Law Society. My partner, Dr. Heidi Kassenborg, and I will be debating Sally Fallon Morell, president, Weston A. Price Foundation, and her debate partner, David Gumpert, author of The Raw Milk Revolution.
The debate starts at 7:00 at Harvard Law School, Langdell South Room, Boston, Massachusetts, 1563 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA. There will be a livestream of the event and it will be archived on YouTube.
The debate comes during the largest outbreak of illness linked to raw milk in the last ten years. There are now 76 confirmed cases in an outbreak of Campylobacter jejuni infections linked to raw milk produced by Shankstead EcoFarm in Pennsylvania and sold under the Your Family Cow brand at The Family Cow dairy in Chambersburg, Franklin County, Pennsylvania. The most recent information from the Pennsylvania Department of Health is as follows:
76 total cases: 66 in PA (increase by 4 from yesterday), 5 in MD (increase by 1 from yesterday), 2 in NJ, and 3 in WV.
Onset dates range from January 17 to February 1, 2012.
PA County breakdown: Franklin 18, Adams 1, Wyoming 1, Chester 6 (increase by 1 from yesterday), Dauphin 2, Cumberland 6, York 7 (increase by 2 from yesterday), Lancaster 8, Delaware 6 (increase by 1 from yesterday), Bucks 6, Allegheny 1, Montgomery 3, and Northampton 1.
The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Laboratories Administration confirmed the presence of Campylobacter jejuni in two unopened raw milk samples purchased from The Family Cow dairy.
Victims of this outbreak can contact me at 1-888-377-8900 (toll free) or by submitting the free consultation form.
If cookie dough adulterated with E. coli O157:H7 was so rare, how could consumers have been at fault for the E. coli outbreak linked to Nestles Cookie Dough?
A logical disconnection (Non sequitur, if you will) is an argument in which its conclusion does not follow from its premises.
In March 2009 there was an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak associated with Nestle Cookie Dough involving 77 confirmed E coli infections in 30 states, including 35 hospitalizations and 10 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome. I represented several of the survivors from that outbreak.
In a medical journal article published online on December 8, 2011,1 the authors concluded that raw flour used to make the cookie dough was the “prime suspect” in the outbreak although there was no conclusive evidence that the flour was, in fact, adulterated. The authors concluded:
This is the first reported STEC outbreak associated with consuming ready-to-bake commercial prepackaged cookie dough. Despite instructions to bake brand A cookie dough before eating, case patients consumed the product uncooked. Manufacturers should consider formulating ready-to-bake commercial prepackaged cookie dough to be as safe as a ready-to-eat product. More effective consumer education about the risks of eating unbaked cookie dough is needed. (emphasis added)
Within a few months of the outbreak (by July 1, 2009 according to press reports), FDA investigators were focusing on flour as the source of the E. coli O157:H7. However, officials and food safety pundits stressed how novel it was for an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak to be associated with either raw flour or cookie dough. Evidently it was so novel that most cookie dough producers were not treating their flour to kill off the deadly pathogen (and presumably were not testing for it either).
There appears to be a logical disconnection here. If cookie dough adulterated with E. coli O157:H7 was so rare that even producers did nothing to prevent it, how can it be suggested that consumers (who are known to eat raw cookie dough) are implicitly at fault because they failed to take precautions against the E. coli O157:H7 threat?
I can already hear the response: Everyone knows cookie dough contains raw eggs and everyone knows raw eggs carry Salmonella, so if consumers used common sense and refrained from eating cookie dough to avoid salmonellosis, they could have also avoided E. coli O157:H7 poisoning.
But you know what? Most consumers are not food safety experts. They may not know about the dangers associated with raw cookie dough and certainly could not know it was capable of harboring deadly E. coli O157:H7. They also don’t know that the infective dose of E. coli O157:H7 is so incredibly low (which means that you don’t even have to eat raw cookie dough to become poisoned by it).
I agree that consumers need to take reasonable precautions. But if producers – especially multi-national companies like Nestle – don’t consider a danger or prevent it from occurring, it’s illogical and unfair to blame consumers for not doing so.
Food is a product and therefore subject to product liability law and the requirements of safe product design. Those requirements establish a three-tier safe design process: design out the defect; if you cannot design out the defect, add guards that prevent contact with the danger; and if you cannot design out or guard against the danger, then (and only then) are you allowed to warn users to avoid the danger (and when you do issue warnings, they have to be explicit).
In this case, as in so many others involving unsafe food products, producers don’t design out the dangers; they simply bypass the principles of safe design and jump to innocuous and ill-conceived warnings that do not convey sufficient information to constitute an effective warning (Why? Because if the warnings were truly effective, people would not buy the product).
1. Karen Neil, et al., A Novel Vehicle for Transmission of Escherichia coli O157:H7 to Humans: Multistate Outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 Infections Associated With Consumption of Ready-to-Bake Commercial Prepackaged Cookie Dough—United States, 2009 , Clin Infect Dis. (2011) doi: 10.1093/cid/cir831. First published online: December 8, 2011.
Food Safety Lawyer Fred Pritzker to Bourdain: Love Your Show But Medium Rare Hamburger Is Dangerous
I live in Minnesota. That means that for four or five months of the year, my exercise regimen is relegated to the basement of our St. Paul home.
Since using an elliptical trainer or riding an exercise bicycle is mind-numbingly dull, I distract myself with television. One of my favorite work-out programs is Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” (and his new show, “The Layover”). I like Bourdain because he’s wry, mordant and cynical: the perfect companion for a visit to places I may never see on my own.
I also like the fact that he’s a dick. His persona is that of a self-absorbed and highly opinionated guy – traits you probably don’t want in your father or best friend but quite enjoyable as a travel guide (provided you have separate rooms and a lot of time apart).
Bourdain is also the quintessential (and disdainful) foodie. In a recent episode, “The Layover: New York,” Bourdain samples some of New York’s best burgers, including the $26 offering at Minetta Tavern (a blend of inexpressibly choice cuts of cow capable of exciting the salivary glands of any carnivore, me included).
Bourdain, of course, orders his burger medium rare and eats it with a verbal dollop of sanctimony about the virtues of less-cooked food. On some level, I think “good for him.” If he drinks too much or has no antipathy toward pathogenetic microorganisms, who am I to judge?
And yet…I wonder if Bourdain has ever cared about someone dying from foodborne illness or watched a child undergoing dialysis? I doubt it. The pleasure of food well-eaten pales in comparison to a young life lost to foodborne illness.
We tout the virtue of personal freedom and rebel against the sanctimonies of dictated behaviors. That tension will always exist and the line separating the extremes is, by necessity, ever shifting. But Bourdain is still a dick, albeit an entertaining one, and hamburger, even the priciest, is still a danger at less than 160°.
PritzkerOlsen Files a Lawsuit against Wegmans On Behalf of Pine Nut Salmonella Outbreak Victim
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The national food safety law firm PritzkerOlsen has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a victim of the multistate Salmonella outbreak linked to Turkish pine nuts sold at grocery stores operated by Wegmans Food Markets, Inc., of Rochester, N.Y., and distributed by Sunrise Commodities, of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The lawsuit against Wegmans and Sunrise Commodities was filed in the New York State Supreme Court in Monroe County by PritzkerOlsen with local counsel.
In September 2011, the plaintiff purchased pine nuts at Wegmans and made basil pesto with them. After eating the pesto, she began to suffer weakness, abdominal pain, diarrhea and fever. Her condition worsened, and she was later admitted to the hospital.
The plaintiff was one of at least 42 people in five states who contracted a Salmonella infection after eating the pine nuts, according to the CDC. Most of the victims, 27 of them, are from New York. There are also eight victims from Pennsylvania, four from Virginia, two from New Jersey and one from Maryland.
“This outbreak was caused by a breakdown in the food safety systems designed to protect consumers” said food safety attorney Fred Pritzker. “After-the-fact testing conclusively proved that the Turkish pine nuts were adulterated with Salmonella Enteritidis. Had these companies properly tested the product in the first place, this outbreak would not have occurred.”
Public health investigators used DNA “fingerprints” of the Salmonella strain to identify cases of illness that were part of this outbreak. After laboratory testing linked the illnesses to pine nuts sold in bulk bins at Wegmans grocery stores, the company issued a recall of 5,000 pounds of Turkish pine nuts sold at 78 stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland between July 1 and October 18, 2011.
Further tests by the FDA confirmed that Salmonella matching the outbreak strain was present on samples of Turkish pine nuts taken from a warehouse used by Sunrise Commodities. The recall was then expanded to include pine nuts that had been distributed to food vendors in Florida, New Jersey, New York and Canada.
Attorneys Fred Pritzker and Ryan Osterholm represent the plaintiff in this case. They can be reached at 1-888-377-8900 (TOLL FREE) or at http://www.salmonellaclaimcenter.com or www.pritzkerlaw.com. PritzkerOlsen, P.A. has offices in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Contact
Pritzker Olsen, P.A.
Fred Pritzker
Phone: 612-338-0202
fhp@pritzkerlaw.com
Cantaloupe Outbreak is Showcase of Bad Policy
Although we expect the cantaloupe we eat to be safe and healthy and to be produced, marketed and sold in a reasonable manner, it often isn’t. In fact, this cantaloupe Listeria outbreak is a showcase of bad policy and repeated mistakes that was as foreseeable as it was preventable.
According to a 2006 study authored by epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the period between 1984 and 2002 there were no fewer than twenty-three cantaloupe-associated outbreaks in which almost 1500 people were sickened. This cantaloupe outbreak, the first one caused by Listeria, may prove to be the deadliest foodborne outbreak in U.S. history.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this outbreak is that although we know what food caused it and where that food came from (Jensen Farms in Colorado), people continue to get sick and die from it. Why?
The first reason is because neither Jensen Farms nor the federal and state governments charged with investigating the outbreak have released the names of retailers that sold the contaminated fruit. And the reason they haven’t released those names? Because they don’t really know where the cantaloupe was sold. And the reason they don’t know is because effective trace back technology and practices were not in place.
The second reason is because cantaloupe is often sold without labels, or previously affixed labels fell off. Consumers simply cannot tell by looking at a cantaloupe where it was grown or whether it contains life-threatening pathogens. An untold number of unsuspecting people will continue eating Jensen Farms cantaloupe because they cannot find out if their retailer sold it and cannot tell by looking at the fruit if was produced by Jensen Farms.
You would think that if a company sells a product capable of producing injury and death across the United States there should be a way to trace the distribution of that product. There is. But as this outbreak tragically illustrates, the technology and practices that would have stopped this outbreak long before now weren’t applied to fungible food products like this one.
It’s not hard to envision how this would work. Cantaloupes, like other types of fruits and vegetables, could be sold in inexpensive mesh bags. Attached to the bags would be sufficient information to allow regulators (and the public) to know the producer, shipper, sell by dates and any other information including the best practices for preparing and consuming the product. You could, for example, easily create a method by which a QR code is affixed to the fruit so that consumers can quickly scan it with a cell phone app and learn where it came from and whether it is implicated in an outbreak.
Labeling and traceback issues in foodborne illness outbreaks are as foreseeable as human illness from the consumption of cantaloupe. It is insane that more people will continue to get sick and die because we don’t learn from our failures and because we don’t apply the tools and policies that we know will work.
Fred Pritzker On Newsmakers
