First, a confession: I’m a pro-union guy. I believe unions were instrumental in securing many of the health and safety rights we take for granted.  I believe unions continue to have relevance and remain necessary for a just and benevolent society.

The essence of that society is balance through strength. It is the logic that underpins all of our democratic institutions. For justice, we need government authority tempered by individual rights. For democracy, we need co-equal branches of government each to check the power of the others. For international diplomacy, we need military strength to prevent over reaching by expansionist nations.

How then can we, as a just society, ever accept a lack of balance when it comes to workers’ rights? History and our own experience shows that corporatism unchecked is a threat to us all (and not just the workers most directly affected).

A good example of this is playing out in a battle over organizing rights involving a Twin Cities Jimmy John’s franchisee that fired six employees after they publically protested the restaurants’ sick leave policy. See http://www.startribune.com/business/148530485.html.

Like many fast food restaurants, these Jimmy John’s shops don’t pay employees on days when they’re too sick to work. It doesn’t take a food scientist or an economist to figure out that such policies create a strong incentive for employees to continue working when they have infectious and highly contagious illnesses likely to result in contamination of work surfaces, utensils and food sold to the public.

This is not a hypothetical threat. Our firm, one of only a handful in the United States that specializes in food safety law, has represented hundreds of people harmed in foodborne illness outbreaks caused by infected food handlers.  Many of those cases involved workers sickened by hepatitis A, Salmonella, norovirus or Shigella who continued working despite their illnesses.

The mode of transmission is as unpleasant as the illnesses are dangerous:  fecal matter or aerosolized vomit in food.  This pathogenic chain reaction is the direct result of employment policies and sanitation violations that are so often inextricably linked. Put another way, restaurants that are unwilling to pay their employees for sick time may have the same laissez-faire attitude toward restaurant hygiene.

Not all workers are saints and not all restaurant owners are villains. Personal responsibility applies to food safety as it does to every other human action. However, when we know by direct experience and common sense that certain policies ineluctably lead to foodborne illness, those policies must change.

A federal administrative law judge has ruled that a Twin Cities Jimmy John’s franchisee violated the union organizing rights of six employees by firing them last year after they publicly protested the restaurants’ sick leave policy.

The workers, who were all active in an attempt to unionize 10 local Jimmy John’s, must be reinstated to their jobs and given back pay, according to an order late Friday by the Washington, D.C.,-based judge, Arthur Amchan

MINNEAPOLIS, Feb 28, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Restaurants, commercial kitchens and other food service providers should cease serving raw sprouts of any kind unless an explicit food safety warning is provided on menus, national E. coli lawyer Fred Pritzker announced.

Pritzker, who represents victims of foodborne illness in practically every major U.S. outbreak, said that more than a decade of concentrated effort by regulators and sprout suppliers has failed to make raw sprouts safe to eat. The latest of far too many outbreaks has sickened customers of the sandwich chain Jimmy John’s in Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Wisconsin and Arkansas. Officials suspect pathogenic contamination in seeds sold to growers — a common source of poisoning in sprouts. Late last week, Michigan public health officials issued a statewide alert for citizens to avoid eating raw clover sprouts due to an outbreak of E. coli O26 associated with seven illnesses, including at least two victims who are confirmed to be part of the food poisoning at Jimmy John’s.

“These people suffered severe pain due to a collapse of food safety measures,” said Pritzker, one of four national figures chosen to debate the dangers of raw milk earlier this month at Harvard University. “If consumers are going to be put in harm’s way, justice demands they be forewarned.”

Many restaurants have already removed raw sprouts from their offerings. For those who persist in selling them in ready-to-eat food, an explicit public warning should be mandatory, Pritzker said. The warning should alert consumers to the risk of life-threatening virulent bacteria, he said.

Toxic E. coli is the latest pathogen to contaminate sprouts in a multi-state outbreak, but Salmonella and Listeria also have a history of harboring in sprouts sold into the food supply. A sprout E. coli outbreak centered in Germany last year killed more than 50 people and sent more than 840 to the hospital with hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS).

In just the past three years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has publicly tracked six separate sprout outbreaks that have sickened more than 4,500 people. And by the government’s own admission, FDA guidelines for seed suppliers and sprout growers would not have detected the strain of toxic E. coli in the Jimmy John’s outbreak.

“The only way to make sprouts safe is to cook them,” Pritzker said. “Serving them raw to an unsuspecting public is irresponsible and should be banned.”

E. coli outbreak victims and their families can contact food safety attorney Fred Pritzker by calling his law firm at 1-888-377-8900 (toll free). PritzkerOlsen, P.A. is a nationally recognized food safety law firm that has collected millions for E. coli food poisoning victims. The firm represents E. coli victims throughout the United States and has offices at Plaza Seven, Suite 2950, 45 South Seventh Street, Minneapolis, MN 55402.

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.

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.

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°.

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

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.

Why? Because EXPERTS, the people who have studied, trained, conducted experiments, treated patients and written peer-reviewed articles (not pseudo-scientists who BELIEVE something to be true), know that raw milk is inherently unsafe.  Raw milk is responsible for repeated outbreaks and will continue to cause injury and death no matter what its proponents claim to the contrary.

Need proof? Look no further than this month’s raw milk outbreak involving fourth graders at a public school in Wisconsin.

In Racine County, Wisconsin a parent (!) brought raw milk to a school event. Sixteen people, including at least nine children, were poisoned with Campylobactor jejuni bacteria after consuming the donated milk.

According to Wisconsin officials, this incredibly stupid action on the parent’s part was not illegal. Apparently, any person who lawfully purchases raw milk can give it away to anyone with impunity.

Proponents claim that consumption of raw milk is healthful, nutritious and a matter of personal choice. Their argument is that if a person knows of the risk (which they claim is de minimis) and chooses to encounter it, it is that person’s choice and the state should not intrude.

Fair enough. Except, that a) there is no proof raw milk is healthier than pasteurized milk; b) the risks associated with raw milk are not de minimis; c) when people become ill from raw milk, as some inevitably will, we all (not just the victim) have to pay for it, and d) as this case tragically illustrates, “freedom of choice” does not prevent innocent children from being harmed.

According to a Wisconsin newspaper, “bills to legalize the sale of unpasteurized milk have been introduced in the Legislature in the past. One passed last year, but former Gov. Jim Doyle vetoed it citing the danger to public health.” Enough said.

Attorney Fred Pritzker represents campylobacteriosis victims and their families nationwide. He is currently representing a man who consumed raw milk contaminated with Campylobacter, developed Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) and is now paralyzed. Mr. Pritzker can be reached at 1-888-377-8900 (toll free) or by submitting our contact form.

We know that E. coli O157:H7 survives in soil. We also know that plant surfaces become contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 as a result of direct contact with the pathogen – either in the soil, as deposited by animals, from dust and from irrigation or run-off water.

Scientists have also speculated that ground-based E. coli O157:H7 gets taken up through the roots of growing plants and thus contaminates the interior of the plant as well as its exterior.

As reported by Doug Powell in his blog:  http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/blog/147517/11/04/01/can-e-coli-get-inside-plant-vascular-system-2009-research-says-unlikely

A study by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service appears to show that such internal contamination does not occur.

The significance of this? While it does not mean there is any less E. coli O157:H7 adulteration of produce, at least we may not have to worry about the insides of plants.

As often happens in such presentations, the conversation turned to raw milk. Under Canadian law, it is apparently illegal to sell or purvey raw milk in any fashion (unlike in the US where many states allow some commercial raw milk sales). One of the officers of the Department raised an interesting question about raw milk in the context of personal freedom vs. governmental regulation of a potentially dangerous commodity. He asked me whether it is appropriate to regulate a commodity like raw milk if a consumer, knowledgeable about its risks and dangers, nevertheless chooses to drink it. In other words, treat it like “informed consent” in the context of a medical procedure: there is utility with attendant risk. If the risks are fully explained and the consumer/patient judges there to be sufficient utility to justify the risk, why should the government intrude?

So let’s assume a consumer goes to a dairy intending to purchase raw milk and is handed a form that fully and fairly sets out all the risks associated with raw milk. The consumer reads the form, signs the waiver and purchases raw milk. If s/he later gets sick, no one can complain (and no lawyer can sue on their behalf) because the consumer made an intelligent choice and is now fully responsible for the harms and losses that occurred.

Okay. But like most anti-government conceptual bullshit, the execution of the concept and the real-world implications of it are something else altogether.

So what happens, for example, when the bottle of raw milk that was “intelligently and knowingly” purchased ends up in the consumer’s refrigerator and is then poured on two bowls of corn flakes, one eaten by the 10-year-old child of the purchaser and the other by his neighbor/friend who was at the house on a sleep-over and later developed Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome and has life-long medical problems as a result(these facts are virtually the same as a real case, by the way)? Or what about another raw milk proponent who is sickened despite his knowing and intelligent waiver and then proceeds to incur over $1 Million in medical expenses (which we as a society end up paying directly or indirectly)?

Here’s my take: Until we can guarantee no innocent party will ever be harmed by raw milk and no one other than the person who chooses to drink it will have to subsidize the harm resulting from it, we should follow the wisdom of our friends north of the border and not allow anyone to buy it.

Food safety attorney Fred Pritzker can be reached at 1-888-377-8900 (toll free) or via our online contact form.