Food Poison Journal - Food poisoning outbreaks and litigation: surveillance and analysis

KRLD News Radio reports that a Dallas resident has died after eating raw oysters. Jamie Nicolay with the Collin County Health Department says the victim ate the oysters at a restaurant in Plano. Oysters can be contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio vulnificus.

The bacterium is naturally present in marine environments and does not alter the appearance, taste, or odor of oysters. In healthy people, ingesting V. vulnificus can cause vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain.

But in people who have chronic illnesses -- especially those with chronic liver disease -- V. vulnificus can infect the bloodstream, causing a severe and life-threatening illness, characterized by fever and chills, decreased blood pressure (septic shock) and blistering skin lesions.

Nicolay says restaurants are allowed to sell raw oysters as long as they warn diners about the possible risks. She suggests if you want to eat oysters, it's best to order them cooked.

The Associated Press reports that California health officials said Thursday they still hope to find the source of the contaminated spinach that's sickened at least 189 people, but called on farmers to be more diligent about applying food safety measures to prevent future E. coli outbreaks.

The recent nationwide outbreak, at least the 10th traced to produce from California's Salinas Valley during the last decade, shows that growers have not done all they could to safeguard their crops and the public's health, said Dr. Kevin Reilly, deputy director of the prevention services branch of the California health department.

Meanwhile, the produce processing company at the center of the current E. coli outbreak announced Thursday that it would test a sample from each lot of greens its packages for illness-causing bacteria.

Natural Selection Foods CEO Charles Sweat said the new system is modeled after sampling procedures that helped reduce the number of human E. coli infections caused by beef. Natural Selection Foods LLC is a privately held company.

The Examiner reports that authorities have traced the contaminated spinach that has killed as many as three people and sickened at least 173 to a few counties in California’s Salinas Valley, but let’s not stop the investigative work too soon.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, an important one about the dangers of superstitious, leftist twaddle and the threat it poses to human life.

So let’s zero in on the anti-corporate, conspiracy-minded, Nader-formed group, Public Citizen, which never quits yelping about the public good while simultaneously betraying it, and let’s focus on its opposition to irradiation, which is an extraordinary means of saving literally tens of thousands of lives lost to food-borne illness over the years.

The Associated Press reports that a second tainted bag of spinach, found in Utah over the weekend, has helped health officials pinpoint E. coli contamination in one specific batch of fresh spinach in a California processing plant.

California health officials said the Utah bag of Dole baby spinach and another of the same brand found in New Mexico last week were both processed during the same shift on Aug. 15 at Natural Selection Foods' San Juan Batista plant in the Salinas Valley.

"We are looking very aggressively at what was produced on that date," Dr. Kevin Reilly, deputy director of prevention services for the California Department of Health Services, said late Monday. "Much of the feedback we got from patients right now was related to Dole packaging."

The Utah Department of Health and the Salt Lake Valley Health Department confirmed Monday that E. coli had been found in a bag of Dole baby spinach purchased in Utah with a use-by-date of Aug. 30, 2006, the FDA said.

The earliest onset of illness known to be linked to spinach consumption was on Aug. 19.

The 25 affected states are: Arizona (7 cases), California (1), Colorado (1), Connecticut (3), Idaho (4), Illinois (1), Indiana (9), Kentucky (8), Maine (3), Maryland (3), Michigan (4), Minnesota (2), Nebraska (9), Nevada (1), New Mexico (5), New York (11), Ohio (20), Oregon (6), Pennsylvania (8), Tennessee (1), Utah (18), Virginia (2), Washington (3), Wisconsin (44), and Wyoming (1).

Wisconsin has the largest number of reported cases, and the one death, a 77-year-old woman. Two other deaths, in Idaho and Maryland, are still under investigation.

Joseph Ryan of The Daily Herald reports that as the tables rapidly filled for lunch at Yanni's Greek Restaurant in Arlington Heights, TV reports were warning consumers not to eat the veggie — if it was bought in bags.

Yet, no one was telling Liakouras that his spinach, purchased from a distributor, wasn’t safe. He didn’t know what to do. The manager called his spinach providers to see what they thought, but eventually he figured, “Why even take the risk?”

By late afternoon, he pulled spinach from eight classic dishes. A week later, the manager remains in the dark. “No one has actually told us not to serve spinach,” he says.