Marler Blog to get Updated Look on 8-9-10
Marler Blog which is visited by several thousand people daily and is subscribed to by hundreds will get a updated look beginning 8-9-10. Check in out at www.marlerblog.com.
South Royalton, VT Company Unveils On-the-Farm Pasteurization System for Farmstead and Micro Dairies
Brand New Choice: Raw Milk OR Pasteurized Directly on Farm
08.03.2010 – South Royalton, VT – From this August forward, there are now two options for farm fresh milk – raw OR gently pasteurized directly on the farm with the Bob-White Low Impact Farmstead Pasteurization System.
The company’s website launched this week at www.bobwhitesystems.com. In honor of this positive news, Bob-White Systems will be holding an open house at the storefront located on the town green in South Royalton, Vermont the entire week of August 23, 9:00 – 4:00 daily. Special events will be planned for Wednesday, August 25 including the opportunity to meet a Bob-White System’s Jersey cow on the Town Green, live music, and other fun surprises.
Small herd or micro dairy farmers struggling with the commercial dairy industry can now explore an affordable alternative which offers diversification and eliminates over-production – did you know four grazing hillside cows can supply up to 60 families with farm fresh milk?
Farmsteaders and homesteaders seeking to round out building a business based on commitments to localvore food production can now help provide their communities with locally produced milk by the cows who live there, instead of having the milk trucked out of state.
Farm fresh milk producers now have the choice to produce either raw milk or milk pasteurized directly on the farm, or a combination of the two – but the choice is now theirs to make.
The Bob-White Pasteurization System has been in use at the company’s farmstead dairy research facility located in Royalton Village since March of 2008. The pasteurizer gently pumps the cold milk through its heat exchanger at a gallon per minute, where it is heated to 163 degrees and held at that temperature for 20 seconds. The milk is then rapidly cooled back down as it flows into a small bulk tank, where it is further cooled and stored. The milk is not homogenized, separated or standardized, which safeguards more of the milk’s nutritional value and cream content, as well as its farm fresh flavor. It does an excellent job of eliminating the harmful bacteria in milk, regardless of the bacteria levels found in the raw milk and it has absolutely no impact on the milk’s flavor. In addition, the texture of the cream and the ability to utilize the milk for yogurt, butter and other dairy products is unaltered.
The current raw milk legislation does not include regulatory accommodations for farm fresh pasteurized milk and Bob-White Systems is seeking awareness vehicles statewide to help obtain such accommodations for milk processed with the Bob-White Pasteurization System to be able to be sold direct from the farm in the same fashion as raw milk. Such policy enhancements will open up an entire new economic, community, and localvore food opportunity for Vermont dairy farmers and those who want to be dairy farmers.
Bob-White Systems’ Open House Week – August 23 – 27
Brand New Website – www.bobwhitesystems.com!
With E. coli O145 Illnesses in New York, Ohio and Michigan, a Refresher Course on the Enemy is in Order
Escherichia coli (E. coli) are members of a large group of bacterial germs that inhabit the intestinal tract of humans and other warm-blooded animals (mammals, birds). More than 700 serotypes of E. coli have been identified. Their “O” and “H” antigens on their bodies and flagella distinguish the different E. coli serotypes, respectively. The E. coli serotypes that are responsible for the numerous reports of contaminated foods and beverages are those that produce Shiga toxin (Stx), so called because the toxin is virtually identical to that produced by another bacteria known as Shigella dysenteria type 1 (that also causes bloody diarrhea and hemolytic uremic syndrome [HUS] in emerging countries like Bangladesh) (Griffin & Tauxe, 1991, p. 60, 73). (download brochure)
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The best-known and most notorious Stx-producing E. coli is E. coli O157:H7. It is important to remember that most kinds of E. coli bacteria do not cause disease in humans, indeed, some are beneficial, and some cause infections other than gastrointestinal infections, such urinary tract infections. Shiga toxin is one of the most potent toxins known to man, so much so that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists it as a potential bioterrorist agent (CDC, n.d.). It seems likely that DNA from Shiga toxin-producing Shigella bacteria was transferred by a bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) to otherwise harmless E. coli bacteria, thereby providing them with the genetic material to produce Shiga toxin.
Although E. coli O157:H7 is responsible for the majority of human illnesses attributed to E. coli, there are additional Stx-producing E. coli (e.g., E. coli O121:H19, E. coli O145, etc) that can also cause hemorrhagic colitis and post-diarrheal hemolytic uremic syndrome (D+HUS). HUS is a syndrome that is defined by the trilogy of hemolytic anemia (destruction of red blood cells), thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), and acute kidney failure. Stx-producing E. coli organisms have several characteristics that make them so dangerous. They are hardy organisms that can survive several weeks on surfaces such as counter tops, and up to a year in some materials like compost. They have a very low infectious dose meaning that only a relatively small number of bacteria, less than 50, are needed “to set-up housekeeping” in a victim’s intestinal tract and cause infection.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that every year at least 2000 Americans are hospitalized, and about 60 die as a direct result of E. coli infections and its complications. A recent study estimated the annual cost of E. coli O157:H7 illnesses to be $405 million (in 2003 dollars), which included $370 million for premature deaths, $30 million for medical care, and $5 million for lost productivity (Frenzen, Drake, and Angulo, 2005). E. coli O157:H7 was first recognized as a foodborne pathogen in 1982 during an investigation into an outbreak of hemorrhagic colitis (bloody diarrhea) associated with consumption of contaminated hamburgers (Riley, et al., 1983). The following year, Shiga toxin (Stx), produced by the then little-known E. coli O157:H7 was identified as the real culprit. In the ten years following the 1982 outbreak, approximately thirty E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks were recorded in the United States (Griffin & Tauxe, 1991). The actual number that occurred is probably much higher because E. coli O157:H7 infections did not become a reportable disease (required to be reported to public health authorities) until 1987 (Keene et al., 1991 p. 60, 73). As a result, only the most geographically concentrated outbreaks would have garnered enough attention to prompt further investigation (Keene et al., 1991 p. 583). It is important to note that only about 10% of infections occur in outbreaks, the rest are sporadic. The CDC has estimated that 85% of E. coli O157:H7 infections are foodborne in origin (Mead, et al., 1999). In fact, consumption of any food or beverage that becomes contaminated by animal (especially cattle) manure can result in contracting the disease. Foods that have been sources of contamination include ground beef, venison, sausages, dried (non-cooked) salami, unpasteurized milk and cheese, unpasteurized apple juice and cider (Cody, et al., 1999), orange juice, alfalfa and radish sprouts (Breuer, et al., 2001), lettuce, spinach, and water (Friedman, et al., 1999).
Marler Clark, food safety advocates and lawyers, provide consumer informational site on E. coli O145 complication - hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS)
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Ongoing outbreak and recall of Romaine Lettuce tainted with E. coli O145
Freshway Foods and the Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday. An a press release, Freshway Foods said the E. coli O145 - tainted Romaine Lettuce was sold to wholesalers, food service outlets, in-store salad bars and delis in Alabama, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin. The affected lettuce has a "best if used by" date of May 12 or earlier. The recall also affects "grab and go" salads sold at Kroger, Giant Eagle, Ingles Markets and Marsh grocery stores. The recall of Romaine Lettuce was prompted after illnesses were reported in Michigan, Ohio and New York - primarily impacting students at University of Michigan, The Ohio State university and Daemen University. The Food and Drug Administration reported the E. coli O145 illnesses included 12 people who have been hospitalized and with Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS).
What is Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome? See, www.about-hus.com.
Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome is a severe, life-threatening complication that occurs in about 10 percent of those infected with E. coli O157:H7 or other Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. HUS was first described in 1955, but was not known to be secondary to E. coli infections until 1982. It is now recognized as the most common cause of acute kidney failure in infants and young children. Adolescents and adults are also susceptible, as are the elderly, who often succumb to the disease.
Ongoing Outbreak Investigation
Given the time of the year, the most likely area for growing Romaine Lettuce is Arizona – likely Yuma. The investigation is likely hampered by the failure of health departments throughout the United States from actually testing ill persons stools for E. coli O145. For a bit(e) of history on lettuce and E. coli, visit www.outbreakdatabase.com.
More Information on E. coli O145
In 2009, Marler Clark Petitioned the USDA to define E. coli O145 and other Shiga toxin-producing E. coli as adulterants. The Petition has a very complete explanation of the dangers of E. coli O145.
Foodborne Illness Outbreak Database Still Being Upgraded
We have continued to upgrade and improve www.outbreakdatabase.com and nearly are ready for launch. We have a few "bugs" to work out and we are going to link to the CDC and CSPI databases too. We would still love any input, advise or criticism.
Marler Clark Creating Searchable Foodborne Illness Outbreak Database
Over at the Des Moines Register, Phil Brasher has written a great piece on Marler Clark's efforts to create a searchable foodborne illness outbreak database.
The nation’s top private food regulators, otherwise known as the Marler Clark law firm out of Seattle, are putting together a database for tracking food-borne illness. That’s something you might think the government would do, but it hasn’t.
Check it out the database at outbreakdatabase.com.
Search on “Iowa” and “E. coli O157:H7,” the potentially fatal pathogen associated with ground beef, and you’ll find three outbreaks that have affected involved Iowa since 2006, including two last year.
Bill Marler, one of the nation’s top plaintiff’s attorneys for victims of food poisoning, is soliciting comments on the project. (I refer to Marler as a “regulator” because of the government’s and industry’s reliance on the tort system to hold companies accountable.)
The data are coming from state and local health departments as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various journals that document outbreaks, including the CDC’s.
Marler on food safety - U.S. should do more against food-borne illness
By Hope Belli Tinney, WSU Today
PULLMAN - Americans don’t tend to take a “buyer beware” approach to food consumption, but perhaps they should.
William D. “Bill” Marler, an expert in food-borne illness and the law, spoke at WSU Pullman Wednesday to say that food-borne illness is far more prevalent than most people realize and the United States should be doing more to confront the problem.
“It’s not easy being an eater in America,” Marler said. “There’s a lot of stuff out there that can kill you.”
'Chasing the Ambulance Away'
Marler, a WSU alumnus and former regent, delivered a talk titled, “Chasing the Ambulance Away: Reshaping the Role of the Personal Injury Lawyer in Society and the Law,” as part of the WSU Common Reading lecture series that centers around this year’s book selection, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” by Michael Pollan.
In some people’s mind, personal injury lawyers are “ambulance-chasing, bottom-sucking” parasites, Marler said, and he doesn’t disagree.
“I’ll tell you right now, that’s me,” he said. “That’s who I am.” But, he said, “There is a place in society for a parasite like me.”
Make it painful
Marler’s Seattle firm, Marler Clark, has earned more than $500 million for victims of food-borne illness caused by organisms such as E. coli, salmonella and listeria. His goal is to make the settlements so painful that businesses will guard food safety as if their lives depend on it because, in fact, our lives do depend on it.
According to statistics from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, about 76 million people are sickened by a food-borne illness each year, hundreds of thousands of people are hospitalized and about 5,000 die. A report last week, funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, estimated that those illnesses cost the United States $152 billion annually in health care and other losses.
Memory lane of food poisoning
During Marler’s 90-minute presentation he took the audience down a memory lane of significant food-borne illness cases, from tainted hamburger at Jack-in-the-Box in 1993, through the Odwalla apple juice poisoning in 1996, to tainted spinach in the Salinas Valley in 2006, to contaminated peanut butter at a ConAgra plant in 2007.
Marler said he sometimes feels like the boy who sticks his finger in the dike to hold back the water, but as soon as he does, another leak spouts.
“If you don’t like lawyers, one of the things to do is to fix the food system,” he said.
Europe does better job
The European Union does a much better job of protecting its food system, he said, mostly through increased regulation and rigorous enforcement on the front end and criminal prosecution on the back end.
In the United States, he said, there are regulations on the books, but often there is insufficient funding to monitor or enforce food safety laws. In the nearly two decades that he has been involved in these issues, he said, only a handful of people in the United States have been fined and only two people have been jailed.
Execution
In China, by contrast, two men were executed in 2009 for their role in a melamine-tainted milk scandal that killed six and sickened 300,000.
Marler’s list of recommendations for improving food safety include:
- increased surveillance
- more cooperation among government agencies
- better training of food handlers
- stiffer licensing requirements
- more food inspections
- reform so agencies are more proactive
- heavier legal consequences
- use of technology to make food traceable from field to fork
- funding and promotion of food safety research
- tax breaks to companies that have low profit margins
- improvement of consumer understanding
“I think what I do is honorable,” Marler said. "It’s right, but it’s not complete.” The government and the consumer have to do their parts as well, he said.
Food Safety News IPhone Application Approved by Apple - Should be at App Store in 24 Hours
Food Safety News coming to an Iphone Application in 24 hours.
WSU Common Reading Hosts Foodborne Illness Attorney William D. Marler for Presentation March 10
PULLMAN, Wash.—Washington State University alumnus William D. “Bill” Marler will be in Pullman to present “Chasing the Ambulance Away: Reshaping the Role of the Personal Injury Lawyer in Society and the Law,” at 7 p.m. March 10 in room 203 of the Smith Center for Undergraduate Education (CUE). The presentation is open to the public at no charge. A brief reception will follow.
Marler and his Seattle law firm, Marler Clark, are nationally known for earning $500 million for victims of foodborne illness caused by organisms such as E. coli, salmonella and listeria. He consults with companies that want to avoid bacterial contamination, blogs about food-safety issues and has passionately urged members of Congress to adopt tougher legislation on that topic.
Marler’s visit is in conjunction with the WSU Common Reading Program of the University College. He last visited campus in January to hear Michael Pollan, author of this year’s freshman common reading book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Pollan’s visit to campus and his lecture were made possible by a gift to the Common Reading Program by Marler.
“We have the opportunity to look at the common reading book’s topic—‘food’—from another perspective thanks to Bill Marler, a WSU and an Honors College alumnus,” said Mary F. Wack, dean of the University College and vice provost for undergraduate education.
“Food safety is very big news today, and Bill is one of its most well-known and successful proponents in our nation.”
In the early 1990s, Marler earned a national reputation when he successfully represented people sickened by E. coli in hamburger. Three years later, he represented victims sickened by juice. Over the years, he represented people made ill by contaminated spinach, cookie dough, and meats.
Marler graduated from WSU in 1982 and from Seattle University School of Law in 1987. While at WSU, he was the youngest person and the first student elected to serve on the Pullman City Council. In 1998, Gov. Gary Locke appointed Marler to the WSU Board of Regents. He has published numerous journal articles, is listed in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers, and serves on community service boards.
Contact: Beverly Makhani, Communications Director, WSU University College/Common Reading Program, 509-335-6679, makhani@wsu.edu; Mary Wack, Dean, WSU University College, and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, 509-335-8044, mwack@wsu.edu
Bioniche E. coli O157:H7 Vaccine Recognized In Prestigious Scientific Journal
Bioniche Life Sciences Inc. (TSX: BNC), a research-based, technology-driven Canadian biopharmaceutical company, announced that Econiche(TM), the world's first vaccine developed to reduce the shedding by cattle of Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157, has been cited in the February, 2010 issue of Scientific American (Vol. 302, # 2).
The article, "The Art of Bacterial Warfare", was written by Dr. Brett Finlay, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories, the biochemistry and molecular biology department, and the microbiology and immunology department at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Finlay's research led to the development of Econiche.
In his article, Dr. Finlay discusses the evolution of research into disease-causing bacteria and the discovery that bacteria have become increasingly adept at penetrating organs and tissues to survive and thrive in the human body. Dr. Finlay describes the E. coli O157 bacterium as having "perhaps the most remarkable method of locking itself onto a host cell", making its own receptor in the host's intestinal cells, anchoring it and allowing the bacterial toxins to enter the body and cause illness. Dr. Finlay further describes how E. coli O157 resides harmlessly in domestic cattle, but is released in their fecal matter where it can spread to human food and water supplies.
Most strains of E. coli are harmless but some, like O157, can cause severe illness and even be fatal when ingested by humans from contaminated meat, vegetables or water. Vaccination of cattle with Econiche can help reduce the risk of food and waterborne contamination with E. coli O157. The vaccine is fully licensed in Canada and is awaiting conditional licensing in the U.S.
An estimated 100,000 cases of human infection with the E. coli O157 organism are reported each year in North America. Two to seven per cent of those people develop haemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a disease characterized by kidney failure. Five percent of HUS patients die, many of them children and senior citizens, whose kidneys are more sensitive to damage.
Marler Clark Files First E. coli Lawsuit Against National Steak & Poultry
From Cattlenetworks - Chuck Jolley:
Let me introduce you to my friend Bill Marler. A nice enough guy for a lawyer, he watches the meat industry from way out there in Seattle, patrolling the perimeter of the business like an old-fashioned foot ball coach. You’ll get grudging pats on the back when you do things right and a two-by-four upside your head when you screw up. Does anybody remember Woody Hayes grabbing a slacker of a player by the throat and pointing out the error of his ways?
Here is his latest blow to the meat industry’s head:
“SALT LAKE CITY, UT (January 21, 2010) The first E. coli lawsuit against National Steak and Poultry (NSP), an Oklahoma meat manufacturing facility, was filed today in the Third Judicial District Court in Salt Lake City. The civil suit was filed by Marler Clark and by Utah attorneys Jared Faerber and Dustin Lance on behalf of a child sickened in the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to NSP beef products. The lawsuit also names as yet unidentified “John Doe” companies that may have been involved in distributing the tainted meat products.”
“According to the lawsuit, 14-year-old Utah resident “CD” was infected with E. coli O157:H7 in October 2009. Within days of consuming contaminated meat, he began to experience severe E. coli symptoms including agonizing abdominal cramps and diarrhea that soon turned bloody. When his symptoms worsened, his parents rushed him to the ER at Columbia Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful, Utah where he was diagnosed with gastrointestinal bleeding; his parents were ultimately directed to take him to Primary Children’s Medical Center due to his deteriorating condition. CD remained hospitalized at Primary Children’s Medical Center in Ogden, Utah from November 2 through 4, 2009. He was diagnosed with infectious colitis, and a stool specimen that he submitted during his hospitalization soon tested positive for E. coli O157:H7. CD’s parents learned from officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the strain of E. coli O157:H7 that had infected their son matched the outbreak strain linked to the defendant National Steak Processor’s beef products.”
Now friend Bill has a certain reputation. More often than not, he’ll walk into a room with the defendants and their team of highly paid, skilled lawyers and, with his avuncular smile and warm handshake, walk out an hour or so later with an extremely large settlement. No need to waste time in court. The company in question merely hands over a check (Fill in the blank spots, Mr. Marler, sir) and counts themselves lucky that they escaped with their corporate lives. The only thing the defendants ask is that the size of the settlement not be disclosed but I can promise you it’s in the breathless 7 figure range.
The agonizing thing is --- he doesn’t want to do this. He has plenty of money and a sterling reputation in his line of work. He lives very comfortably, thank you very much. But when it comes to getting after companies that are responsible for outbreaks of food borne illnesses, it’s like that old line in the Godfather:
Yeah, that’s it. Every time he thinks he’s out of the business, the meat industry keeps pulling him back in.
So let me repeat myself. If you’re in the meat business, do a serious cost/benefit analysis. What’s worse, doubling the money you’re spending for food safety or sitting across the conference table from Bill Marler?
Just in case you need more background on the man, here is a peek at his resume: He began litigating foodborne illness cases in 1993, when he successfully represented Brianne Kiner, the most seriously injured survivor of the Jack in the Box E. coli O157:H7 outbreak. Over the years Marler Clark (his law firms) has become the leader in representing victims of foodborne illness and has gone against companies that include Odwalla, Chili’s, ConAgra, Dole, KFC, Sizzler, Golden Corral, and Wendy’s. Under the auspices of the non-profit Outbreak, Inc, Mr. Marler spends much of his time speaking about food safety and has testified before Congress as well as State Legislatures. He is a frequent author of articles related to foodborne illness in food safety journals and magazines as well as on Food Safety News, www.foodsafetynews.com and his personal blog, www.marlerblog.com.
Bottom line: Pay your food scientists now or pay Bill Marler later, and trust me, he’s a hell of a lot more expensive.
U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Issues Second Beef Recall of 2010: Take It Seriously!
Food Safety Advocate and Attorney Bill Marler encourages everyone—especially parents—to never use ANY food that’s been recalled
The year may be young but beef recalls because of potential E. coli O157:H7 contamination are in full swing. In light of the two recalls already issued in 2010, food safety advocate and attorney Bill Marler has issued a strong warning to consumers—throw away or return that meat!
“There’s a lot of misinformation about tainted meat and E. coli—many seem to believe that proper cooking practices will make it safe to eat. This is simply not the case. Safe preparation is always necessary, but tainted meat can make you sick no matter how it’s cooked,” said Marler.
The USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued a recall on 864,000 pounds of beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. The meat was packaged by Montebello, Calif.-based Huntington Meat Packing and sold to consumers under the Huntington, Imperial Meat, and El Rancho brands. Some of the meat in question was sold almost two years ago. This is the second beef recall of 2010—the first came on January 11 and was initiated by the Massachusetts Department of Health over 2,500 pounds of beef from Adams Farm Slaughterhouse, LLC.
So what do you do if you’re worried or think you may have beef covered under this recall? Marler provides these suggestions:
1. Go to http://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls/Open_Federal_Cases/index.asp for the latest in food recalls issued by the USDA.
2. Check any meat or food products you have for the information listed in recalls including brand names, packaging stamps, and distribution dates.
3. If you find you’re in possession of meat or a food product that’s apart of a recall, throw away or return the product immediately. You do not need your receipt to return food products under a recall.
Most importantly, Marler stresses, NEVER try to use the meat in question. Just because no one has gotten sick yet that doesn’t mean the product is safe.
“Once a recall has been issued that means there’s definite cause for concern and no manner of safe cooking practices will make the product edible,” says Marler. “While everyone should take this recall seriously, parents should take special note as E. coli tends to affect children and the elderly in greater severity and numbers.”
Marler also takes issue with when this most recent—and several others like it—have been issued: over a holiday weekend when not nearly as many people are paying attention to news reports. This is dangerous because fewer people are made aware that a recall has been issued, which could potentially put individuals and families at unnecessary risk.
As Marler wrote on his blog, www.marlerblog.com, on Tuesday morning: “I need to hand it to the FSIS, I am beginning to lose track how often its recall notices go out on either a Friday night or on a holiday. They sure have learned to get bad news out when no one is watching.”
ABOUT BILL MARLER
Bill Marler is an accomplished food safety advocate and attorney at Marler Clark. He began litigating foodborne illness cases in 1993, when he successfully represented Brianne Kiner, the most seriously injured survivor of the Jack in the Box E. coli O157:H7 outbreak. Over the years, Bill and his firm, Marler Clark, has become the leader in representing victims of foodborne illness and has gone against companies that include Odwalla, Chili’s ConAgra, Dole, KFC, Sizzler, Golden Corral, and Wendy’s.
Under the auspices of the non-profit Outbreak, Inc. (www.outbreakinc.com), Bill spends much of his time traveling to address food industry groups, fair associations, and public health groups about foodborne illness, related litigation, and surrounding issues. He has testified before Congress as well as State Legislatures. He is also a frequent author of articles related to foodborne illness in food safety journals and magazines as well as on his personal blog, www.marlerblog.com. Bill also recently founded Food Safety News (www.foodsafetynews.com) as a one-stop resource for global food safety news and information.
17 Years of Litigating Food Food Poisoning Cases - Profile Bill Marler
By Maureen O'Hagan - Seattle Times staff reporter - "Food-safety lawyer's wish: Put me out of business"
If there's an outbreak of food-borne illness anywhere in the country, chances are William Marler will be filing lawsuits. Marler says he and his law firm have pried $500 million in settlements out of companies that have sickened customers.
You might say that E. coli has been very, very good to William Marler.
Ditto for salmonella, listeria, hepatitis and the like. If there's an outbreak of food-borne illness anywhere in the country — spinach, cookie dough, hamburgers, you name it — chances are Marler will be filing lawsuits.
"I love my job," he said from his Seattle law office. "I represent poisoned little children against giant corporations."
Talk about a winning formula. Marler, 52, says he and his firm, Marler Clark, have pried $500 million in settlements out of companies that have sickened customers. Depending on your point of view, making millions off sick people may be a good thing or it may be a bad thing. But right now, food safety is unequivocally a big thing.
In March, President Obama said the nation's lax food-safety policies have created a "hazard to public health." He appointed a high-level policy group to "upgrade our food-safety laws for the 21st century." Then a major report warned it would be way too easy for terrorists to poison the food supply.
In the midst of all of this, 80 people were infected with the bacteria E. coli after eating Nestle cookie dough.
This year, food-safety legislation was introduced in Congress — legislation that, for the first time in years, seems to have a chance of passing.
Now, Marler's not only trying to wring money out of food companies, he's trying to change the way our food is safeguarded in the first place. He's been lobbying his political buddies, arranging for clients to testify in Congress, and even sending them to reporters at The Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which put his clients' E. coli ordeals on the front pages.
"I'm impatient," he said. "For God sakes, get the bill out of the Senate."
And then, in early fall, he hit upon an idea: T-shirts.
"Pass meaningful food safety legislation before Thanksgiving," the drab gray shirts, sent to every U.S. senator, say.
"Put a trial lawyer out of business."
His smiling face, with a line through it, is emblazoned on the front.
It's funny. And it's serious.
1993 was start
Brianne Kiner was Marler's introduction. In 1993, when the 9-year-old Redmond girl was hospitalized with E. coli infection, her kidneys failed. Her pancreas crashed. Her liver stopped working. She suffered seizures and was in a coma for 40 days.
When she came to, she had to relearn to walk. To chew. To use the bathroom. Her health problems — and expenses — are lifelong.
All this from eating an undercooked hamburger from Jack in the Box. Three kids died in that outbreak, and another 500 Washington residents were sickened.
Brianne's family hired Marler, who then was with the Keller Rohrback firm, to file suit. He had been out of law school for just five years.
"Being extremely overconfident, I sort of volunteered to do everything and pushed myself to the top," he recalled. "Everything" includes not only legal filings but also lots of news conferences.
Some call him a publicity hound. Marler calls it fighting fire with fire. Jack in the Box had a media strategy, and so did he. He figured, the more public the outbreak was, the more likely Jack in the Box would cave. With the family's blessing, he helped put Brianne's plight on the national news.
The firm was hired by 200 other families to file claims against Jack in the Box, too.
Bingo.
Marler got Brianne a $15.6 million settlement. Settlements for his other Jack clients ran into the millions. (Generally, clients get 65 percent to 75 percent after costs, and the firm gets the rest.)
After Jack in the Box, he went back to being a general-practice plaintiff's lawyer. Then, in 1996, came Odwalla. The all-natural juice company sickened 66 people with its unpasteurized juice. Considering the hubbub around Jack in the Box, victims knew where to turn.
By this point, Marler knew the system to protect us from food-borne illness is full of holes. Regulations are a hodgepodge; oversight authority is scattered between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which covers meat and poultry, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which covers everything else.
Generally, the government deems it the food companies' responsibility to make a safe product. For example, the FDA does not require food processors to test for pathogens; the company can decide whether to do it, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts, which is pushing for tougher regulations.
For meats, the USDA can inspect, but it has limited power to close plants or order change. And while it's illegal, for example, to sell hamburger that tests positive for E. coli 0157, a particularly virulent strain, food processors aren't required to test for it in their finished products.
This untested meat nonetheless gets stamped with a USDA label and sold to consumers. "I think our government is as complicit in the process as the companies are," Marler said.
The scariest part? Just a few cells of E. coli in your food could put you through what Brianne went through.
Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 300,000 Americans are hospitalized and 5,000 die from food-borne illnesses each year. Some 76 million are sickened.
Back during the Odwalla outbreak, however, there wasn't as much awareness of the issue. But after that, Marler had a hunch. In 1998, he recruited his former Jack in the Box legal adversaries, Denis Stearns and Bruce Clark, and started a law firm that specialized in food-borne illnesses — a radical idea at the time.
Today, they have clients all over the country. Media coverage helps, but the lawyers also were early in recognizing the power of the Internet. They not only set up a Web site for the firm, they also created sites with comprehensive medical information on every conceivable food-borne illness — and included links back to Marler Clark.
After all, sitting at the bedside of an ailing loved one tends to focus the mind. What is this illness? And how can I possibly afford the medical care? If you Google E. coli — or listeria, or salmonella or even food-borne illness — you'll find a Marler Clark site in the top 10 hits.
They do not accept every case. The firm first has to pinpoint the cause of the illness — a particular lot of ground beef, an ingredient in a restaurant meal. That process can take months, and like most plaintiff's firms, it bears the costs upfront. If the firm can't make a positive match, it declines the case.
Some say Marler's no trial lawyer. In fact, he's tried just one E. coli case through to a jury verdict. It went in his favor. The vast majority of the firm's cases settle.
"We have a lot of big cases, $7 (million) to $10 million cases," Marler said. "People don't just give you that kind of money unless you have your foot on their throat."
Of course, the law of "strict liability" is on his side. If a customer gets sick, whoever made the tainted food is financially liable, whether or not they were negligent.
This, of course, strikes the food industry as unfair.
"There's plenty of people in the meat industry who, if they looked in the rearview mirror and saw they accidentally ran over Bill Marler, they'd put the car in reverse and make sure," said David Theno, a food-safety expert hired to revamp Jack in the Box after the outbreak.
Theno, it should be noted, considers Marler a friend.
Supporters, detractors
He's been called an "ambulance chaser." A vulture who "thrives on misery."
"Have a bad day, you parasite," someone once wrote to him.
Marler loves it. Recently, a reporter asked him for names of supporters and detractors. As to the former, he joked, "Do you want my mom's phone number?"
And the latter? He eagerly provided a long list of names.
"This guy will really tee off on me," he said of one food-industry insider. And another.
He likes to tell a story about a speech he gave before members of the National Meat Association. "They introduced me," he wrote in a blog post, "and nobody clapped."
"I walked up and stood there for a while without saying anything. And then I said, 'You may now clap.'"
He thinks it's hysterical.
The task of finding real-live Marler haters, however, proved difficult. Some likely candidates, like people in the spinach industry, who he's sued, declined to comment; others, like Rosemary Mucklow, director emeritus of the National Meat Association, have nice things to say, despite all the lawsuits (and the rank-and-file's failure to clap).
Which brings us back to his oft-repeated plea: Put me out of business. What he really means is he's tired of seeing so many people get horribly sick. He believes a lot of illness could be prevented with stricter food-safety laws, the sort Congress is considering.
Some time ago, he decided that just suing food companies wasn't enough. He travels across the country, and even the world, to speak about food safety to those who are in a position to do something about it — the farmers, processors and officials in charge of it all.
He tells them about his clients: the children on ventilators; the once-vibrant men on dialysis; the moms who've lost their intestines to the ravages of food-borne pathogens. And he lets them know how a jury might view things.
Marler calls it the "You shouldn't poison people" speech. He's made it before several industry groups, including the spinach growers, whom he sued after an E. coli outbreak in 2006. (He does not get paid for these kinds of talks.)
Even though the tainted greens were traced to just four fields in California, spinach sales plummeted.
"They were looking for scapegoats," recalled Brad Sullivan, an attorney who represents the industry.
Marler gave his talk, and withstood pointed questions. In the end, Sullivan recalls, farmers stood in line to shake his hand.
"Through the force of his personality, and being so knowledgeable ... he made a lot of people think," he said.
Legislation on the move
Periodically, in the wake of an outbreak, Congress considers food-safety legislation.
"They call me up and ask me if I have any victims who will testify," Marler said. "Little kids, dead people's families. It's theater.
"In 2006, it was spinach. (Lawmakers) shook a bag of spinach, belittled the corporate leaders but nothing happened."
Same thing with the peanut-butter outbreak in 2008.
But this year, things seem different. Obama is interested. And consumers are become increasingly aware of food-safety problems. The House passed one bill, and another bill was passed out of a Senate committee last week. Meanwhile, Marler is working on another angle. He wants to become the undersecretary of Agriculture for food safety, a job for which he's applied, and for which former Gov. Gary Locke, now Obama's commerce secretary, floated Marler's name.
"My wife has said, 'I don't think you have the patience for it,' " Marler said. "And maybe that's ultimately true. But when you know you're right ... ."
Effectiveness of liquid soap and hand sanitizer against Norwalk (Norovirus) virus on contaminated hands
Applied and Environmental MicrobiologyDisinfection is an essential measure for interrupting human norovirus (HuNoV) transmission, but it is difficult to evaluate the efficacy of disinfectants due to the absence of a practicable cell culture system for these viruses. The purpose of this study was to screen sodium hypochlorite and ethanol for efficacy against Norwalk virus (NV) and expand the studies to evaluate the efficacy of antibacterial liquid soap and alcohol-based hand sanitizer for the inactivation of NV on human fingerpads. Samples were tested by RT-qPCR both with and without a prior RNase treatment. In suspension assay, sodium hypochlorite concentrations ≥160 ppm effectively eliminated RT-qPCR detection signal, while ethanol, regardless of concentration, was relatively ineffective, giving at most a 0.5 log10 reduction in genomic copies of NV cDNA. Using the ASTM standard fingerpad method and a modification thereof (with rubbing), we observed the greatest reduction in genomic copies of NV cDNA with the antibacterial liquid soap treatment (0.67-1.20 log10 reduction) and water rinse only (0.58-1.38 log10 reduction). The alcohol-based hand sanitizer was relatively ineffective, reducing the genomic copies of NV cDNA by only 0.14-0.34 log10 compared to baseline. Although the concentrations of genomic copies of NV cDNA were consistently lower on fingerpad eluates pre-treated with RNase compared to those without prior RNase treatment, these differences were not statistically significant. Despite the promise of alcohol-based sanitizers for the control of pathogen transmission, they may be relatively ineffective against the HuNoV, reinforcing the need to develop and evaluate new products against this important group of viruses.
Two Things That Keep The Meat Industry Awake At Night - Food Safety & Bill Marler
Chuck Jolley is a free lance writer, based in Kansas City, who covers a wide range of ag industry topics for Cattlenetwork.com and Agnetwork.com.
About this food safety issue, I know you’ve read about it. It’s been in all the papers, the New York Times, for instance. And magazine-after-magazine has jumped on this fast-moving band wagon with breathless exposes on what’s wrong with our inspection system. Want to see my now cancelled Time issue dated August 21 - the one where Bryan Walsh showed everyone that the publication had abandoned its long-time news coverage and quietly turned to opinion pieces, instead? He wrote an interesting piece of fiction called “Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food”.
He blamed modern agricultural practices for almost every ill – real or imagined - that’s befallen America. If we could only adopt practices that would greatly increase the price of food, people wouldn’t eat so much of it and we wouldn’t be a nation populated by the unfit and overweight.
If we would only buy locally, the world’s carbon foot print would shrink drastically, forestalling or even reversing global warming. Of course Alaskans would be reduced to eating snow in the winter. I have no idea what people in the Dakotas would eat. Maybe the folks in Wisconsin could subsist on lutefisk during the colder months.
If we would only turn our bovines loose to fend for themselves, the reduction in the enormous amount of gasses emitted by these beasts (that’s cow farts for the uninitiated) would also help mitigate global warming. The assumption is natural selection (that’s turning cows into wolf food for the uninitiated) would greatly reduce their numbers.
Doing the math, could buying locally and ending bovine-based agriculture actually contribute to global cooling and create an advancing ice sheet that would soon wipe out Detroit and end another plague on our population – massive urban unemployment? I’ll ask Walsh about that possibility one of these days.
If we would just stop fast, efficient food production and leave it to small, local processors, food safety would blossom and our people could eat all they wanted, as long as they could afford it, without fear of food borne illnesses caused by such nasty microbes as E. coli or L. monocytogenes.
Did I mention one of the projects some friends are working on right now is trying to find a way to get the increasingly sophisticated food safety testing procedures and complicated federal, state and local rules and regulations into the hands of small- to medium-sized processors? It’s what keeps them up late at night.
And they admit the prospect of keeping the uncountable number of very small processors up-to-date is a daunting prospect that they just can’t get their arms around. Going from a few thousand to tens of thousands of processors and keeping them all inspected and in the loop on all the amazingly complicated new procedures sounds like one of those “It ain’t ever gonna happen” exercises in futility.
Still, there’s a man out there that’s determined to lead us to that promised land of absolute food safety. He thinks too many people at the higher reaches of food processing companies see food safety as a just another cost of doing business. They seem to be saying, “It must be done, of course, but let’s review the investment and make a financial decision on where we draw the line.”
Bill Marler, the well-know Seattle lawyer, is the man who wants to move that line considerably up to the high side of the corporate balance sheet. “If I can make the cost of a recall higher than it is now through the courts…”
He didn’t finish that comment; he’ll let those that might see him in a court of law while hoping their lawyer can best him in hand-to-hand combat fill in the last few words. Marler, though, is a well-seasoned man on a mission. He’s got 16 years of experience, dating back to 1993’s Jack-in-the-Box outbreak. He’s seen children and old folks die agonizing deaths and the industry claim that we’ve improved our record so that only the tiniest amount of food borne illnesses are actually caused by errors in food processing falls on his annoyed ears.
To a lot of people in this business Marler equals pariah so his appearance at the National Meat Association convention last February caused some controversy. His speech infuriated some people and Executive Director Emeritus Rosemary Mucklow was cornered by a few processors that thought his presence was inappropriate.
Mucklow didn’t invite him without some thought, though, and when I asked her about it, she said, “In order for us to see ourselves as others see us, it is important that we not merely accept adulations, but also criticism. I consider Bill Marler a friend! We took heat for having him at the convention, but we have much to learn from him, and we won’t learn if we put him in our deep freezer. I believe he is sincere when he tells our industry to put him out of business – and we should get as much input from him as we can to help us accomplish this goal!
The question was posed to her after another appearance that surprised people. He attended the Meat Industry Hall of Fame dinner with the editors of his new online pub, Food Safety News, and a handful of lawyers. He had purchased a table and seemed to enjoy the opportunity to meet some of the heavy hitters in the modern era of the meat industry - everyone from Cactus Feeders’ Paul Engler to Hormel’s Dick Knowlton.
Marler had chaired the ACI Foodborne Illness Litigation Conference in Chicago and the lawyers he brought to the Hall of Fame dinner were people who attended that conference and represent some of the largest food processing companies in the U.S.
“I was there because the Hall of Fame was honoring people I respect, people like Dell Allen and Russ Cross who have always tried to do the right thing. We might have had some disagreements but I’ve agreed with them more than 95% of the time,” said Marler. “Lots of people who received those awards spend a lot of time like I do thinking about food safety. I wanted to support that.”
“I understand the vast majority of companies are trying to produce a high quality product with all kinds of things flying around. I know it’s an ongoing ‘pain’ for them but it’s also a problem for the victims of food borne illness. People like Stephanie, the young dancer portrayed in the New York Times story, will live with the effects of E. coli for the rest of their lives.”
Bottom line #1: Yeah, we’ve come a long way with food safety and taking those last few steps will be very expensive and complicated but there is a groundswell of demand that’s absolutely insisting that the job be finished. To those executives that are trying to parse it out on their balance sheets, ignoring it is fiscal suicide.
Bottom line #2: A decade ago, this phrase struck fear into the hearts of CEO’s everywhere, “Hello, I’m Morley Safer with 60 Minutes and I’d like to ask you a few questions.” Today, the phrase is, “Hello, I’m Bill Marler and I’d like to ask you a few questions on behalf of my client.”
WHO - Millions Die Needlessdly from Eating Food
Millions of people die every year from both bugs and toxins that they consume, says a new World Health Organization survey that outlines how food-borne diseases are far worse than the U.N. agency thought.
The study cites hazardous food causes about 2 million deaths annually in Southeast Asia and Africa, which is three times the amount that WHO had originally estimated.
"It is a picture that we have never had before," WHO Food Safety Director Jorgen Schlundt told Reuters. "We now have documentation of a significant burden outside the less than five groups, which is major new information."
Ailments connected to unhygienic food and water has been a gigantic hazard to children. However, the Danish veterinarian and microbiologist feels that the risks to adults had been hugely misjudged.
Both the children and the elderly are particularly susceptible to brutal sickness from food- and water-borne pathogens like salmonella, listeria, E. coli, Hepatitis A and cholera.
Food safety experts are now looking to gauge these kinds of illnesses in people in the Arab world, Latin America and Asia. Already, Schlundt said, health officials understand the requirement of facing these kinds of contamination in their business rules and trade principles.
"Literally millions are dying every year and we know that a lot of these could be prevented," Schlundt told Reuters. "There is a realization that instead of doing what we did in the past, in the future we should really focus on where the problems are."
Several of the contaminants that have been in the media in the US, like salmonella and E. coli, run rampant in underdeveloped countries but are not observed as cautiously, Schlundt notes.
Health authorities in these countries have more opportunities to record food safety hazards thanks to tests that can quickly identify illness connected to foods like lettuce, peppers, spinach and beef.
Still, "there are certain pathogens that have increased over the last 20 or 30 years. Some problems clearly have moved and become bigger because of the ways that we produce," he said.
Another important division of the food-borne disease brawl is taking safety measures in the way they arrange foods, and guaranteeing patients and health workers take the illnesses seriously.
"Many of the deaths that we see in developing countries, if they had been treated at the right time, they would not have died," Schlundt said.
E. coli O157:H7 is the source of an estimated 73,000 illnesses, 2,000 hospitalizations, and 60 deaths in the United States every year
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The bacterium was first identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1975, but was not conclusively determined to be a cause of enteric disease until 1982, following outbreaks of foodborne illness that involved several cases of bloody diarrhea. At that time, E. coli O157:H7 was firmly associated with hemorrhagic colitis. The majority of infections are thought to be food-related, although E. coli O157:H7 accounts for less than one percent of all food poisoning cases.
E. coli O157:H7 bacteria are believed to mostly live in the intestines of cattle but have also been found in the intestines of chickens, deer, sheep, goats, and pigs. E. coli O157:H7 does not make the animals that carry it ill; the animals are merely the reservoir for the bacterium.
While a large number of foodborne illness outbreaks associated with E. coli O157:H7 have involved ground beef, such outbreaks have been increasingly associated with fresh produce, such as lettuce and spinach, but outbreaks have also been traced to unpasteurized apple and orange juices, raw milk, alfalfa sprouts, and water. Person-to-person transmission of the bacterium has been documented in homes, hospitals, daycare centers, nursing homes and many other locations.
E. coli O157:H7 infection is characterized by the sudden onset of abdominal pain and severe cramps, followed within 24 hours by diarrhea. As the disease progresses, the diarrhea becomes watery and then may become grossly bloody – bloody to the naked eye. Vomiting, and rarely fever, can also be symptoms. The incubation period for the illness (the period from ingestion of the bacterium to the start of symptoms) is typically three to nine days, although slightly shorter and longer periods are not that unusual. An incubation period of less than 24 hours would be unusual, however. In most infected individuals, the intestinal illness lasts about a week and resolves without any long-term problems.
Although most people recover from E. coli O157:H7 infection, about five to ten percent of infected individuals develop hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a severe, life-threatening complication of E. coli O157:H7 bacterial infection. HUS develops when E. coli’s toxins enter the circulation by binding to special receptors. During HUS, red blood cells are destroyed and cellular debris accumulates within the blood vessels while the body’s clot-breaking mechanisms are disrupted, causing blockage of the terminal arterioles and capillaries (microcirculation) of most of the major body organs, commonly the heart, brain, kidneys, pancreas and adrenals.
E. coli O157:H7 is responsible for over 90 percent of the cases of HUS that develop in North America. Some organs appear more susceptible than others to the damage caused by these toxins. These organs include the kidney, pancreas, and brain.
Some patients suffering from E. coli and HUS are diagnosed with Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (TTP), a clinical syndrome defined by the presence of thrombocytopenia (low blood platelet counts) and microangiopathic hemolytic anemia. It is sometimes called “Adult HUS”.
Contact your health care provider if you believe you have become ill with an E. coli infection.
Infection with E. coli O157:H7 is usually confirmed by detecting the bacterium in the stool of an infected individual through laboratory testing.
Antibiotics do not improve the illness, and some medical researchers believe that medications can increase the risk of complications. Therefore, apart from good supportive care, such as close attention to hydration and nutrition, there is no specific therapy for the treatment of E. coli O157:H7 infection. The recent finding that a toxin produced by E. coli O157:H7 initially greatly speeds up blood coagulation may lead to medical therapies in the future that could forestall the most serious consequences.
Intervention improves employees' food safety compliance rates
Authors: Pilling, Valerie K., Brannon, Laura A., Shanklin, Carol W., Roberts, Kevin R., Barrett, Betsy B., Howells, Amber D.
Publication Date: 2009; Journal: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management; Volume: 21, Issue: 4, Starting Page: 459, Ending Page: 478
Abstract: Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to evaluate the relative effectiveness of four-hour ServSafe® food safety training, a theory-based intervention targeting food service employees' perceived barriers to implementing food safety practices, and a combination of the two treatments. Dependent measures include behavioral compliance with and perceptions of control over performing hand washing, use of thermometers, and handling of work surfaces. Design/methodology/approach – Four groups are compared: employees receiving only ServSafe® training, intervention alone, training and intervention, and no treatment. Employees complete a questionnaire assessing perceived barriers to practicing the targeted behaviors. Then, employees are observed in the production area for behavioral compliance. Findings – Training or intervention alone is better than no treatment, but the training/intervention combination is most effective at improving employees' compliance with and perceptions of control over performing the behaviors. Research limitations/implications – Research is limited to restaurant employees in three states within the USA, in only 31 of the 1,298 restaurants originally contacted. Future research should identify barriers of other types of food service employees and evaluate the effectiveness of these and other intervention strategies. Practical implications – ServSafe® training can be enhanced with a simple intervention targeting food service employees' perceived barriers to food safety. Providing knowledge and addressing barriers are both important steps to improving food safety in restaurants. Originality/value – No previous research has used the theory of planned behavior to develop an intervention targeting food service employees' perceived barriers to implementing food safety practices. Research also has not attempted to improve the effectiveness of ServSafe® food safety training by adding an intervention.
Marler Explains New News Site - Food Safety News
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Q & A with Bill Marler, managing partner of Marler Clark LLP:
Q: What is Food Safety News?
A: Food Safety News (FSN) is a daily online newspaper dedicated to covering food safety news--all the news that's fit to eat! FSN writers will be reporting on everything from foodborne illness outbreaks to food politics to international food safety policy. We have bureaus in Seattle, Denver, and Washington, DC and have invited contributors from government, industry, academia, and consumer groups to share their viewpoints on food safety-related issues. It's a one-stop shop for all things food safety.
Q: Why are you creating an online newspaper dedicated to food safety?
A: Though the top food safety agencies disseminate food recall and outbreak information, and state, local, and regional health departments make an effort to inform their constituents, there is no up-to-date one-stop place for food safety information. I've also been disappointed to see reporters on the food, health, and product safety beats lose their jobs to the fall of print journalism and the rise of consolidated media. I think food safety is an important beat to cover, especially as food policy issues begin to take center stage in our national discourse. FSN can offer a forum for discussion on these issues for consumers, industry leaders, and public health officials alike.
Q: Will Food Safety News be balanced in its coverage of food safety issues?
A: Yes, our FSN team is dedicated to ensuring we have balanced reporting. Our reporters will be reaching out to a variety of stakeholders and experts as they report the daily food safety news. We have also invited a wide variety of experts and food safety leaders to contribute to the site.
Q: What do you hope readers will take away from Food Safety News?
A: Whether you're a parent or a public health official, food safety is a pertinent issue. We hope readers will get their fill of food safety-related news from FSN on a daily basis. We aim to be the go-to place for anyone looking for information on the issues of the day, whether they pertain to foodborne illness outbreaks, recalled products, or food politics. FSN will have something for everyone. When there is something going on in the food supply, FSN will be serving up the top news.
Welcome to Food Safety News - Marler Clark presents Food Safety News as a daily Web-based newspaper
Here we have created one place that pulls it all together for the food safety community and fills a void in our food safety system. It is about using the Web to put as much available food safety information in one place as is possible. We provide timely reporting on food safety issues with contributed articles from food safety leaders and feeds from government, food industry, and other food safety authorities.
As both print and broadcast media face consolidation, we have been disappointed to see good reporters on the food, health, and safety beats lose their jobs to early retirement or reductions in force. Although excellent food safety reporting continues across the country, more reporting and commentary is needed. We are confident that food safety community leaders will contribute to the site and that a strong and growing audience of Internet users interested in food safety will utilize all of the information we have presented here.
First Responders In Foodborne Disease Outbreaks Now Have Common Guidelines To Work With
The last time anybody counted, there were 2,864 local health departments operating in every state except Rhode Island. Some are units of state governments, cities and counties operate many, and others are a state-local hybrid.
To think that the so-called “first responders” on the frontlines of food-borne illness outbreaks would ever be on the “same page” might be expecting too much.
"Guidelines for Foodborne Disease Outbreak Response", a 200-page report by seven professional organizations and three federal agencies, are designed to achieve just that.
It will not immediately replace local procedure manuals for those responding to outbreaks, but it will serve as a reference guide and best practices document.
“It is our hope that this document will be useful to investigators at all levels in improving outbreak investigations and serve as a platform for developing local and agency-specific policies and additional tools to support these critical public health activities, said Tennessee State Epidemiologist Dr. Tim Jones.
Jones is co-chair of the umbrella group that wrote the Guidelines, The Council to Improve Foodborne Outbreak Response (CIFOR). The Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists and the National Association of County and City Health Officers lead the group.
“The main thing is this provides state and local departments with the best practices,” said Scott E. Holmes of Nebraska’s Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department. He said currently there are no standard methods for conducting an investigation into a food-borne illness outbreak.
The Association of Food and Drug Officials (AFDO), the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), the National Environmental Health Association (NEHA), the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers on Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are the other members of CIFOR.
The document is available online in this PDF file.
Foodborne illness in the United States causes 76 million cases of illnesses, over 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths annually, according to CDC. Hospitalizations due to foodborne illnesses are estimated to cost over $3 billion and lost productivity is estimated to cost between $20 billion and $40 billion each year.
Russia Bans Tyson Pork Over E. coli Concerns
The Des Moines Register is reporting that Russia has banned the import of pork from two plants. According to the report, "Russian meat plant oversight group Rossel-khoznadzor said Thursday that E. coli bacteria was found in some meat from the plants." The implicated plants are located in Waterloo, Iowa, and Columbus Junction, Iowa.
For its part, Tyson is touting the safety of its products, but did not appear to issue a clear denial of the presence of bacteria in the products. A company spokesperson said. "We have very few details about the Russian plant de-listings. We're confident about the safety of our pork products."
Tyson then went on to point out that the Tyson plants are federally inspected. Companies are quick to rely on federal inspections when it comes to giving the impression that their food is safe. Meanwhile, however, idustry groups are hard at work trying to water down and to avoid paying for increases in those same inspections.
New Obama Policy Allows States to Be Tougher on Food Safety
During the Bush administration, and its do-anything-help-big-business approach, agencies were required to insert "preemption" language into all regulations, rules, and policies that the agencies promulgated. This was intended as an attempt to "protect" corporations from state laws and regulations that had the effect of imposing stricter requirements, especially with regard to product safety. One big "win" for this approach was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Reigel v. Medtronic, which held that people injured by a medical device "pre-approved" by the FDA could not file a lawsuit claiming that the device was defective as a matter of state law. A not so successful attempt to use preemption for food cases was that tried by the Excel Corporation in litigation arising from an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to a Milwaukee-area Sizzler restaurant. In those cases, Excel argued that its admittedly contamianted meat was neither defective nor unsafe because USDA policy at the time only prohibited this deadly pathogen from being in ground beef. (For an op-ed piece I wrote about this USDA policy, see Who does the USDA Really Protect, which can be found here: www.marlerblog.com/2008/08/articles/lawyer-oped/who-does-the-usda-really-protect-when-it-comes-to-deadly-e-coli/)
But now most of the arguments in favor of preempting state law in favor of "uniform" federal regulations are going to be undercut by a just-issued Executive Order that declares a new (or renewed) era of states rights. The introductory paragraph of the Order is telling and compelling:
From our Nation's founding, the American constitutional order has been a Federal system, ensuring a strong role for both the national Government and the States. The Federal Government's role in promoting the general welfare and guarding individual liberties is critical, but State law and national law often operate concurrently to provide independent safeguards for the public. Throughout our history, State and local governments have frequently protected health, safety, and the environment more aggressively than has the national Government.
Not only does this Order announce a new direction, it requires the heads of all federal agencies to "review regulations issued within the past 10 years that contain statements in regulatory preambles or codified provisions intended by the department or agency to preempt State law," and to remove them. So once more the role of the state in protecting its citizens from unsafe food and other products is restored to its rightful place. More importantly, the next time that a big food company argues that the USDA said it was okay to poison people, it will likely get laughed out of court. Or at least we can hope so.
To read the full text of the Executive Order, please click on the Continue Reading link.
Continue Reading...FDA Takes Step One: Admits It Has A Problem
In a bit of news that is less surprising than it should be, the AP today reports that the FDA has for the last several years failed to perform a large percentage of required audits for inspections being conducted (under contract) by the States. According to today's report (based on documents recently released to Congress:
The Food and Drug Administration conducted only about half the state food safety audits it promised in the two years before the recent peanut salmonella outbreak, according to new documents the agency sent to Congress.
The documents show the agency did not do any of the required audits of state-run food inspections in five states during those states' budget years spanning 2007 and 2008. And the FDA was unable to say whether audits were conducted at all in 11 additional states during that time, including Georgia and Texas, where salmonella was found in two peanut plants during a wide-ranging peanut recall earlier this year.
Only 14 states saw 100 percent of the audits completed.
As you will recall, the failure of state-performed inspections was a key contribution the recent nationwide Salmonella outbreak linked to contaminated peanuts processed by the Peanut Corporation of America. Ditto the Conagra pot pie Salmonella outbreak, and the Peter Pan peanut butter Salmonella outbreak. Double ditto the Veggie Booty Salmonella outrbeak.
But at least the FDA seems to starting its long overdue recovery process, taking the first step by admitting it has a problem. As the AP story reports:
Stephen R. Mason, acting assistant commissioner for legislation at the agency, said the recent salmonella outbreak "has highlighted limitations in our current approach and has prompted internal discussions on potential enhancements to the audit program."
An agency spokesperson, trying hard to put the best spin on things, goes on to offer the following lame rationalization:
FDA spokeswoman Susan Cruzan says the agency is "evaluating approaches" for improving the audits.
"Although FDA has not been able to fulfill the goal of conducting 100 percent of the audits expected under FDA's internal auditing policy, FDA has audited each state at least once, has good knowledge of the state programs and state inspection personnel, and works to improve the programs as needed," she said.
Having admitted the problem, one can now only hope that the FDA will move on to the crucial next step: Stop Being in Denial.
Before Food Was Fast: Some Looks Back to a Time when Food was Local, Slow, and Safe
In addition to being a lawyer, I am a longtime foodie. So my attention was definitely grabbed this morning when I was listening to NPR and there were segments on two food-related books that I defintely will be reading soon. The first is Watching What We Eat, by Kathleen Collins. It is a history of cooking shows, from its beginning on radio, to its current near-ubiquity on television, like on the Food Network. Here's a link to the author's fun blog. www.watchingwhatweeat.com/
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The other book that merited a segment on NPR is The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food--Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal by Mark Kurlansky, who also brought us a fascinating history of a fish: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. Here is an except from the new book's description on Amazon:
In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, FDR created the Federal Writers’ Project under the New Deal as a make-work program for artists and authors. A number of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren, were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project, called “America Eats,” was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the World War and never completed.
The Food of a Younger Land unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure and brings it to exuberant life. Mark Kurlansky’s brilliant book captures these remarkable stories, and combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery superstore was a thing of the future. Kurlansky serves as a guide to this hearty and poignant look at the country’s roots.
I have not read Kurlansky's latest yet, but I have read a great book that covers the same territory, and does so really well. It's called: America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA - the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food, and its author is Pat Willard. I highly recommend reading it. (Did I mention that I have over 100 cookbooks?)
For an excerpt from Kathleen Collin's book, copied from the NPR website, please click on the Continued Reading link.
Continue Reading...Marler Clark Clients Pitch Food Safety in Washington D.C.
Last June, Brian Grubbs, of Colorado, suffered a Salmonella Saintpaul infection after consuming contaminated jalapeno peppers. His illness was one of more than 1,200 in a nationwide outbreak. The Grubbs purchased the peppers at their local WalMart. Marler Clark subsequently filed suit against WalMart on Mr. Grubbs behalf. WalMart tried unsuccessfully to have the suit thrown out, and has now identified Frontera Produce Ltd, of Texas, as the supplier of the jalapenos in question.
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Brian Grubbs, and his wife Cheryl, were in Washington D.C. on April 29 to call for increased food safety in the U.S. About 25 former foodpoisoning victims met with federal legislators to discuss the problem, and the various pieces of pending food safety legislation.
As reported in the Cortez Journal, Ms. Grubss stated, "'The food we die for shouldn't be killing you, we don't want everyone to find out about foodborne illness like we did. We're trying to educate our community and get (legislation) passed."
FDA Gets 19 Percent Increase In Obama's First Budget
With nearly equal increases on both the food and drug side of its business, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is getting a 19 percent increase in its budget in 2010.
That at least is President Obama’s recommendation to Congress, which controls the federal purse strings.
FDA’s annual budget would rise to $3.2 billion per the President’s request, which is found in his 1,360-page budget submission to Congress for total spending of 3.55 trillion dollars. A total of 1.38 trillion of that spending will be on the federal government’s credit card.
A boost of $259.3 million will to “Protecting America’s Food Supply.” The new money will be focused on preventing both intentional and unintentional food contamination.
FDA will collect an additional $94.4 million in new user fees for registering and inspecting food facilities, issuing food and feed export certificates, and for re-inspections of facilities that do not meet FDA safety standards.
The food supply initiative will be directed at both foreign and domestic sources of ingredients, components, and finished products at “all points in the supply chain, including their eventual use by the American public.”
On the drug side, FDA will get an additional $245.5 million through both increases in some user fees and a larger contribution from taxpayers. Safer medical devices and drug imports will be the gainers.
The FY 2010 request covers the period of Oct. 1, 2009 through Sept. 30, 2010.
Diarrhea and Hollywood
Relax, this is not a first account of Lindsay Lohan, um, "losing control" during another jail stint. It's far less irrelevant than that. What Upton Sinclair started with his brief, though sordid descriptions of Chicago's stockyards in The Jungle, Hollywood has finally chosen to finish with an expose on the often-ugly underbelly of our country's food supply. I don't know how much diarrhea and vomiting we'll see in the soon-to-be-released film titled Food, Inc.--please, not another yellow vomit scene like in Supersize Me--but I do know that the devastating effects of E. coli O157:H7 and hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) will be prominently featured in the story of Kevin Kowalcyk, who died as a young boy as a result of his HUS illness. His mother, Barbara Kowalcyk, is a passionate food-safety advocate, and has been instrumental in bringing this topic to the fore. Who knows, maybe a slap from Hollywood will do to food manufacturers what hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions, in losses from past outbreaks has not???
Food Safety Still Has A Long Way To Go
It looks like Congress is about to throw Detroit a bone by infusing some taxpayer money into the cash-starved Big Three. But the area Congress should really be focusing its attention is on the US's preparedness (or lack thereof) for health emegencies.
Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) released a report yesterday that concludes the US's ability to protects itself from disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and bioterrorism is now at risk from budget cuts and the worsening economic crisis.
With regard to food safety specifically, the report noted that America’s food safety system has not been fundamentally modernized in more than 100 years. Further, twenty states and the District of Columbia do not meet or exceed the national average rate for being able to identify the pathogens, like E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella, that are responsible for foodborne disease outbreaks in their respective states.
Conclusion? SHOW FOOD SAFETY THE MONEY! 
The full report is available here.
10 Tips To Avoid Foodborne Illness At Restaurants
How many times have you gone to a restaurant and ordered the night's special meal? Or gone to the bathroom and noticed it was in less than prime condition? Niall Harbison, regular contributor at iFoods.tv, says those are just the kind of things we should be on alert for when heading out to a restaurant for a meal.
Here are Niall's top 10 tips to avoid getting a foodborne illness:
1. Never eat fish on a Monday! Chances are the chef bought it for the busy Saturday night, didn’t sell it and it has sat in the fridge all day Sunday. It is on its last legs.
2. Get your nose into the food and smell it! It should be aromatic and delicious. If there is any sort of funny smell send it back.
3. Always order popular items on the menu as the turnover on these items will be high meaning the food hasn’t been lying around the fridge.
4. Are the toilets in pristime condition? This is one part of the restaurant that you can see and if the staff can’t be bothered to have these shining then the chances are the kitchen will be a dump as well!
5. Ask to see the kitchen. Don’t have the balls to do this? Would you go in and pay a couple of hundred euros for a pair of shoes or a dress without trying it on?
6. Beware of specials. Although ideally made using some amazing produce the chef has received they can often be a way of moving some of the older stock by dressing it up and giving it a new name!
7. Don’t eat somewhere that is quiet if all the other places nearby are busy! This is a simple one but if a restaurant is quiet it is usually because it is shite!
8. If you are cooking at home, be very careful when preparing raw meat. Make sure to wash the chopping board and knife after you are done .
9. Be careful with buffet food! This is lethal! It needs to be kept hot and becomes a huge risk when it is just kept lukewarm allowing bacteria to multiply.
10. Only eat at a “salad bar” if you have loaded gun pointed at your head! Salad bars are one of the main places that Mr Food Poisoning likes to hide out!
Check Out This Look At Food Radiation
U.S. News & World Report just issued a "fair and balanced" article looking into irradiation of food. It's found under the headline: The Basics on the Foodfight Over Irradiation: Should you look for the "radura" symbol? Check it out here and do not forget to read the comments.
E. coli O157:H7 is a powerful and deadly bacterium
You cannot see it, taste it, or smell it. 250,000 E. coli O157:H7 (E. coli) bacteria will fit on the head of a pin. Ten to 50 will kill your child or your grandmother.More likely due the expertise of Children’s Hospitals, and other top medical centers around the country, deaths at times are avoided, however, often not before Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) nearly kills. HUS, a complication from an E. coli infection, can cause severe damage to kidneys, intestines, and pancreas. Falling into a coma and suffering further from cognitive impairment are all too common.
I’ve seen the inside of too many of those Intensive Care Units with families who are scared senseless as they watch their children or mother shutdown. For 15 years, this has been my world. When I was an undergraduate, I read Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle. That book took the American public on a tour of the contaminated underbelly of the meat industry and they were sickened. It led to the Pure Food & Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act, versions of which are still in place today.
Until 1993, I thought—because of those laws—that the United States had a safe and secure food supply. But, then came the Jack-in-the-Box E. coli outbreak. It killed four, and sickened hundreds, including many who were gravely ill with HUS and related complications. Many of those victims became my clients.
Once again, there was a public outcry for safe meat. The Food Safety & Inspection Service responded by creating and aggressively enforcing the Mandatory Risk Management System. Based on research and practices of the U.S. Space Program, the risk management system established checkpoints at every phase of meat processing.
The presence of E. coli was defined as an adulterant under the Federal Meat Inspection Act. I continued to sue “Big Meat” as most of my clients up to 2002 were children who were made sick by eating E. coli contaminated meat. I recovered over $350 million during this period from the meat industry and the restaurants they supplied in verdicts and settlements on behalf of those clients. In 2003 recalls of meat laced with E. coli began to decline. After 24 million pounds of contaminated beef were recalled in 34 separate incidents in 2002, recalls dropped off to just over a million pounds a year for the next three years, and then to just 181,900 pounds in 2006. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention saw E. coli – related illnesses drop 48%.
But then came Spring 2007. E. coli, which begins its life in the hindgut of a cow, mounted a surge on its home court. And, it came back with a vengeance. Thirty-three million pounds of beef would be recalled in 22 incidents. All over the country, slaughterhouses, packing and distribution centers, retail outlets, and restaurants were once again testing positive for E. coli and people-mostly children-were getting seriously sick.
The American meat supply, which had again been touted as safest in the world, tumbled back into disarray. But, why?
As with any unexplained mystery, theories abound. Could it really just be meat industry complacency? Did everyone respond to the good numbers in 2006 by taking a long nap? Did meat processors slack off—consciously or unconsciously—and relax their testing procedures?
Or could it be better reporting? Doctors are more aware of E. coli now, and perhaps when patients present symptoms of food poisoning; tests are more likely to be ordered. When the presence of E coli is found and reported, a recall is triggered.
There’s always global warming. Seriously though – very smart people have posited that droughts in the southeast and southwest have launched more fecal dust into the air, which then finds its way into beef slaughtering plants. It has also been suggested that the deluging rainfall in other areas created muddy pens—an ideal environment for E. coli.
While we’re at it, why not blame high oil prices? High gas prices have fueled (sorry) the growth of ethanol plants. These plants are often built next to feedlots, and a byproduct of the ethanol production process—distiller’s grains—is considered an excellent (and cheap) alternative to corn for cattle feed. Unfortunately, research at Kansas State University associates the use of distiller’s grains as feed with an increase in the incidence of E. coli in the hindguts of cattle.
Another controversial issue may affect the meat supply. The New York Times reported that immigration officials began a crackdown at slaughterhouses across the country in the fall of 2006. Experienced—albeit undocumented—workers have been cleared out and replaced with unskilled, inexperienced labor.
And then there’s Darwin. Another theory holds that interventions have caused the wily E. coli microbes to adapt, selecting pathogens that are more resistant to detection or intervention. E. coli back in our meat cannot be tolerated. We’ve got a lot of summer of 2008 left. Summer has always been kind to the E. coli bug. More than 5.6 million pounds of E. coli contaminated beef has been recalled so far in 2008, most supplied by Nebraska Beef Ltd., via the Kroger Grocery chain. All of which is responsible for a multi-state outbreak of E. coli that again is filling up the ICU’s in Hospitals in the seven states.
What is being done? Not much.
Congress has held some hearings, but the only new reform is that the names of retail stores that received meat and poultry involved in recalls with high health risk will be made public. Good as far as it goes.
However, despite 76,000,000 American’s being sickened, 325,000 hospitalized and 5,000 deaths each year, food safety has not made it as a Presidential campaign issue. Congress, Democrats and Republicans, have about run out its clock. But E. coli is back in our meat and we better care.
Solutions?
Might I suggest:
* Improve surveillance of bacterial and viral diseases. First responders - ER physicians and local doctors - need to be encouraged to test for pathogens and report findings directly to local and state health departments and the CDC promptly. Right now, for every person counted in an outbreak there are some 20 to 40 times those that are sick but never tested. The more we test, the quicker we know we have an outbreak and the quicker it can be stopped.
* These same governmental departments, whether local, state or federal, need to learn to “play well together.” Turf battles need to take a back seat to stopping an outbreak and tracking it to its source. That means resources need to be provided and coordination encouraged so illnesses can be promptly stopped and the offending producer - not an entire industry - are brought to heal.
* Require real training and certification of food handlers at restaurants and grocery stores. There also should be incentives for ill employees not to come to work when ill. We should impose fines and penalties on employers who do not cooperate.
* Stiffen license requirements for large farm, retail and wholesale food outlets, so that nobody gets a license until they and their employees have shown they understand the hazards and how to avoid them.
* Increase food inspections. While domestic production has continued to be a problem, imports pose an increasing risk, especially if terrorists were to get into the act. Points of export and entry are a logical place to step up monitoring. We need more inspectors - domestically and abroad - and we need to require that they receive the training in how to identify and control hazards.
* Reorganize federal, state and local food safety agencies to increase cooperation and reduce wasteful overlap and conflicts. Reform federal, state and local agencies to make them more proactive, and less reactive. This too requires financial resources and accountability. We also need to modernize food safety statutes by replacing the existing collection of often conflicting laws and regulation with one uniform food safety law of the highest standard.
* There are too few legal consequences for sickening or killing customers by selling contaminated food. We should impose stiff fines, and even prison sentences for violators, and even stiffer penalties for repeat violators.
* We need to use our technology to make food more traceable so that when an outbreak occurs authorities can quickly identify the source and limit the spread of the contamination and stop the disruption to the economy. When I buy a book on line I can track it all the way to my mailbox. However, we have yet to find the source of a tomato (or salsa) outbreak after months of sickening hundreds.
* Promote university research to develop better technologies to make food safe and for testing foods for contamination. Provide tax breaks for companies that push food safety research and employee training. Greatly expand irradiation of raw hamburger and other high-risk products.
* Improve consumer understanding of the risks of food-borne illness. Foster a popular campaign similar to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which uses consumer power to promote a no-tolerance policy toward growers and companies that produce tainted food.
* Provide Presidential leadership on a topic that impacts every single one of us.
Marler Gives Congress Specific Food Safety Reforms
As we promised, Bill Marler was making news today on Capitol Hill. Along with a bench full of food industry executives, Marler testified before the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Michigan's John D. Dingell.
We go to Andrew Schneider's blog at the Seattle P-I for a quick summary of Bill's major points:
Seattle lawyer William Marler gave the lawmaker an up close and personal view of many victims of food poisoning that he had encountered.
Marler, who has been involved in food safety litigation since the '70s, offered the committee specific recommendation on how the nation's food safety system should be improved.
Create a local, state and national public health system that catches outbreaks before they balloon into a personal and
business catastrophe, he said. He explained that everyone believed that the Jack in the Box outbreak that killed four and sickened scores of others started in Seattle in January 1993. But he said it actually began three months earlier "when another child died and another 30 people were sickened in Southern California. He said E. coli was not a reportable illness at the time, "the death and illnesses were not recognized as an outbreak and the contaminated meat was shipped to Seattle."
He said that food must be inspected and sampled before it is consumed. He reminded the committee members that the GAO has warned in the past that our food sampling and inspection is so scattered and infrequent that there is little chance of detecting microscopic E. coli or any other pathogen for that matter.
Consumers, he said, need to know what is being recalled. Voluntary recalls don't work.
Marler warned that turf wars and split responsibilities are gutting the effectiveness of the nation's food safety system and the three federal agencies responsible - CDC, FDA and USDA – should have the food safety mandates merged and properly staffed and funded.
See the rest of the P-I blog here.
The food safety music homepage - UC Davis
This is a great site - A creative guy in a field where there is little humor: http://www.foodsafe.ucdavis.edu/
With a few clicks you can be on your way learning (and hearing) about food safety through song and video. Songs address a wide variety of food safety topics and have been developed for diverse audiences including children, health professionals, food service workers, food regulators, and teachers. Styles range from pop, country, rock, rap, Latin, and disco and there's even one song in Spanish.
Food Poisoning Resources
Marler Clark, Food Poisoning Lawyers
Marler Clark is the nation's foremost law firm with a practice dedicated to representing victims of food poisoning.
Since 1993, Marler Clark's lawyers have represented thousands of clients in litigation against restaurants and food companies whose food was traced as the source of illness. The Marler Clark food poisoning lawyers have brought claims on behalf of individuals sickened as part of outbreaks - cases involving multiple people sickened by a common source - and individuals whose illnesses were considered "isolated," yet could be traced to a particular food source.
