The consumer finance gurus at walletpop.com today released their list of ten major foodpoisoning outbreaks and recalls for 2010. Yes, consumer finance and food outbreaks are tightly linked; some estimates are that every case of E. coli O157:H7 costs an average of $1,000 in physician and hospital services, and medical costs in most of the HUS cases we see easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars (not everybody is insured; some go bankrupt as a result; and this says nothing of the other costs, like lost wages, that must be factored into the analysis). But that’s beside Walletpop’s point. I agree with most of their major food stories for the year:
- The recall of over 500,000,000 eggs, and an associated outbreak that sickened almost 2,000 people
- Sangar Fresh Cut Produce listeria outbreak and forced shutdown
- Daniele salami salmonella outbreak ultimately linked to contaminated pepper
- Valley Meat beef E. coli O157:H7 outbreak
- Bravo Farms gouda cheese E. coli O157:H7 outbreak
- Fresh Express lettuce recalls
- Zemco Industries listeria lunchmeat recall
- Pictsweet Co. frozen vegetables recalled because they contained shards of glass
- Lobster meat recall due to listeria contamination
- Morningland Dairy’s dairy products recalls
It’s a good list, but it begs a bigger point with respect to the year’s problems with raw dairy. The Morningland Dairy and Bravo Farms cheese recalls are only two in a litany of outbreaks and recalls that occurred over the course of the past year, some linked to raw milk-based cheese and some to raw milk itself. In total in 2010, there have been 11 raw dairy outbreaks with 138 illnesses (also 1 pasteurized dairy outbreak with 23 illnesses), 1 queso fresco Mexican-style cheese outbreak with 5 illnesses, and 3 sporadic illnesses from illegal Mexican-style cheese. As for recalls with no illnesses reported, there have been 5 linked to raw dairy (3 milk, and 2 cheese), and 3 linked to queso fresco cheese, and 1 imported Italian cheese made from pasteurized milk.