Nationally-known food safety attorney Bill Marler calls for Bartaco to reimburse Westchester County for the hepatitis A vaccinations issued by county health officials over the past month. According to press reports, the vaccinations have cost the county between $75,000 and $210,000, which will end up coming out of taxpayer’s pockets.

“Hepatitis A is the only vaccine-preventable foodborne illness.  Bartaco should have offered hepatitis A vaccines to all of its employees and avoided this outbreak,” said Bill Marler. “Bartaco should now step up and reimburse the department of public health for the cost of vaccinating over 3,000 people.  Other companies in similar situations have paid for their error and relieved the taxpayers of the cost burden.”

Marler Clark has already filed a class action lawsuit against Bartaco, representing those who have received shots. The firm is working to recover costs for those who received shots privately.  Marler Clark has also been retained by some of those who actually contracted hepatitis A.  Those cases will be handled individually.

Hepatitis A is one of five human hepatitis viruses (hepatitis A, B, C, D, and E) that primarily infect the liver and cause illness. It is a communicable (or contagious) disease that spreads from person-to-person through fecal-oral contact, often from an infected food handler contaminating food. The cases the Marler Clark hepatitis A lawyers have been involved in have generally resulted from contaminated food or water.

An estimated 80,000 hepatitis A cases and an estimated 100 deaths due to acute liver failure brought on by hepatitis A occur each year in the U.S. The rate of infection has dramatically decreased since the hepatitis A vaccine was licensed and became available in 1995. Despite the decrease in hepatitis A cases nationally, Marler Clark has represented clients young and old who have become ill with hepatitis A after eating contaminated food or who were exposed to the virus and had to receive an injection to prevent illness.

Marler Clark, The Food Safety Law Firm, is the nation’s leading law firm representing victims of Hepatitis A outbreaks. The Hepatitis A lawyers of Marler Clark have represented thousands of victims of Hepatitis A and other foodborne illness outbreaks and have recovered over $600 million for clients.  Marler Clark is the only law firm in the nation with a practice focused exclusively on foodborne illness litigation.  Our Hepatitis A lawyers have litigated Hepatitis A cases stemming from outbreaks traced to a variety of sources, such as green onions, lettuce and restaurant food.