Restaurants, commercial kitchens and other food service providers should cease serving raw sprouts of any kind unless an explicit food safety warning is provided to customers, national E. coli lawyer Fred Pritzker announced today in a national press release.
The warning should alert consumers to the risk of infection from life-threatening virulent bacteria — a threat that hasn’t been erased by regulators or seed and sprout suppliers despite more than a decade of intensive efforts. The latest evidence that raw sprouts are unsafe to eat is a six-state outbreak of E. coli O26 associated with raw clover sprouts served by the sandwich chain Jimmy John’s.
At least two Jimmy John’s victims live in Michigan, where state health and agriculture officials have alerted the state to a broader E. coli outbreak associated with raw clover sprouts.
“The only way to make sprouts safe is to cook them,” Pritzker said. “Serving them raw to an unsuspecting public is irresponsible and should be banned.”
Pritzker, one of four national figures to debate raw milk poisoning at Harvard University this month, said many restaurants have already removed raw sprouts from their offerings. For those who persist in selling them in ready-to-eat food, an explicit public warning should be mandatory, Pritzker said.
Toxic E. coli O26 may be the latest pathogen to contaminate sprouts in a multi-state outbreak, but Salmonella and Listeria also have a history of harboring in sprouts sold into the food supply. Sprout E. coli outbreaks centered in Germany and France last year killed more than 50 people and sent more than 840 to the hospital with hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS).
In just the past three years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has publicly tracked six separate sprout outbreaks that have sickened more than 4,500 people. And by the government’s own admission, FDA guidelines for seed suppliers and sprout growers would not have detected the strain of toxic E. coli in the Jimmy John’s outbreak.
