Hepatitis A is hard to kill. The virus is normally transmitted when an infected person doesn’t wash his or her hands properly after going to the bathroom and then touches food or objects where it can live for a month or more.
Alcohol-based cleaners, iodine-based products, and solutions of citric or phosphoric acids will not successfully remove the virus from surfaces. The most effective way to disinfect surfaces is with a 1:100 dilution of household bleach.
Heating foods to 185˚F or disinfecting them with the bleach solution will kill the virus. But rinsing contaminated foods with water doesn’t remove the virus. And neither does freezing them, which is how frozen berries came to be the source of a hepatitis A outbreak that has, so far, sickened 49 people in seven states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. Eleven people have been hospitalized.
For case patients of this outbreak, onset of illness has so far ranged from April 29 – May 24. Many of them reported eating Townsend Farms Organic Antioxidant Blend frozen berry and pomegranate mix purchased from Costco.
Townsend Farms has issued a recall for the berries, as has Harris Tweeter, a grocery stores chain with stores in the southeastern part of the country. Consumers who have these berries in their freezers should not eat them.
