OPINION Fox News Host Tucker Carlson did a segment on Friday night about a CDC news release entitled CDC Investigating New Outbreaks of Salmonella Infections Linked to Backyard Poultry. One thing missing from the 4:47 minute piece? Any mention of the Salmonella outbreak linked to backyard poultry flocks. Instead of telling his viewers that ongoing … Read more
As food safety lawyers, people have been asking us (from a distance) how worried they should be about COVID-19 and the safety of their takeout food? While we can’t tell them about viral transmission rates via various sources – we’re lawyers, not scientists – we can tell them what we have learned from years of … Read more
Ever since the huge and deadly Listeria monocytogenes outbreak that was linked to whole melons produced by Jensen Farms in Colorado, I have been wary of cantaloupes, honeydew, and watermelon. While I did sometimes purchase precut melons, that ended when a Salmonella outbreak linked to precut melons sickened dozens in 2018. The current Salmonella Carrau melon outbreak has … Read more
One April, 2019 morning, amidst the ongoing ground beef E. coli O103 outbreak affecting much of the east-central United States, one of the attorneys on the foodborne illness team at the Pritzker Hageman law firm began her weekly meal preparation ritual. She went to her freezer and grabbed two pounds of frozen ground beef, defrosted it, … Read more
Over the years, Food Poisoning Bulletin has received many, many messages from people defending raw milk consumption. Every one of these messages has used the claim, “I have drunk raw milk for years and I have never gotten sick.” There are several problems with that statement: one is the logical fallacy of a small sample … Read more
It never ceases to amaze me why people drink raw milk. Raw milk, as all should know, is unpasteurized. Pasteurization is the process by which milk, juices and other products are heated in order to kill off dangerous pathogens. Without pasteurization, bacteria that harm or even kill people remain in the milk. Pasteurization, a simple … Read more
Organizers of the Milk Makers Fest in Lynden, Washington, said one of the 45 case patients in an E. coli outbreak associated with the annual schools event remained hospitalized this week at St. Joseph Hospital in Bellingham. All together there have been eight hospitalizations among a case patient population dominated by first-graders from public schools … Read more
The history of food safety, corporate irresponsibility, and workers’ rights is long and tortuous (as well as tortious). From the days of Upton Sinclair (rotten and diseased meat), unpasteurized and tuberculosis-laden milk, all the way through the present, the dangers of unsafe food have been compounded by improperly trained and poorly paid food workers. In … Read more
Last week, an editor for Slate magazine, L.V. Anderson, wrote an article entitled: “Salmonella and raw eggs: How I’ve eaten tons of cookie dough and never gotten sick”. In it, she says that she has eaten about 360 raw eggs in her lifetime and has never contracted a Salmonella infection. From that, she infers that … Read more
There is a lot of confusion about the dietary supplement industry, what products they are allowed to sell, and how they are regulated. Before 1990, supplements were mainly just vitamins and minerals. Interest peaked in the early 1990s, and more manufacturers got into the business. Congress wanted to strengthen the FDA’s enforcement powers over misleading … Read more