The work

I have four citizen petitions rough drafted on my desk. Each one asks a federal agency to change a rule:

  • FDA — require a consumer warning statement on the labels of packaged raw and lightly cooked sprouts.
  • FDA — require testing for Clostridium botulinum in powdered infant formula and in the dairy ingredients it is made from, after fifty-two infants were hospitalized in two outbreaks.
  • FDA — require access and microbial sampling at animal feeding operations implicated in multistate outbreaks, under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act.
  • FSIS — determine that Salmonella at or above 1 CFU/g is an adulterant in raw comminuted chicken and turkey and in raw chicken parts.

A petition is only as strong as its weakest citation. No agency has to grant one, and the first thing a government lawyer or a trade association looks for is a fact that does not hold up. One wrong case count, one misread study, one Federal Register cite that does not say what the sentence claims it says, and the whole document becomes easy to set aside.

Your job is to find those errors before anyone else does. Specifically:

  • Check every factual assertion in the petition against the source it rests on.
  • Verify statutory, regulatory, Federal Register and case citations — that they exist, that they are current, and that they stand for what the text says.
  • Read the scientific literature cited and tell me whether it actually supports the sentence citing it.
  • Find any additional scientific literature that supports our petitions or not.
  • Confirm outbreak case counts, dates, recall records and agency findings against CDC, FDA and FSIS sources.
  • Flag anything overstated, unsupported or out of date — including my own writing. Especially my own writing.
  • Line edit for clarity and consistency.

Who I am looking for

A law student — 1L through 3L — an LL.M. candidate, or a recent graduate. An LL.M. in food and drug law, public health law or regulatory practice fits this work particularly well, as does a lawyer trained abroad who is now studying here. What I need in any case is:

  • A science background. Microbiology, food science, epidemiology, public health, biology, chemistry or similar. You should be able to read a peer-reviewed microbiology paper and tell me whether it says what I claim it says.
  • A real interest in public health, or in food and drug regulation.
  • Cite-checking stamina. Law review or journal experience helps.
  • Comfort with the Federal Register, the eCFR, regulations.gov, PACER and PubMed.
  • A willingness to tell me I am wrong.

One reason to think this works

On October 5, 2009, this firm petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to declare non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli adulterants in beef. The industry said it would be ruinous. The agency said it lacked a laboratory method. We kept building the record. On September 20, 2011, FSIS published its determination that six serogroups — O26, O45, O103, O111, O121 and O145 — are adulterants in raw non-intact beef products. Routine verification testing of raw beef manufacturing trimmings began June 4, 2012. Those six are now what everyone in the industry calls the Big Six, and they are the law because a petition built a record the agency could not answer.

That took nearly three years and an enormous amount of checking. The petitions on my desk now are built the same way, and they will be read by people looking for a reason to say no.

Every one of them is meant to prevent an outbreak that would otherwise walk into this office as a case file. I have represented people injured by contaminated food since the 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak — children on dialysis, families who buried someone over a hamburger or a bag of lettuce. The goal is a country that does not need a lawyer like me. This work is a step toward putting me out of business, and I would like the help.

Terms

Paid hourly. Rate and weekly hours to be discussed and scheduled around your classes. Remote, with occasional calls. Project-based to start, with more work likely — the petitions do not stop coming. If your school awards externship or independent-study credit, I am glad to work with them.

To apply

Send a resume and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com with “Petition Research” in the subject line. Skip the cover-letter language. Instead, tell me about one time you caught an error in something you were reading — what it was, and how you found it. If you have a writing sample with citations in it, send that too.

Also, why I have your attention, please see the below:

WANTED AN ASSOCIATE ATTORNEY — 5+ YEARS

Want to Put Us Out of Business? Come Help Us Try.

Marler Clark has been suing the companies that poison people since 1993 — since a nine-year-old girl named Brianne Kiner nearly died from a hamburger. Sixteen years later it was Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor paralyzed by a hamburger, whose case put the grinding of American beef on the front page of The New York Times and won Michael Moss a Pulitzer Prize. Thirty-plus years later we are still the only law firm in the country that does nothing but foodborne illness — tens of thousands of clients and over $850 million recovered — and there is more work than there are lawyers to do it. The names on the other side are ones you already know: Jack in the Box, Cargill, Dole, Nestlé, Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Nebraska Beef, Yum Brands, and this year Taylor Farms, Taco Bell and Boar’s Head.

As I write this, on August 19, 2026: a Cyclospora outbreak the fifty state health departments now count at 31,521 people and rising. The federal government called it 1,947 in nine states until it changed what qualifies as a case in August; its own number is now 9,481 in seventeen states, 398 hospitalized, two dead. Michigan by itself reports 13,909 cases — more than the federal government counts for the entire seventeen-state outbreak. We have five cases filed against Taco Bell, four different franchise operators and Taylor Farms, and more than two hundred other people in twenty-six states have retained us to find out how they were poisoned. Salmonella Javiana in jalapeños grown in Sinaloa — 431 sick in 32 states, Chipotle and QDOBA — which Minnesota epidemiologists and a company traceback found before it ever reached FDA’s outbreak table; a month later the grower still has not been named and the recall of what it sold has spread to more than 160 grocery products. Infant botulism litigation against ByHeart and Nara Organics. Listeria out of Boar’s Head. E. coli O157:H7 from beef kofta and from romaine. Salmonella from nineteen million recalled eggs and from a Lexington pie shop. E. coli O145 in frozen blueberries. Vibrio from raw seafood in Queens. Read a month of marlerblog.com. Clients in need find us; that has never been the hard part.

Finding the defendant is. Nobody hands you one in a foodborne case. You will read FDA inspection reports and environmental assessments, USDA establishment records, whole genome sequencing and PulseNet clusters, epidemic curves built by state health departments, and — this summer — the sanitation and rainfall records of a Mexican municipality where the lettuce was grown and the traceback on a lot of peppers out of Sinaloa. That work gets done before the complaint is filed, not in discovery. You will also have the Outbreak Database, which this office built and still maintains — decades of outbreaks, searchable, and no other firm in the country has it. Spanish is a real plus.

And half of this job is not litigation at all. E. coli O157:H7 became an adulterant in American beef in 1994; six more strains followed because we petitioned USDA to make them so. We helped pass FSMA in 2011, petitioned — so far without success — to have outbreak strains of Salmonella declared adulterants in 2019, and pushed hepatitis A vaccination for food workers in 2020. This year alone: an infant formula bill in the House, a food safety bill in the Senate, the Stop Foodborne Illness petition pending at FDA asking it to tell the public where recalled food went, comment letters on the traceability rule Congress delayed to 2028, and a standing demand that CDC count Cyclospora again. I publish Food Safety News, I have written over 6,000 posts on Marler Blog since 2004, I speak all over the world, and I teach food safety at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. You will do this too — including writing here under your own name, where reporters will read it. Within a few years it will be you the conference invites, the health department calls and the reporter quotes; our lawyers speak to industry groups, public health audiences and university classes, and that platform is handed over, not loaned. Work out of this office has been cited in more than a thousand media reports. We also correct in public: when a poultry veterinarian wrote in last month to tell me a post of mine was wrong, we ran the correction louder than the original. Being right matters less here than getting it right. Cases fix one company; the rest fixes the industry.

If you want to know what that adds up to, read the testimonials page on billmarler.com and pay attention to who is on it: a former FDA food safety czar, a former USDA food safety official, the retired head of the Produce Marketing Association. Michael Pollan wrote that the federal watchdog on food safety is asleep at the switch and we are what is left. One of the lawyers who defended the other side in the Jack in the Box cases became my law partner. You will spend your career arguing with the food industry, and some of the people you argue with will end up thanking you for it.

We are looking for an associate with at least five years of litigation experience — personal injury, product liability, med-mal, or complex tort — who is ready to run cases, not just paper. We are a handful of lawyers, not a floor of them: you will carry your own docket from the start.

Here is what you will not do here. There is no billable hour requirement and no origination credit to chase — the clients find us, and the firm carries the cost of every case out of its own pocket until it resolves. There is no committee, no partner standing between you and the person who decides, and no waiting your turn: when you need an answer you walk down the hall and get one. And there is no volume. We turn down cases every week that we could not do right, because a file nobody has time for is worse than no file at all.

Our office is on Bainbridge Island, and the honest truth is that we want you here — living on the island, not commuting to it. We are a few minutes’ walk up from the ferry terminal, thirty-five minutes across the water from downtown Seattle, in a town where you can walk to work, walk to lunch, and walk home. Most people who make the move do not move back. But the right lawyer matters more to us than the right zip code: if you are elsewhere in Puget Sound, or willing to relocate, and can be here most days, we should talk, and we will help the right person get here. 

What you’ll actually do: file in federal and state courts across the country, write the settlement demand letters that resolve most of our cases before anyone sees a courtroom — the medical chronology, the liability analysis, the damages model, all of it yours — take and defend depositions of plant managers and epidemiologists, work up hemolytic uremic syndrome, Listeria meningitis and Salmonella reactive arthritis cases with the best experts in the field, sit with families in hospital rooms, and try cases. The docket is national; you will be on airplanes. It has been international as well — outbreaks in Europe, Asia and Africa. You will be trusted early and often.

Many of our clients are children, and on those cases the last thing you do is the hardest. A settlement for a child has to be approved by a judge, cleared of Medicaid, Medicare, ERISA and sometimes federal military liens, and structured — now and then into a special needs trust — so the money is still there decades later, when the kidney an outbreak took finally has to be replaced. If you have never done a minor’s compromise, you will.

What you need: licensed and in good standing somewhere, admissible pro hac vice everywhere else — Washington admission is not required; real deposition experience; the writing chops to draft a complaint that reporters quote; and the stomach for what an outbreak does to a child. A science background is a bonus, not a requirement — we’ll teach you the microbiology.

What we offer: Competitive salary depending on experience, plus bonus; medical, dental and vision; 401(k) with match; paid vacation and holidays; bar dues and CLE; and cases that end up in The New York Times, in front of Congress, and in Poisoned, the Netflix documentary about this work — watch it before you apply. Also: a commute that involves a ferry or no ferry at all, and a firm that goes home for a safer dinner because of you.

One last thing, and it is the whole thing. Nobody here treats this as a practice area. Everyone here can name the child whose case they will never forget. That is why they stay. A client wrote to us that I came to the hospital while their son was there, and that somebody from this office was in touch every step after; that somebody is going to be you as often as it is me. I am not looking for a lawyer who wants a job. I am looking for one who cannot look away from it and wants to spend the next thirty years making a difference.

The job is open now. Resume, writing sample and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com — in the note, pick any case or outbreak off marlerblog.com and tell me what you would do with it first. The rest of it is public too: marlerclark.com and billmarler.com. No recruiters. Equal opportunity employer.

WANTED A PARALEGAL — 10+ YEARS

We Need Someone Who Reads 4,000 Pages of Medical Records and Finds the One That Matters.

Marler Clark represents people sickened by E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Cyclospora, Vibrio and botulism — from a single family to a thousand-plaintiff outbreak, tens of thousands of clients and over $850 million recovered since 1993. The companies on the other side are ones you already know — Jack in the Box, Cargill, Dole, Nestlé, Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Yum Brands, and this year Taylor Farms and Boar’s Head. The cases are won or lost in the details, and the details live with our paralegals.

Right now, the details include a Cyclospora outbreak the fifty state health departments count at 31,521 people while the federal government counts 9,481, Salmonella Javiana in Sinaloa jalapeños that has sickened 431 in 32 states and set off a recall that now runs to more than 160 grocery products, infant botulism cases against ByHeart and Nara Organics, Listeria from Boar’s Head, Salmonella from nineteen million recalled eggs, and E. coli from beef kofta, romaine and frozen blueberries. Spend ten minutes on marlerblog.com and you will see the month we just had. Every one of those numbers is a person with a chart, a bill, a lien and a phone number.

The other half of this office is advocacy, and it runs on the same skills. Public records requests to state and county health departments. FOIA to FDA and USDA for inspection reports and environmental assessments and sometimes records in Spanish from a growing region in Mexico — Spanish is a real plus. Fifty health department dashboards read and reconciled every morning. Exhibits and family declarations assembled for a rulemaking petition, a congressional hearing, or a bill. FDA and USDA dockets tracked, and comment letters filed on deadline. The last time we petitioned USDA, six strains of E. coli became adulterants in American beef. That file had to be built by somebody. The same goes for the Outbreak Database and Food Safety News — this office built both and still feeds them. People here get their names on that work, and anyone who wants to speak or write about it is pushed forward, not held back.

We are hiring a paralegal with at least ten years of experience in plaintiffs’ personal injury or complex litigation. Ten years, because we need someone who already knows what a lien is, what a hospital billing department will and will not send you, and how to keep sixty clients straight without losing one. Ten years also because nobody here is going to look over your shoulder — you will run your own files.

Here is what you will not do here. No billable hours and no timesheets — nobody in this office bills by the tenth of an hour. No committee, and no layer between you and the person who decides; when you need an answer you walk down the hall and get one. And no volume: we turn down cases every week that we could not do right, because a file nobody has time for is worse than no file at all.

Our office is on Bainbridge Island, and we would like you to live here rather than commute here. We are a few minutes’ walk up from the ferry terminal — thirty-five minutes from downtown Seattle by boat, a town you can cross on foot, and a trip to work that is a walk or a short drive instead of an hour on I-5. People who make the move tend to stay. But the right person matters more to us than the right zip code: if you are elsewhere in Puget Sound and can be here most days, we should talk, and we will help you get here.

What you’ll actually do: run intakes with families who are frightened and exhausted, chase and chronologize medical records, build the damages and lien files that become the settlement demand, assemble the minor’s compromise petitions that put a child’s settlement in front of a judge, manage e-discovery and document productions, calendar and cite-check, coordinate with experts and state health departments, keep cases moving in courts in a dozen states, and travel with us when one of them goes to trial. The work has gone international too — outbreaks in Europe, Asia and Africa.

What you need: a decade in the trenches, mastery of medical records and chronologies, real lien experience — Medicaid, Medicare, ERISA plans and, more often than you would think, the federal government — e-discovery platform experience, absurd organizational instincts, and genuine kindness on the phone: the person calling you may have just buried someone.

What we offer: Competitive salary depending on experience, plus bonus; medical, dental and vision; 401(k) with match; paid vacation and holidays; and the rare paralegal job where the work actually changes how food is made in this country.

And one last thing. This is not a file-management job. One of our clients wrote that I came to the hospital while their son was there, and that somebody from this office was in touch every step after. Being that somebody is the job. The people who last here take it personally — they still remember a client’s child by name a year after the case settles, and they are angry that any of it happened at all. If that is you, you will fit here.

The job is open now. Resume and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com — in the note, tell me about the hardest lien you ever cleared or the record you had to fight hardest to get. marlerclark.com and billmarler.com if you want to know more before you write. No recruiters. Equal opportunity employer.

On September 11, 2026, CDC declared the multistate outbreak of Cyclospora infections linked to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico over. The final federal count is 12,883 laboratory-confirmed illnesses across twenty-one states, 570 hospitalizations, two deaths in Michigan, and a last illness onset of August 17. Virginia was added as the twenty-first state on the day the outbreak closed. Nothing in the American record comes close.

Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal illness caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a microscopic parasite spread through human feces in contaminated food or water. It cannot come from animal manure, washing does not reliably remove it, and chlorine does not kill it.

The outbreak is only part of the season. As of September 8, CDC had recorded 19,595 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases since May 1, against 1,180 in the same stretch of 2025. Subtract the 12,883 tied to the lettuce and roughly 6,700 confirmed illnesses have no food named beside them at all. I intend to keep asking about those people into the winter.

What the FDA did on the way out

FDA opened a new page called Post-Outbreak Response Activities. It reports that senior FDA and Mexican officials met during the week of September 8 to encourage a prevention-focused framework, that FDA will fold what it learns into its Cyclospora Prevention, Response and Research Action Plan in the coming months, and that it is sending a letter to industry calling for collaboration across the supply chain.

Read the letter. It reminds the regulated industry that it must apply science-based agricultural water management, worker health and hygiene controls, and sanitation under the Produce Safety Rule at 21 CFR Part 112; preventive controls, including a supplier program, under 21 CFR Part 117 where they apply; and rigorous foreign supplier verification under 21 CFR Part 1, Subpart L. Every one of those is already the law. After the largest outbreak of this parasite ever recorded here, the federal output is a letter asking industry to comply with rules that have been on the books for years.

And here is the fact that should worry growers and shippers more than anything else on that page. FDA’s onsite inspections and sample collection at the lettuce growers and the processing facility in Mexico have ended. The samples are pending analysis. No root cause has been named. We have been here before: in the 2020 bagged salad outbreak, CDC declared the outbreak over and FDA’s traceback was complete, and the cause or source was never determined. Industry cannot fix what it is never told.

CDC was clear about why it closed the file: infections had declined and the lettuce was gone from stores and restaurants. That is a finding about future risk, not about cause, and the same update says FDA is still investigating how the contamination happened. The agency that counts the sick is finished; the one that is supposed to find out why is not, and only one of the two has a published finish line.

The ten states that got the lettuce and reported nobody sick

Put the two federal lists side by side. FDA confirmed distribution in thirty-one states, and all twenty-one outbreak states sit inside it. In an outbreak with no positive product sample, that coherence is real corroboration, and I will say so plainly.

The inverse is the more interesting number. Ten states got confirmed distribution and reported no outbreak illnesses at all: Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Look at New York and Florida. Both have run hundreds of cyclosporiasis cases this season with no source named. Either the lettuce arrived and sickened nobody, which is possible, or nobody did the interviews and typing that would have found out. The federal record cannot tell you which, and that is the whole problem.

Ten things the FDA should do before next May

1. Publish what the investigation found, including the negatives. FDA has its own root cause analysis program and a promise to update its action plan in the coming months. Name the month, and report the sample results either way. A published negative is real information: it tells every farm in that valley the contamination was not where investigators looked.

2. Describe the supply shed. Traceback converged on one processor, then inspections moved upstream to multiple growers. Tell us how many farms fed that plant and how many water sources served them, even if private farm names stay out.

3. Give industry a detection method it can actually run. FDA has a validated laboratory method for finding Cyclospora in fresh produce. There is no comparable routine tool a grower can use on irrigation water, sediment or soil at commercial scale and commercial speed. Fund it, validate it, publish it, and stop asking companies to manage a hazard they cannot measure.

4. Restore the parasite research and say plainly what the agency needs. Congress did not appropriate funding for two federal Cyclospora research projects in the FY2026 agriculture bill, and the third is being relocated away from the scientists who run it, as reported at the end of August. FDA should put in writing which research questions it cannot answer without that work.

5. Make genotyping routine and push it to the states. CDC used Cyclospora genotyping this summer to show that illnesses were genetically related. It is the first tool on this beat that does not depend on somebody remembering a June salad. Publish the protocol, fund state laboratory capacity, and make it standard again.

6. Put Cyclospora back into FoodNet, and make it mandatory again. FoodNet has been the audited count of foodborne illness since 1995, run by CDC with FDA, USDA and ten states. Cyclospora went on the list in 1997. On July 1, 2025, after twenty-eight years, reporting for it became optional, along with five other pathogens; only Salmonella and STEC stayed mandatory. I wrote about it in July, before this outbreak had a name. FoodNet is ten sites, not a national tally, so it would not have counted these cases. It is the yardstick for normal, and we entered the worst Cyclospora year on record without it.

7. Rebuild the Microbiological Data Program, and put a parasite on the panel. From April 2001 until December 2012, USDA tested roughly fifteen thousand produce samples a year at distribution centers, more than any other federal or state program. It was killed to save about five million dollars. I have been asking for it back since 2024. Here is the honest part: MDP looked for bacteria, not parasites, so restoring it as it was would not have found this. Rebuild it with Cyclospora on the panel, which is only possible once item three exists.

8. Attack the six-week reporting lag with a funded plan and a number. Every federal page carries the same caveat: it takes about six weeks to know whether a sick person belongs to an outbreak. That lag is why the recall came after most people had already eaten the lettuce. Say how fast the agencies intend to get, by when, and what it costs.

9. Lift the spending prohibition on traceability and water, and build the system Congress ordered in 2011. Section 780 of the November 2025 appropriations law bars FDA from spending a dollar to administer or enforce the Food Traceability Rule before July 20, 2028, and restricts enforcement money for the Produce Safety Rule and its pre-harvest agricultural water requirements. FDA’s letter asks industry to follow water practices Congress has defunded the agency from enforcing. Section 204 of FSMA also told the department to build a system inside FDA capable of receiving traceability information, and a Congressional Research Service report, citing a Government Accountability Office finding from this January, says no such system exists. Fifteen years.

10. Publish the framework with Mexico, including commitments and dates. A meeting during the week of September 8 is not a framework. The food safety partnership with Mexico has existed for years. Say what each side committed to, who verifies it, and when the first deliverable is due.

Why this is industry’s fight too

Fast, accurate traceback draws a line. It says this facility, this lot, this week, and what everything else is not. Without the line, fear prices the whole category, and this summer iceberg sales fell for growers with no connection to Guanajuato. Every one of the ten items narrows the circle. The alternative is the 2020 outcome, where the investigation quietly ends and the next grower learns nothing from the last grower’s disaster.

The count you will not find on any federal page

Add up what the state health departments published themselves and the total runs past thirty-two thousand. Michigan alone reported 14,277 cases as of August 20, more than CDC’s entire twenty-one-state outbreak figure. The two series do not measure the same thing, and the difference is worth understanding rather than shouting about. CDC counts only laboratory-confirmed illnesses it has attributed to this outbreak inside its May 1 season, and it files a sick traveler under the state visited rather than the state of residence. States count what they see: many include probable cases, some count on the calendar year, and all of them post before CDC finishes confirming. Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions, and the gap between them is about the size of the outbreak itself.

Now put the confirmed count in context. Scallan and colleagues, writing in CDC’s own journal in 2011, estimated an underdiagnosis multiplier of 83.1 for cyclosporiasis: for every laboratory-confirmed case, roughly eighty-three infections. Apply that to 19,595 and the estimate is on the order of 1.6 million Americans infected this summer. Apply it only to the 12,883 tied to the lettuce and it is still above a million. Treat those as orders of magnitude rather than counts. The multiplier was built before multiplex stool panels were common, so it probably runs high today, and testing this summer was unusually aggressive. Cut it in half twice and the answer is still that the people sickened by this lettuce number in the hundreds of thousands, and that almost none of them will ever appear in any government table.

The outbreak is closed. The investigation is not. All of those people are owed an answer about how a parasite that travels in human waste got onto lettuce bound for American tables. A letter asking industry to reread the regulations is not it.

Cyclosporiasis is the intestinal illness caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a parasite that reaches produce when human waste reaches a field or the water running through it. This summer it caused the largest outbreak of its kind in American history. Depending on which page you open, this summer either sickened 12,883 people, 19,595, or 33,548. Every one of those numbers is correct. They are different because they are not counting the same thing, and the differences between them are the story.

NumberWhat it countsSource, as of
33,548Everything fifty state health departments have published this season, including probable and travel casesMy fifty-state table, September 8
19,595Laboratory-confirmed cases acquired in the United States since May 1 that meet CDC criteriaCDC case data, September 11
12,883Cases CDC and FDA attribute to recalled Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuceCDC and FDA, September 11

What the fifty states report: 33,548

The largest published figure is not the government’s. It is the sum of what fifty state health departments have printed, as of September 8, and I keep it because nobody else does. States count what reaches them: laboratory-confirmed cases, probable cases, residents infected while traveling, and cases that have not yet cleared CDC’s criteria. Michigan alone reported 14,718 cases and 366 hospitalizations as of September 3, in a state that logs about fifty in a normal year. Forty states publish a number. Nine publish nothing at all. Four — Pennsylvania, Idaho, Mississippi and Nevada — do not make cyclosporiasis notifiable, so no figure was ever required to exist. Pennsylvania is one of the twenty-one outbreak states.

What CDC counts: 19,595, and 15,504 more it has not finished sorting

CDC’s national case-data page, updated September 11 with data through September 8, reports 19,595 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis acquired in this country since May 1, 1,043 hospitalizations, two deaths, and cases in forty-nine states and the District of Columbia. The comparable 2025 figure is 1,180. This season is more than sixteen times last season.

CDC’s criteria are narrower than a state’s: laboratory-confirmed, domestically acquired, inside the May 1 through August 31 season, and reported up the federal chain. The same page carries two numbers that almost never get printed. There are 9,355 additional laboratory-confirmed cases still being sorted into domestic or travel-related, and CDC says it is aware of at least 6,149 more that are not yet laboratory confirmed or are waiting on an interview. Add them together and the agency knows about 35,099 people. A separate series counts 1,997 travel-associated cases and 71 hospitalizations on top of that.

What is attributed to Taylor Farms: 12,883

CDC declared the iceberg lettuce outbreak over on September 11 at 12,883 illnesses, 570 hospitalizations, both deaths and twenty-one states, with the last illness beginning August 17. FDA’s advisory carries identical figures and says its own investigation continues, with samples from the inspections in Mexico still pending analysis. At the peak, before the July 17 recall, more than a thousand infections began in a single day. Through August the average was fewer than two a day.

Attributed means something specific here, and it is worth understanding. CDC’s definition is people who reported exposure to processed iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico, served or purchased at various locations. That is an interview, not a laboratory match. In August CDC added that genotyping shows the parasites from sick people are genetically related to one another, which is real evidence that they share a source. No product sample was ever confirmed positive.

Attributed to some other food: nothing

Not one 2026 cyclosporiasis case in this country has been publicly attributed by the federal government to any food other than that lettuce. Every open Cyclospora investigation FDA is carrying reads Not Yet Identified, and there are four of them on FDA’s table: 231 people in one, 38 in another, 22 in a third, 18 in a fourth. That is 309 people in files that have a pathogen, a case count and a traceback, and no food. None of the four has had an on-site inspection.

States have pointed elsewhere without confirming anything. North Carolina has said cilantro and parsley rather than the Taco Bell outbreak. New York traced an April cluster to cilantro at a Brooklyn restaurant and never confirmed it. Alabama named two Mexican-style restaurant clusters and said plainly they had nothing to do with Taco Bell. None of that is a federal attribution and none of it names a grower. It can be done: FDA closed a 2025 Cyclospora file naming parsley, with 69 cases in it.

Attributed to nothing at all: 6,712

Subtract the outbreak from CDC’s own confirmed count and 6,712 laboratory-confirmed Americans got this parasite this summer from a food nobody has named. Subtract it from the fifty-state total and the number is 20,665. These people were tested, diagnosed and counted. What they ate is simply unknown, and the season closed on August 31. Over the coming months I will be working with epidemiologists to find out where those infections came from.

Part of the answer may sit on FDA’s own page. Twenty-one states have cases in the Taylor Farms outbreak. The lettuce went to a great deal more of the country than that, and it did not go only to Taco Bell. Ten states received it, confirmed, and have no outbreak cases attributed to them at all: Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina and Wisconsin. New York alone has reported more than nine hundred cases this season. Here is the whole footprint.

ChannelWhere it wentHow many
Foodservice, distribution confirmed by FDAAlabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin31 states
Foodservice, may have been distributed furtherDelaware, District of Columbia, North Dakota, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington8 more
Retail, Marketside brand at select Walmart storesAlabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia15 states
Outside the United StatesMexico, where FDA says customer information from the firm shows the recalled product was sold to consumersNot stated

The company’s own July 17 notice listed twenty-seven states for the shredded iceberg product, four fewer than the list FDA now publishes: Maine, Nebraska, New York and West Virginia are on FDA’s and were not on the company’s. FDA’s recall record in its own enforcement database says twenty-seven states as well, and it also leaves West Virginia off.

Nobody thinks West Virginia did not get this lettuce. FDA named Taco Bell locations in West Virginia on July 16, the day before the recall, as one of the first five outbreak states, and West Virginia has counted its sick people ever since. The people who ate the product there were already in the hospital while the paperwork was being written. What the omission shows is that the distribution list attached to a recall is not a reliable map of where the food went. It is a list of who the company billed, assembled quickly, and it can leave out a state where the illnesses started. Thirty-one states is a floor too.

Every customer, and how much each one got

The recall notice named no customers. It identified the buyers by eight two-letter codes and published no volume at all. All of it was sitting in FDA’s recall enterprise database from the day the recall was announced, in a record called Event 99453, twenty-one separate product entries. I went through it entry by entry on August 9 and added it up. The recall covers 236,192 cases, a figure that appears nowhere on FDA’s website or in the company’s announcement, because the system lists the entries and never totals them. And the federal record spells out the codes.

CustomerCasesWhat the code was, and what is known
Marketside109,476Walmart’s house brand, and the only entry aimed at consumers. Four items, roughly ninety lot codes, ten to twelve bags to a case. Well over a million bags.
Taylor Farms68,897The company’s own label, code TF.
Cross Valley Farms19,016Code CV. The private label of US Foods.
Sysco11,519Code SY. The largest foodservice distributor in the country. It told customers to destroy the product and never said where it had already gone.
Subway8,075Code SUB. Quarter-inch shredded lettuce across fourteen lot codes, and the largest single restaurant chain in this recall. Subway has said nothing about this outbreak.
Markon7,459Code MARK. Not a restaurant but a purchasing cooperative, whose member distributors resell to independent operators who never see the name. A notice that reaches Markon is two steps from the kitchen.
Yum5,900The parent of Taco Bell. Four lot codes from two days of production, July 8 and July 11, the narrowest window of anybody in the file.
Jack in the Box5,130Code JB. Locations in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, through the company’s Texas distribution center. It volunteered its own name to reporters on July 18.
Peak720Code PK.
Total236,192The sum of all twenty-one entries. FDA publishes the entries and does not add them up.

Two things in that table deserve to be read twice. Subway is the biggest restaurant chain in this recall, bigger than Yum and bigger than Jack in the Box, and it has never said a word in public about this outbreak. Jack in the Box put its own name out voluntarily in July and became the chain everyone has heard about. The quiet one is the larger one.

And the recall was never only iceberg. FDA annotates every entry with what is actually in the bag. Iceberg alone is 167,504 cases. The other 68,688, twenty-nine percent of the recall, is lettuce and romaine blends at fifty-fifty and seventy-thirty and eighty-twenty, garden salad mixes with carrots and red cabbage, and salads carrying all four. Every federal page and every news story I have read says iceberg. Some of the people told to check their refrigerator for iceberg lettuce were holding a garden salad.

Beyond the customer list, one individual establishment has ever been named by a health department anywhere in this outbreak: the cafeteria at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene, New Hampshire. Nine customers and one cafeteria, against a product that went to thirty-one states.

The undercount, and the five reasons behind it

Every number above is a floor. CDC says so on its own page: the true number is likely higher because some people recover without medical care and are never tested for Cyclospora.

The standard estimate of that gap comes from Scallan and colleagues in Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2011, which puts the underdiagnosis multiplier for Cyclospora at 83.1. Applied to 19,595 confirmed cases, it puts the real number near 1,628,000. Here is why the multiplier is that large.

  • The routine stool panel does not look for this parasite. A physician has to ask for it by name.
  • The illness relapses over weeks, so people decide they have a stomach bug and never see a doctor at all.
  • It takes about six weeks from a first symptom to a case landing in CDC’s count.
  • Testing costs money. A nurse practitioner at a safety-net clinic in Lee County, Florida told a reporter in August that her clinic is not testing anyone, because her patients are uninsured and cannot afford it. The cases she has seen, in her own staff and her own patients, are in nobody’s count.
  • Four states do not require the disease to be reported at all.

Where the 83.1 comes from, and the 99 percent that goes with it

The multiplier is not a guess. Scallan and colleagues built it as a chain, one link for every step an illness has to survive to become a counted case: the sick person seeks medical care, a stool specimen is submitted, the laboratory tests for that particular organism, and the test finds it. Each link was measured. Across three FoodNet population surveys run between 2000 and 2007, 35 percent of people with bloody diarrhea sought care and 36 percent gave a stool sample, against 18 and 19 percent for nonbloody diarrhea. Depending on the organism, between a quarter and all clinical laboratories routinely tested for it, and test sensitivity ran from 28 to 100 percent. Combined for this parasite those proportions produce 83.1, and nothing is stacked on top of it for underreporting, because the Cyclospora count came from active surveillance. 83.1 is the whole adjustment.

The second Scallan number is the one almost nobody quotes, and for a food safety argument it is the important one. The paper attributes 99 percent of domestically acquired cyclosporiasis to food. For the two other parasites people associate with contaminated water the figures are 8 percent for Cryptosporidium and 7 percent for Giardia. In the government’s own burden estimate this is a food problem and essentially nothing else. There is no swimming pool and no day care to fall back on. Somebody ate something.

Then there is the baseline. Scallan’s model began with 239 laboratory-confirmed Cyclospora illnesses a year in this country and put the total annual burden, counted and uncounted together, at 19,808, of which 11,407 were domestically acquired and foodborne. CDC’s laboratory-confirmed count for this one season is 19,595. What was confirmed in a single summer is very nearly what the standard estimate says the whole country suffers, diagnosed and undiagnosed, in an ordinary year.

Two people are dead and 1,043 people were hospitalized. The best-counted figure the federal government has, the one that took an entire summer to build, is about one percent of the people who probably got sick.

My friend Herb Weisbaum, The ConsumerMan, published a piece this morning at KOMO News and Checkbook that asks the question I have been asked at kitchen tables for more than thirty years. Why does this keep happening?

The article grew out of a conversation Herb had with me and with Brian Ronholm on Checkbook’s Consumerpedia podcast. Brian is the director of food policy at Consumer Reports and was the deputy under secretary for food safety at USDA, where he ran the agency that inspects meat, poultry and processed eggs. Herb did what the good consumer reporters do. He let two people who argue with the food industry for a living say their piece, and then he went and checked the numbers.

Start with the sentence that usually ends these conversations. America has the safest food supply in the world. Herb did not let it end there. He set it next to a 2025 report from the Government Accountability Office, which called foodborne illness in this country a serious and continuing problem, and next to CDC’s estimate that 48 million Americans get sick from food every year, 128,000 land in the hospital and 3,000 die. Both sentences can be true at once. The second one is the one that matters if you are the parent standing in the hospital hallway.

What the piece gets right

Most produce grows outdoors, in open fields, and is eaten raw. There is no kill step on a salad. Irrigation water, animals wandering through the rows, manure applied at the wrong time, bacteria in the soil and workers with no place to wash their hands are all ways a pathogen gets on a leaf, and nothing downstream takes it back off.

Then we chop it and mix it. As I told Herb, when you introduce mass production into a ready-to-eat raw product, if you make a mistake, it is a big one. One contaminated head becomes ten thousand bags. I have said it for years and I will keep saying it. The convenience is not worth the risk.

Meanwhile the government is looking less. Congress and a string of administrations underfunded food safety at FDA, USDA and CDC for decades, and this year’s cuts took more staff out. CDC dropped Cyclospora from its surveillance list before the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history got going. Brian’s line for that is the best one I have heard: CDC “essentially lost its hunting license.” We found out this summer what that costs.

We are also importing more of what we eat. Roughly 60 percent of our fresh fruit and 38 percent of our fresh vegetables are grown in other countries, and FDA inspects well under one percent of the food arriving at the border. Brian’s point about import alerts is the sharp one. A company with a long recall history and product grown in Mexico ought to be getting extra scrutiny at the port, not the benefit of the doubt.

And then there is traceability. Congress told FDA to build a real traceback system when it passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2011. The Food Traceability Rule covers exactly the foods that keep hurting people, including leafy greens, peppers, sprouts and fresh fruits and vegetables. It was finally supposed to take effect in July 2026. Congress moved it to 2028. The trade groups say the recordkeeping is a burden with little public health benefit. This summer, Taco Bell took ten days to give the Michigan health department its produce records. My estimate, and it is an estimate, is that five hundred to a thousand fewer people would have gotten sick if the rule had been in place.

One more thing Herb flagged that deserves a closer look. FDA’s August 11 announcement on handling ready-to-eat fresh-cut produce is guidance, which means it is a recommendation and not a rule. Taylor Farms responded that it is already in compliance. That is what recommended buys you.

An update on the numbers

The case counts in Herb’s article were the ones on the board when we taped. They have moved since. CDC has now closed the iceberg lettuce outbreak at 12,883 laboratory-confirmed cases, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths across 21 states, which makes it the largest Cyclospora outbreak this country has ever recorded. The national cyclosporiasis count kept climbing after the outbreak closed, reaching 19,595 confirmed domestic cases and 1,043 hospitalizations as of September 11, with thousands more still being sorted. About 6,700 of those confirmed cases have no food attached to them at all. Closing an outbreak is not the same as answering it, and Cyclospora does not get into lettuce without human sewage getting there first.

What you can do, and what you cannot

Herb’s advice at the end of the piece is the right advice. Buy heads of lettuce and bunches of spinach instead of bags. Wash your produce in plain, slightly warm water, and understand that washing removes dirt but does not remove the risk. Peel what grows in the ground. Skip the soap and the produce washes. Do not assume organic is safer, because the GreenWise organic frozen blueberries recalled in August were organic. Shopping closer to home and keeping things simpler helps, a little.

But the honest bottom line is the one Herb lands on. You can only do so much at the sink. The rest of it has to happen upstream, in the field, on the wash line, in the inspection budget and in a traceability rule that Congress keeps pushing down the road. Consumers did not build this system and they cannot fix it one salad at a time.

A note on the polling, because it is the number I would put in front of a member of Congress. A Quinnipiac poll taken in late July, in the middle of the outbreak, found 55 percent of Americans have not much confidence or none at all in the federal government’s oversight of food safety. People are not confused. They are paying attention.

Thank you, Herb. You have been telling consumers the parts companies would rather they did not hear for a very long time, and you do it without shouting. You can find his work at Consumerman.com, and the outbreak reporting we do at Food Safety News.

Saturday, September 12, 2026

This is the tenth Saturday column. Last Saturday’s edition ran under the headline The State Matched the Outbreak Strain to the Farm’s Barns and Asked for an Egg Recall That Has Not Come; its point was that the recall had become optional and the count occasional. This week the paper moved. The egg recall came Tuesday, though nobody said so until Friday. The sprout recall notice reached FDA’s page six days late. FDA closed a romaine E. coli file Thursday and named nobody who grew it. CDC declared the largest Cyclospora outbreak in the country’s history over Friday at 12,883 while the national count passed 19,000. Closed is not the same as answered.

On Friday CDC declared the Taylor Farms de Mexico outbreak over, at 12,883 confirmed illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths in 21 states. CDC’s outbreak page says that at the peak, before the recall, more than 1,000 infections occurred in a single day, and that August averaged fewer than two; Virginia was the twenty-first state, per Food Safety News. CDC’s national case page, updated the same Friday, counts 19,595 confirmed domestically acquired cases from May 1 through September 8, 1,043 hospitalizations, two deaths, 49 states plus the District of Columbia, 9,355 confirmed cases still being sorted between domestic and travel, and at least 6,149 more never lab-confirmed; last year the window held 1,180. The subtraction is the number worth stopping on: 19,595 minus 12,883 leaves 6,712 confirmed illnesses with no food named. I wrote Thursday, as the Washington Post reported the end was near, that thirteen congressional letters have drawn no published answer and no hearing, and Friday what it would take to prevent the next one, starting with a traceability rule enforced before 2028.

FDA marked the close with a letter. Acting Deputy Commissioner Donald Prater’s September 11 letter to the produce industry asks the supply chain to apply the Produce Safety Rule, verify suppliers and develop new practices, with no case count, no company name, no country and no new requirement. FDA’s post-outbreak page says the root-cause investigation continues, that FDA has met with Mexican officials on a prevention framework, and that inspection and sampling in Mexico began August 20, the first visit to the Guanajuato site since 2019 per an Associated Press report counting foreign food inspections down from about 1,700 in 2019 to 1,140 in fiscal 2025, nearly 35 percent; Food Safety News says the results are pending. Congress should hold a hearing on what real inspections cost; my ten things that would have stopped this outbreak ran Monday.

The egg recall the state asked for came on Tuesday, and the state announced it on Friday. CDPH release NR26-029 says Happy Hens of Ramona voluntarily recalled its brand eggs on September 8. The count is unchanged at 23 sick, seven hospitalized, none dead, onsets June 21 through August 16, outbreak ongoing; two poultry-housing samples from FDA’s August 17 to 20 inspection matched the outbreak strain of Salmonella Enteritidis. The recall covers in-shell organic eggs under handler code CA-0677, lots 223, 226 and 237, sell-by September 10, 13 and 24, consumer cartons and 15-dozen foodservice cases. The lot codes are Julian pack dates, so 223 is August 11, 226 is August 14 and 237 is August 25, each sell-by thirty days later: the recall reaches August shelf stock, and almost every illness came from June and July eggs. CDPH also published a retail distribution list of 41 locations, every one in San Diego County, among them three Whole Foods stores, a home-delivery service out of Escondido and the Ramona market that is a defendant in the firm’s three complaints, though the release says Southern California and the Central Coast. I wrote up the store list Friday night and, that morning, the farm’s argument that a genetic match is not proof because no egg was tested; the federal egg rule acts on the positive house, not the egg. As of Friday night the farm’s website carried no recall notice and its shop was taking orders; Phyllis Entis had the recall that night. Marler Clark represents seven people in this outbreak.

The broccoli sprout outbreak went federal on Wednesday, and the recall notice reached FDA’s page on Thursday, six days after the recall began. FDA and CDC posted the same day: 22 sick in Idaho, Montana, Utah and Washington, two hospitalized, none dead, onsets July 7 through August 26, broccoli sprouts from Evergreen Fresh Sprouts of Moyie Springs, Idaho. Utah is new; Montana officials collected the matching sample. Evergreen initiated its recall September 4; the company notice reached FDA’s page September 10: 215 cases of six four-ounce bags, use-by September 7 through 16, three Washington distributors, shipped August 24 to September 2, crediting a third-party lab rather than the state sample. Washington’s pagelists 16 cases in eight counties; I wrote the federal notice up Wednesday. With the Minnesota alfalfa outbreak at 55, two sprout outbreaks carry 77 sick, and FDA has warned high-risk consumers off raw sprouts since 1998; I first asked for a warning label in 2000.

Phyllis Entis found the seed supplier’s name in FDA’s Enforcement Report, which is where FDA put it instead of on its advisory. The supplier in the alfalfa sprout outbreak is International Sprout Holdings of Cookeville, Tennessee, doing business as International Specialty Supply; its recall, initiated August 23, covers lot SAL2-24JB, 43,799 pounds of seed in roughly 876 fifty-pound bags, shipped to sixteen states plus Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Tahiti and Venezuela, per eFoodAlert. The outbreak stands at 55 sick in fifteen states, four hospitalized, 46 with Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, seven with Salmonella Agona and two with both. FDA’s advisory has not moved since August 31, and the second sprout grower is still unnamed.

FDA closed a romaine file Thursday, named the lettuce, and named nobody who grew it.Reference 1382, fourteen people sick with E. coli O157:H7, was posted July 1 and closed September 10 with romaine as the likely source, beyond shelf life when identified. No grower, processor, brand or county. FDA has named all of those after the product was gone at least eight times, from Dole spinach in 2006 to FreshKampo strawberries in 2022. On July 23 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency loosened its fall romaine rule, trading the attestation form for one letter per season and citing the absence of reported O157 romaine outbreaks in recent years; FDA disclosed this one six weeks later.

The files with no food named kept growing. FDA’s CORE table, stamped September 10, carries sixteen active investigations. The Salmonella Newport file posted August 26 went from 84 to 97 to 109 with traceback only, no inspection, no sampling, no advisory and no CDC notice. Oranienburg holds at 99, the I 4,[5],12:i:- file at 43, the Listeria file at nine, the largest leftover Cyclospora row at 231, and the iceberg row was still marked active the day before CDC ended the outbreak. CDC’s dashboard, dated September 9, counts 37 active multistate investigations: 21 Salmonella, eight Listeria, five Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and three Campylobacter.

Two small egg farms, one hot sauce maker and a thousand backyard flocks. Vermont said Friday that Leaping Bear Farm of Reading recalled eggs after Salmonella Enteritidis turned up in eggs and environmental samples, with fourteen Vermont residents sick and linked cases elsewhere; cartons dated June 1 through September 5 went to eighteen locations in Windsor and Windham counties, and the farm’s 1,800 hens sit under the federal egg rule’s 3,000-hen threshold, so none of its testing applied (Food Poison Journal, Food Safety News). The largest Salmonella outbreak of the year is not a food: CDC’s backyard poultry page, updated August 27 and written up this week, counts 1,061 sick, 234 hospitalized and two dead across 46 states and Puerto Rico, nearly a quarter of them children under five, the hatcheries unnamed. Connecticut told consumers Friday to throw away every bottle of Phire in the Hole hot sauce, made in Monroe without a license or an approved scheduled process and sold at a Shelton cider mill from November through August 17; the maker declined a voluntary recall and has not answered a cease-and-desist order, per WFSB, and no illnesses are reported.

The recall ledger, with Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert keeping it as she does every week. Made Fresh Salads of Bay Shore, New York, recalled 43 varieties of deli salads and cream cheese on September 6 after FDA and company environmental sampling found Listeria in the plant; the product went across New York City, no illnesses reported. Prime Line Distributors and Ferrarini USA recalled 1,513 pounds of Italian guanciale after FSIS import reinspection found Listeria monocytogenes, a Class I recall reaching eight states, per Food Safety News. Fi recalled two lots of dog supplements sold direct, on Amazon and on Chewy for possible Salmonella, written up at Food Poison Journal. FSIS also flagged 264 pounds of chicharrón potato chips from Colombia, a country not eligible to ship pork here. The full ledger is hers.

Two policy items, one in a courtroom and one in a box of t-shirts. In January the childhood immunization schedule made the hepatitis A shot a matter of shared clinical decision-making; a judge stayed the change in March and the appeal is pending. Cases fell about 95 percent after the 2006 recommendation, and making the shot optional is a very bad idea. The week of September 14 two shirts go to each of the 77 offices on House Energy and Commerce and Senate HELP, the committees that can move H.R. 7867 and S. 272, the bills that would require infant formula to be tested for C. botulinum; 52 babies were hospitalized across the ByHeart and Nara outbreaks, and one dose of antitoxin costs $69,300. A poll this week found 94 percent of Americans worried about food recalls. One firm note: Marler Clark is hiring an associate with five or more years and a paralegal with ten or more, on Bainbridge Island, at bmarler@marlerclark.com.

That’s the week — the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history closed at 12,883 while 6,712 confirmed illnesses have no food named, an egg recall made Tuesday and announced Friday, a sprout recall notice six days late, a seed supplier named by a microbiologist rather than the agency, a romaine file closed with the lettuce named and the grower not, and a Newport file at 109 with no food. Closed is not the same as answered. Check back next Saturday.

About Bill Marler

William “Bill” Marler has spent more than thirty years as a food safety lawyer and advocate—work that began with the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak and has never really stopped since. In the years that followed, he has represented victims in nearly every major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States. That case, and the movement it launched, is the subject of the book “Poisoned” and the Emmy Award–winning Netflix documentary of the same name. Bill’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker (“A Bug in the System”), the Seattle Times (“30 years after the deadly E. coli outbreak, a Seattle attorney still fights for food safety”), the Washington Post (“He helped make burgers safer. Now he’s fighting food poisoning again”), and many others.

Dozens of times a year, Bill speaks to industry, regulators, and universities across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, China, and Australia about a simple idea: outbreaks are preventable. He has testified before Congress on the Food Safety Modernization Act and teaches food safety at institutions including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He writes regularly about food litigation and food safety at Marler Blog, and in 2009 he founded Food Safety News, which he continues to publish.

The State of California published two documents on Friday, September 11, 2026. One is a consumer warning telling Californians not to eat, serve or sell Happy Hens brand eggs (CDPH release NR26-029). The other is the thing this outbreak has gone six weeks without: a list of the places that sold them. Forty-one locations, every one of them in San Diego County. The deli at the center of the outbreak is on it.

What the state said

As of September 8, 2026, twenty-three California residents are part of this outbreak. Seven were hospitalized. No deaths. Illness onsets run from June 21 through August 16, and CDPH calls the outbreak ongoing, which means more cases may still be identified. FDA inspected the Happy Hens farm from August 17 to 20 and collected environmental samples; two from poultry housing sites were positive for Salmonella Enteritidis, and whole genome sequencing matched them to the strain in the sick. San Diego County said the same thing on September 4. What is new is the last sentence: on September 8, 2026, Happy Hens voluntarily recalled its eggs.

The recall is three days old, and nobody said so

Tuesday to Thursday, the recall existed and the public did not know. The County published nothing. The farm announced nothing. As of tonight, the farm’s website still carries no notice of it. I posted this morning that there was still no recall. I was working from the whole public record, and the whole public record was wrong by three days. Phyllis Entis had the same reading tonight at eFoodAlert, and she put the number on it: the recall came six weeks after the first outbreak announcement.

Now read the date codes

The recall covers in-shell organic eggs, all grades and sizes, egg handler code CA-0677, in three lots: 223, sell by September 10; 226, sell by September 13; and 237, sell by September 24. Consumer packs of one dozen, eighteen, twenty-count flats and thirty-count flats, plus fifteen-dozen foodservice cases.

Egg lot codes are Julian pack dates. 2026 is not a leap year, so code 223 is August 11, code 226 is August 14, and code 237 is August 25. Check that against the sell-by dates printed next to them: each one falls exactly thirty days after the pack date I just calculated. The arithmetic closes on itself, which is how you know the reading is right.

The illnesses in this outbreak began on June 21 and the most recent was detected on August 16. The recalled eggs were packed on August 11, August 14 and August 25. Two of those codes postdate all but the last five days of the outbreak. One postdates the outbreak entirely. What has been recalled is the product still sitting inside its sell-by window — shelf stock. The June and July cartons that actually made people sick are not covered, because their sell-by dates passed weeks ago.

That is not a complaint about the codes. It is the whole argument for timeliness. A recall issued in early August would have reached the eggs that were hurting people. A recall issued on September 8 reaches the eggs that are left.

The forty-one locations

This is CDPH’s retail distribution list, stamped UPDATED: 9/11/2026. Phone numbers for each location are in the state’s PDF.

RetailerAddressCityZip
Boney’s Bayside155 Orange AveCoronado92118
Carlsbad Ranch Market6120 Paseo Del Norte Q1Carlsbad92011
Cream of the Crop2009 S Coast HwyOceanside92054
Farm Fresh to You (delivery service)EscondidoEscondido92029
Fox Point Farms1200 Fox Point Farms LaneEncinitas92024
Frazier Farms La Mesa8401 Fletcher PkwyLa Mesa91942
Frazier Oceanside1820 Oceanside BlvdOceanside92054
Frazier Vista225 Vista Village DrVista92083
Golden Door Country Store314 Deer Springs RoadSan Marcos92069
Grocery Outlet Oceanside1527 Mission AveOceanside92058
Grocery Outlet Pt Loma3948 W Point Loma BlvdSan Diego92110
Grocery Outlet San Marcos125 S Rancho Santa Fe RdSan Marcos92078
Grocery Outlet San Ysidro444 E San Ysidro BlvdSan Ysidro92173
Happy Hens (farm store)2176 Ramona St.Ramona92065
Harvest Ranch162 S Rancho Santa Fe RdEncinitas92024
Jensens955 Catalina BlvdSan Diego92106
Jimbos 4S10511 4S Commons Dr Ste 155San Diego92127
Jimbos Carlsbad1923 Calle BarcelonaCarlsbad92009
Jimbos Del Mar12853 El Camino RealSan Diego92130
Jimbos Escondido1633 S Centre City PkwyEscondido92025
Lofty Carlsbad2742 State StCarlsbad92008
Lofty Encinitas90 N Coast Hwy 101 Ste 214Encinitas92024
Lofty La Costa7740 El Camino Real Unit ACarlsbad92009
Lofty Little Italy444 W Cedar StSan Diego92101
Lofty Solana132 S Cedros AveSolana Beach92075
Lucky Bolt10920 Roselle St Ste 105San Diego92121
Nectarine Grove948 N Coast Hwy 101Encinitas92024
Nectarine Grove DM2720 Via De La Valle Ste E110Del Mar92014
Origins Grocer (South Park)2361 30th StreetSan Diego92104
Peoples4765 Voltaire StSan Diego92107
Perennial Pastures3427 N Twin Oaks Valley RdSan Marcos92069
RFN (Ramona Family Naturals)325 6th StRamona92065
Sand and Straw629 Mar Vista DrVista92081
Trattoria Positano2171 San Elijo AveCardiff92007
Valley Farm Del Mar1555 Camino Del Mar Space #107Del Mar92014
Valley Farm La Jolla6902 La Jolla BlvdLa Jolla92037
Valley Farm Spring Valley9040 Campo RdSpring Valley91977
Whole Foods Del Mar2600 Via De La Valle Ste 100Del Mar92014
Whole Foods Hillcrest711 University AveSan Diego92103
Whole Foods La Jolla8825 Villa La Jolla DrLa Jolla92037
Windmill Farms6386 Del Cerro BlvdSan Diego92120

Source: California Department of Public Health, Food and Drug Branch, Recall: Happy Hens retail distribution list, updated September 11, 2026.

Three things worth noticing about that list

First, the geography does not match the warning. CDPH’s own release says these eggs went to restaurants, grocery stores and farmers markets in Southern California and the Central Coast. Every address on the list is in San Diego County. There is no Orange County entry, no Los Angeles entry and nothing north of there. Either the distribution was narrower than the release describes, or the list is not finished. It is stamped with an update date, which is how the state marks a list it expects to add to — it did the same thing in the Vega Farms egg recall last December. Anyone outside the county should read this as incomplete, not as clearance.

Second, one entry on the list has no shelf to clear. Farm Fresh to You is a home-delivery service, listed out of Escondido with an 800 number. A grocery store can pull a case in the morning. A delivery box is already in somebody’s kitchen, and the only way to reach it is to call the customer.

Third, and this is the limit of the document: the list says which locations received Happy Hens eggs. It does not say which of them received the three recalled codes, and it cannot tell a customer whether the carton they bought in July came from one of the two positive hen houses. RFN at 325 6th Street in Ramona is Ramona Family Naturals Market, the deli where this started. The farm’s own store in Ramona is on the list too.

Meanwhile, on the farm’s website

As of tonight, happy-hens.com carries no recall notice anywhere. The store locator is live and invites you to find the stores “currently carrying our exceptional eggs.” The online store is taking egg orders — nine egg listings with working Add to Cart buttons, from a $10.35 dozen to a thirty-count at $26.65, for pickup at the Ramona farm store.

The reel arguing that a genetic match is not proof because no egg was tested no longer appears in the Instagram feed embedded on the home page. I am not going to say it was deleted; an embedded feed rotates. What sits at the top of that feed tonight is a new post about the difference between cage-free, free-range and pasture-raised, and hens raised outdoors “the way God intended.” The reel asking, “Was the actual product ever tested?” is still up. The answer to that question, incidentally, is that the County said on September 4 that egg-sample results were pending. A week later, nobody has published them.

If you bought these eggs

Throw them away or take them back for a refund. Do not serve them. Wash and sanitize anything they touched with hot soapy water or run it through the dishwasher. If you find these eggs still for sale, the CDPH complaint hotline is (800) 495-3232.

If you got sick after eating eggs or anything made with raw egg — mayonnaise, aioli, Caesar dressing, hollandaise, a raw-egg protein drink — see a doctor and ask specifically for a stool culture. Keep the carton, or the receipt, or a photograph of either. And ask the laboratory or the health department to preserve your isolate. Whole genome sequencing of that isolate is what ties one person’s illness to everyone else’s in an outbreak, and isolates get discarded as a matter of routine.

Our firm represents seven people sickened in this outbreak.

We spend a great deal of energy in this country worrying about imported food. FSMA gave FDA the Foreign Supplier Verification Program, which makes the American importer responsible for confirming that a foreign supplier produces food in a way that meets our standards. We keep import alerts. We detain shipments without physical examination. The premise behind all of it is that food grown somewhere else deserves an extra look before it reaches an American table.

Canada applies that same premise to us, and the commodity it applies it to is romaine lettuce grown in California.

What Canada requires

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency maintains a page titled Temporary import requirements for romaine lettuce from the United States. The 2026 edition takes effect September 24 and runs through December 17. The conditions are imposed under section 20(3) of the Safe Food for Canadians Act, which allows the Minister to attach conditions to a licence.

The reason is stated plainly at the top of the page. Romaine imported from the United States has been associated with several E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks in Canada and the United States, and American investigations have identified a recurring geographic source: the Salinas Valley counties of Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Benito and Monterey.

If the lettuce comes from anywhere else in the United States, the importer must hold a proof of origin, meaning a signed and dated letter on the exporter’s letterhead naming the state and county of harvest. If it comes from those four counties, or if no proof of origin exists, the importer has to do more.

This is the seventh consecutive fall. The first round ran October 7 through December 31, 2020, and CFIA has renewed the conditions every harvest season since.

Why Canada did it in the first place

Canadians were among the sick.

In the 2017 outbreak, the Public Health Agency of Canada counted 42 cases across five eastern provinces, 17 hospitalizations and one death. Romaine was identified as the source. The cause of the contamination never was.

In the spring 2018 Yuma outbreak, eight Canadian illnesses were genetically similar to the American cases, reported from British Columbia to Quebec.

In the fall 2018 outbreak, FDA traced the lettuce to the Central Coast growing regions of northern and central California. PHAC noted that romaine grown in Canada, including hydroponic and greenhouse romaine, was not involved. CFIA imposed import controls during that outbreak and said it was reviewing control measures going forward. The seasonal rule is what came out of that review.

What changed for 2026

Until this year, a shipment from those four counties needed an attestation form and a Certificate of Analysis for every consignment, uploaded at the time of the import declaration. The testing protocol is not casual: 60 individual random sample units of 25 grams each, 1,500 grams per sampling lot, analyzed by a laboratory accredited to ISO/IEC 17025, with a presumptive positive treated as a positive unless confirmed negative within 24 hours.

Three things changed. The attestation form is gone. Supporting documents no longer have to be uploaded with the import declaration, and importers simply retain them and produce them if CFIA asks. And there is now an alternative to lot-by-lot testing.

An importer may instead obtain a letter confirming that the LGMA member supplying the lettuce participates in the California LGMA Romaine Test & Learn Program. The letter needs the member’s name, a date, a statement of participation, and a signature. CFIA says it may be obtained once at the beginning of the import period.

A season of shipments can now ride on one signed letter that nobody looks at unless something goes wrong.

CFIA gives its reason: the absence of reported E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks linked to romaine lettuce in recent years, together with strengthened control measures for Salinas Valley romaine.

The timing

That page was last modified July 23, 2026.

On September 10, 2026, FDA closed CORE investigation #1382 and named romaine lettuce as the vehicle in a 14-case E. coli O157:H7 outbreak. FDA had carried that file since July 1 with no food identified, and it identified one on the way out the door, with no grower and no processor named. I wrote about it yesterday.

CFIA’s stated premise for relaxing its rule was published six weeks before FDA acknowledged a 2026 romaine O157:H7 outbreak, and the season that rule governs had not yet begun when FDA acknowledged it.

I do not fault CFIA for failing to know in July what FDA would publish in September. That is the problem, not the excuse. A foreign regulator calibrating its controls on American lettuce can only work from what our agency publishes, and our agency published nothing until the file was closed.

What a participation letter is, and what it is not

Test & Learn is a good idea. LGMA launched it in July 2023 as a two-year study, folded it into the required food safety standards that September with audits starting in January 2024, and in August 2025 extended data collection through September 30, 2027 while adding a root cause interview for any member that submits a positive sample. Members’ pre-harvest and finished-product results are aggregated on Western Growers’ GreenLink platform. The model was borrowed, deliberately, from aviation safety data sharing.

But it is a data collection and analysis program. It is not a release test for a truckload. A letter confirming that a handler participates tells an importer something about the supplier’s program. It tells the importer nothing about the lettuce in the trailer. That is the trade CFIA made, and it made it with its eyes open, since the page lays both options out side by side.

A caution for Ottawa

There is one more thing the Canadians should hear, and I offer it as a friend of the rule they just relaxed.

CFIA’s stated reason was the absence of reported E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks linked to romaine lettuce in recent years. Read that sentence again, and put the weight where it belongs. Reported.

In November 2024, while CFIA’s temporary conditions were in force for that season, an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak tied to romaine lettuce sickened 89 people in 15 states. Thirty-six were hospitalized. Seven developed hemolytic uremic syndrome. One person died. FDA issued no public announcement while it was happening. Its first public mention of the outbreak was a line on the CORE table after the investigation was closed.

I spent the year after that prying the traceback summary loose. When the redactions finally came off, the file led to a single processor, Taylor Farms of California in Salinas, and a single grower, Anthony Costa & Sons in Soledad, which sits in Monterey County, one of the four counties on CFIA’s own list. Taylor Farms has denied that its product was the source. The documents are here.

Now put #1382 next to it. FDA posted that file on July 1, 2026 with no food identified, carried it that way for ten weeks, and named romaine on September 10 as it closed. Measured by CFIA’s test, there was no reported American romaine outbreak this summer, right up to the day there was, seven weeks after CFIA published its rationale.

A regulator in Ottawa scanning for reported American romaine outbreaks is scanning a feed whose contents FDA decides. The absence of reported outbreaks is not the same thing as the absence of outbreaks. It can just as easily be the absence of reporting.

The part that should sting

Set what the Canadian system asks of us against what our own system delivered this summer.

A Canadian importer has to be able to produce a document naming the state and the county where the lettuce was harvested. FDA closed a romaine outbreak without naming a grower, a processor, a county or a brand.

Canada tells its importers exactly which four California counties are the recurring problem. FDA’s handling of #1382 told American consumers nothing of the kind, and told them nothing at all until the investigation was over.

We ask the rest of the world to verify its suppliers before food crosses our border. A neighbor asks the same thing of us, and our answer this fall is a letter obtained once in September saying the grower is enrolled in a program.

I have been suing lettuce companies for nearly thirty years. The counties have not changed. The pathogen has not changed. What changes is how much the public gets told, and when.

If Canada wants to know whether the lighter touch was the right call, the thing to watch is not whether FDA announces a romaine outbreak. It is what shows up on the CORE table after the file is closed.

In July I wrote that I had bought Congress a t-shirt — one for every member. The shirts arrived in August. This month they are being hand-delivered, and I have narrowed the aim.

Seventy-seven offices are getting two shirts each, carried in by hand: all 54 members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and all 23 members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Those are the two committees with jurisdiction over the FDA, and between them they hold every procedural key to the only bill that would fix this. Everyone else in Congress still gets one. These offices get two, and they get a person at the counter rather than a package on a mail cart.

The timing is deliberate. The House came back for a single week on August 31 and went home again for Labor Day. The Senate has been out since the first week of August. Both chambers return Monday, September 14. The shirts land in the week they walk back in.

I have written each of those committees twice. Energy and Commerce got a letter on June 23 supporting H.R. 7867, with the statements and photographs of fourteen families attached, and a follow-up on August 28. HELP got a letter on June 29 and a follow-up on August 28. Four letters. No reply to any of them. I have also written Secretary Kennedy, and when Chairman Cassidy demanded answers from Nara and ByHeart I gave him full credit for it in public. None of it has produced a markup.

What changed between the first letters and the second ones is that the argument stopped being an argument. On August 27 the CDC closed the Nara Organics investigation and did it without a hedge, finding that the formula was contaminated with Clostridium botulinum and made infants sick — where its earlier update had said only that the formula might be contaminated. Then came the part that should have moved the calendar. Whole genome sequencing linked a patient sample from the Nara outbreak to a patient sample, product samples and an ingredient sample collected during the 2025 ByHeart investigation. The same organism, in a baby fed one brand and, in the product, and the ingredient of the other.

In June I told both committees that the contamination had not struck two unrelated companies by chance, that it had traveled through one shared supply stream the system missed twice. That was reasoning from a traceback and a trade-press report. It is no longer reasoning. A strain does not move between two babies who never drank the same product by accident. It moves through the thing they shared, and the only thing these two shared was an ingredient — milk supplied by Organic West Milk, spray-dried by Dairy Farmers of America.

Forty-eight infants in the ByHeart outbreak, across seventeen states, the largest infant botulism outbreak in American history. Four in the Nara outbreak, in California, Pennsylvania and Washington, with onsets between April 20 and May 31 of this year. Fifty-two babies hospitalized, many of them on ventilators, each one treated with BabyBIG antitoxin that the State of California prices at $69,300 a dose.

And the rule has not moved an inch. Federal regulation still requires powdered infant formula manufacturers to test finished product for exactly two organisms — Salmonella and Cronobacter. That is 21 C.F.R. § 106.55, and C. botulinum is not on it. It was not on it in November 2025. It was not on it this spring. It is not on it this morning. The FDA named the organism itself, by genus and species, in a March 8, 2023 Call-to-Action letter to the entire powdered formula industry — three and a half years ago, and more than two years before the first ByHeart baby got sick. The hazard was on the government’s own record. The rule never caught up to it.

H.R. 7867 fixes the part a statute can fix. It puts C. botulinum on the required testing list, mandates environmental monitoring inside the plants where this powder is made and holds foreign manufacturers to American standards. It is bipartisan. The Health Subcommittee held its hearing on April 29. It has sat in Energy and Commerce ever since, waiting on a markup nobody has scheduled. The Senate passed S. 272 the same day that hearing happened — 22 to 0 in committee, unanimous consent on the floor — which tells you this is not a hard vote once somebody puts it on the calendar. S. 272 is the narrower bill. It reaches the organisms already on the list and does not reach the one that paralyzed these fifty-two children.

So, the shirts go with four asks, the same four in both buildings. Mark up H.R. 7867 and report it favorably. Hold the oversight hearing, with the FDA, Dairy Farmers of America, Organic West Milk, Nara Organics and ByHeart at the table, because the questions are sharper now that there is a laboratory result to ask about. Put the parents at the witness table — they have written to you already, and they are willing to come and say it in person. And put a written question to the FDA with a deadline: what has the root cause investigation found, does the agency intend to require this testing by regulation, and if so, when. A date certain would tell you whether legislation is necessary or merely useful. The absence of one would tell you something too.

A t-shirt in a plastic bottle will not produce a markup. But it is small, it is strange, it does not throw away easily, and it says the whole argument in one line. They will be sitting on a desk in Rayburn and in Dirksen next week, in every office that can put this bill on a calendar. Somebody is going to unroll one and read it out loud.

I have been suing companies since 1993, and I would close the doors tomorrow if Congress made this product safe enough that nobody needed me. Fifty-two families already know what the sequencing means. They would like to know that Congress does too.

The four letters

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/08/HR_7867_Support_Letter_6_23_26_WDM_FINAL.pdf

Letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, June 23, 2026, with Appendix A — statements and photographs of fourteen families.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/08/Marler_Senate_HELP_Letter_Letterhead.pdf

Letter to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, June 29, 2026.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/08/HR7867_Follow_Up_Letter_8-28-26.pdf

Follow-up letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, August 28, 2026.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/08/Senate_HELP_Follow-Up_Letter_8_28_26_WDM.pdf

Follow-up letter to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, August 28, 2026.

Yes, it is past time for a warning label on sprouts. I first asked FDA for one in 2000. Twenty-six years later nobody has to invent it — the government wrote the template in 1998 and put it on a bottle of unpasteurized apple cider.

I have lost track of the number of “sproutbreaks” over the years. My friends at Barfblog kept a running table of at least 55 sprout outbreaks worldwide and 15,233 people sick since 1988, last updated in 2014. FDA’s own guidance to the sprout seed industry counts 52 American outbreaks since 1996 and more than 2,700 illnesses. Whichever number you prefer, it keeps going up. Two are open as I write this.

ProductGrowerCasesStatesHospitalized
Alfalfa sprouts (Calco, Everything Sprouts)Everything Sprouts, LLC55154
Broccoli sproutsEvergreen Fresh Sprouts, LLC2242

Sources: CDC outbreak pages, updated September 1 and 9, 2026. Washington is on both lists, so the combined footprint is 77 people in 18 states.

The alfalfa outbreak involves Salmonella and three strains of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, with two people carrying both. The broccoli sprout outbreak is a different grower, state and serotype, and FDA says they are unrelated. Both companies have recalled. Neither package carried a warning before anyone got sick.

The advice is twenty-eight years old, and it has never been on a bag.

FDA first advised high-risk consumers away from raw sprouts on August 31, 1998, and reissued it on July 9, 1999, with Commissioner Jane Henney saying that despite everything the industry had tried, the best way to control the risk was not to eat raw sprouts. FDA broadened it on October 2, 2002 to cover mung bean and lightly cooked sprouts.

CDC said the same thing in its own peer-reviewed journal in 1999: treatments of seed and sprouts cannot remove all the bacteria present, the conditions that germinate a seed are the conditions bacteria like best, and people at high risk should probably not eat raw sprouts at all. The same advice appears on every sprout outbreak page CDC has posted since, including the two open this week.

Twenty-eight years of consistent federal advice, delivered entirely through press releases, talk papers and web pages. A press release has the shelf life of one news cycle. A package sits in a refrigerator until somebody eats what is inside it.

FDA already wrote this label once, for juice, and it took ten weeks.

After the unpasteurized juice outbreaks of the mid-1990s, FDA proposed a warning statement on April 24, 1998, published the final rule on July 8, 1998, and made it effective September 8, 1998, in time for that year’s cider season. The rule sits at 21 CFR 101.17(g), and the required words are these:

WARNING: This product has not been pasteurized and, therefore, may contain harmful bacteria that can cause serious illness in children, the elderly, and persons with weakened immune systems.

FDA was explicit about why it moved that fast. Its own guidance explains that the warning label was meant to provide a measure of public safety until juice HACCP rules could be established and implemented. The label came first. The process rule came later.

Sprouts got that order backwards. The Produce Safety Rule gave sprouts a subpart of their own — seed treatment, testing of spent sprout irrigation water, environmental monitoring for Listeria — with compliance dates running from 2017 through 2019. Sprouts are the only produce commodity in that rule with its own section, because everyone involved agreed sprouts are different. Sprouts got the rule. Sprouts never got the label. And here we are in September 2026 with two outbreaks running at once, one of them from a company FDA had warned sixteen months earlier.

The Food Code already bars sprouts for the vulnerable. It stops at the front door.

This is the part that ought to end the argument. FDA’s Food Code, section 3-801.11(G), says raw seed sprouts may not be served or offered for sale in a ready-to-eat form to a highly susceptible population. That means hospitals, nursing homes, dialysis centers, child and adult day care, assisted living and senior centers. Most states have adopted some version of it.

The finding has already been made, by the federal government, in a model code the states enforce. Raw sprouts are too dangerous to put in front of a frail eighty-five-year-old. She is protected at dinner in the nursing home. She drives herself to the grocery store and buys the identical product with nothing on it at all. Same for the pregnant woman, the toddler and the man in the middle of chemotherapy.

The biggest names in American food already made this call, on their own.

Large retailers and restaurant chains looked at the same facts and quit.

  • Walmart quietly pulled raw sprouts from its U.S. stores and clubs in October 2010, citing “the inherent microbial risks associated with sprouts.”
  • Jason’s Deli dropped them across 230 restaurants in January 2012. Its spokesman told The Packer the chain had “lost confidence in sprouts.” It still names 2012 as the year it dropped sprouts for safety.
  • Erbert and Gerbert’s pulled alfalfa sprouts system-wide in February 2012 and said so in a press release. CEO Eric Wolfe said removing them was how the chain eliminated the risk. It had no problem with its own supply.
  • Kroger, then 2,425 stores in 31 states, stopped on October 22, 2012. Its food safety chief, Payton Pruett, said pathogens may sit inside the seed where processing cannot reach them — the reason CDC gave in 1999 and FDA gives now.

Jimmy John’s is the counterexample, and it matters. The chain announced in February 2012 that clover sprouts were gone permanently. Three months later, at a meeting with FDA, it said it would keep serving sprouts from approved suppliers. More outbreaks followed. A voluntary decision lasts exactly as long as the company wants it to.

Every one of those companies reached a conclusion and acted on it. Not one was required to share it with the shopper. Walmart’s was a quiet one — the customer who stopped finding sprouts was never told why.

What the label should say.

Here is my proposal. It borrows the shape of the juice warning, then says out loud what these infections do to people:

WARNING: Sprouts are a raw agricultural product and may contain harmful bacteria (not limited to E. coli, Campylobacter, Listeria and Salmonella) and have been linked to serious injury and death. Pregnant women, infants, children, the elderly, and persons with lowered resistance to disease (immune compromised) have the highest risk of harm, which includes bloody diarrhea, vomiting, fever, dehydration, Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, Reactive Arthritis, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, miscarriage, or death.

That is longer than the juice warning, deliberately. The juice text tells a shopper there may be bacteria in the bottle. It does not tell her the bacteria can take a child’s kidneys or end a pregnancy. Every consequence on that list is documented in the sprout literature, and I have sat across a table from people living with most of them.

The juice text’s opening line cannot be borrowed. Sprouts are never pasteurized and cannot be, because the heat that kills the bacteria also kills the seed. “Raw agricultural product” is the honest substitute.

If FDA balks at fitting all of that on a five-ounce clamshell, the answer is two placements rather than a weaker warning. The package carries the core statement:

WARNING: Sprouts are a raw product that may contain harmful bacteria, including E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria, that can cause serious illness, permanent injury or death in children, the elderly, pregnant women, and persons with weakened immune systems. Bacteria may be inside the seed and cannot be washed off.

A shelf placard at the point of sale carries the full list. The juice rule itself allowed the statement on signs and placards for a period, so that precedent sits in the same rulemaking.

Three questions a rulemaking would have to settle.

Scope: all sprouts, or only the ones normally eaten raw? FDA’s 2002 advisory covered raw and lightly cooked, which suggests all of them. Delivery: a package label handles retail, but what about the deli case and the sandwich counter, where no package exists? Exemption: sprouts cooked through before service should be exempt, the way pasteurized juice is. That gives the industry a path rather than a verdict.

Twenty-eight years of federal advice. Twenty-six years since I first asked for the label. More than fifty American outbreaks. Two open this minute, seventy-seven people sick, six in the hospital. The advice exists. The finding exists. The template exists, and FDA wrote it in ten weeks the last time it decided something mattered. The only piece missing is the sentence on the bag.

Eben-Haezer’s Happy Hens of Ramona, California has posted two new Instagram reels, embedded on its own website as of September 11, 2026, arguing that the Salmonella FDA found in its hen houses does not tie its eggs to anyone’s illness because the match came from “environmental samples—not from the contents of an actual egg.” San Diego County’s count in the Ramona outbreak stands at 23 people sick and seven hospitalized, five of them sickened by the eggs directly, and there is still no recall.

The farm’s two new reels make one argument: no egg was tested.

The first reel, headed “Environmental VS Egg Sampling,” explains that an environmental sample “can come from a surface, piece of equipment, floor, nest boxes, or perch area,” that “bacteria exist naturally in the world around us,” and that “if we are finding bacteria in an environment, this does not automatically mean the food produced there was contaminated.” It ends with the question the farm wants asked: “Was the actual product ever tested?” The second reel takes on the sequencing: “a genetic match is not the same thing as proving where an illness came from. The type of sample matters. In our case, the reported match was from environmental samples—not from the contents of an actual egg.” Its last line is “Similar bacteria ≠ automatically proven source.” Neither reel carries a date on the farm’s page; both appeared there after Wednesday morning.

The County did not report similar bacteria. It reported the outbreak strain, in two of seven houses.

San Diego County’s September 4 release is short and specific. FDA sampled the floors, perch rails and nest boxes of the farm’s hen houses beginning August 17. “Salmonella was found by the FDA in two of seven hen houses tested.” “Genetic testing of the salmonella linked the farm to the strains from ill San Diegans.” The California Department of Public Health “shared the FDA results with the owners of Happy Hens and recommended the farm issue an egg recall voluntarily.” Egg test results were pending. Whole genome sequencing does not find similar bacteria; it finds the same bacteria, and the strain in those two houses is the strain in 23 people. I wrote about that release the day it came out, and about the farm’s first answer, that nobody asked for a recall.

The federal egg rule treats an environmental positive as the trigger, not a footnote.

FDA’s shell egg rule, 21 C.F.R. § 118.6, is built on environmental testing. A producer with 3,000 or more laying hens swabs the poultry house, and when a house tests positive for Salmonella Enteritidis the producer has two choices: divert every egg from that flock to pasteurization, or test the eggs, four times at two-week intervals, 1,000 eggs a test, and divert on the first positive. The rule does not wait for a positive egg before it acts on a positive house. FDA wrote it that way because eggs from an infected flock carry the organism inside the shell at a rate low enough that a laboratory can go through thousands of eggs before it finds one. Environmental testing is the screen because egg testing is a weak one. A farm holding up the absence of a positive egg is holding up the reason the rule exists. Happy Hens’ own website, as quoted by the San Diego Union-Tribune in August, put the flock at 14,000 hens, and a state agriculture spokesperson confirmed to the same paper that FDA inspected the farm.

The farm announced the egg tests itself on August 31. The two weeks are up on Monday.

On August 31 the farm’s own Instagram account said FDA’s additional testing had come back with two samples positive for Salmonella Enteritidis, that product from the “affected sites” was being held, and that 4,000 eggs would be tested over the next two weeks. Four tests of 1,000 eggs is § 118.6 running as written. Two weeks from August 31 is September 14. The reel asking “Was the actual product ever tested?” comes from the account that told its followers the product was being tested, and it does not say what the tests have shown so far. The farm is the party that would know first.

What the reels leave out.

They do not mention that the match was to the outbreak strain. They do not mention that the state recommended a recall on September 4 and that none has been issued. They do not mention 23 sick, seven hospitalized, or the five people the County says were sickened by the eggs themselves, not by the deli’s mayonnaise. They do not mention that the same account announced two Salmonella Enteritidis positives eleven days ago, or the 4,000-egg test it said was underway. They do not mention the County’s instruction to every retail food facility not to use or distribute the eggs associated with the outbreak, or the carton that may still be in somebody’s refrigerator. And they do not mention that on September 8 three lawsuits were filed in San Diego Superior Court on behalf of people who ate the eggs. My firm filed them, and now represents seven people in this outbreak.

What the reel saysWhat the public record saysSource
“the reported match was from environmental samples—not from the contents of an actual egg”FDA found Salmonella in two of seven houses; genetic testing linked the farm to the patient strains; egg results pending; CDPH recommended a recallSan Diego County, Sept. 4
“Was the actual product ever tested?”The farm said 4,000 eggs would be tested over two weeks from Aug. 31, which runs to Sept. 14; no result has been published by the farm or any agencyHappy Hens Instagram, Aug. 31
“Similar bacteria ≠ automatically proven source”A positive house means divert the eggs or test 4,000 of them; the rule acts on the house, not the egg21 C.F.R. § 118.6

Sources: happy-hens.com embedded reels (undated, present Sept. 11, 2026); San Diego County News Center release of Sept. 4, 2026; @trulyhappyhens post of Aug. 31, 2026; eCFR, 21 C.F.R. § 118.6, read Sept. 11, 2026. Check: 4 tests × 1,000 eggs = 4,000 eggs; August 31 + 14 days = September 14; 18 deli cases + 5 egg cases = 23.

Outbreak investigations have never waited for a positive egg.

The Midwest Poultry Services outbreak that CDC declared over on September 3 ended at 134 sick in 18 states. FDA’s environmental samples at that farm matched the outbreak strain, and the company recalled its eggs in July. The evidence in Ramona is the evidence that produced that recall: sick people, a supplier the traceback reached, and the outbreak strain in the houses. The difference is that the company here has decided to argue with it on Instagram, and the agencies that hold the results have let it. The County’s release is the only official word since September 4. CDPH, whose recommendation the farm turned down, has issued no release of its own that I can find.

The reel is right about one thing. The type of sample matters. A swab from a perch rail in a house that carries the outbreak strain, in a flock that laid the eggs the sick people ate, is the sample the federal rule was written around. The farm says eggs from the two positive houses are being held and the rest are still being sold. Nobody outside the farm has said the rest are clean. Twenty-three people, seven of them hospitalized, are waiting on a test the farm says it started two weeks ago.