Before I file it, I am asking for comments on a draft citizen petition asking the Food and Drug Administration to require that powdered infant formula, and the dairy ingredients it is made from, be tested for the bacteria that cause infant botulism. The draft, with 31 footnotes to public sources and four appendices, is posted here: https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/10/C.-botulinum-Petition-10.15.26-WDM.pdf

I am filing it with twenty-three parents of infants who were hospitalized with botulism after being fed powdered formula – twenty-one from the ByHeart outbreak and two from the Nara Organics outbreak. I represent each of those families in litigation, and the petition says so.

Why it is needed

Federal regulation, 21 C.F.R. § 106.55(e), requires infant formula manufacturers to test finished product for two organisms: Cronobacter and Salmonella. FDA added Cronobacter to that list in 2014 on a record of about one reported illness a year, because it concluded that voluntary industry testing might not be enough for a food that is the sole source of nutrition for infants.

On March 8, 2023, the FDA Commissioner wrote to the entire powdered infant formula industry and named Clostridium botulinum as a hazard to be considered in designing controls.

Since then, 52 infants have been hospitalized with botulism in two outbreaks. ByHeart Whole Nutrition Infant Formula sickened 48 infants in 17 states, with illness onsets from December 2023 through November 2025. Nara Organics Whole Milk Organic Infant Formula sickened four infants in California, Pennsylvania and Washington in April and May 2026. Every one of those babies was hospitalized.

On August 27, 2026, FDA reported that whole genome sequencing linked the two outbreaks. Formula from both brands was made with milk supplied by Organic West Milk and spray dried by Dairy Farmers of America. FDA says the evidence points to a common source.

The organism is still not on the list.

The bacteria came in with the ingredient

ByHeart reported 472 environmental samples from its plants – food-contact surfaces, the areas around them and HVAC filters. Every one was negative. FDA, on the other hand, found the organism in a lot of organic whole milk powder that matched a sick infant by whole genome sequencing. A rule aimed only at the plant environment would have found nothing.

When FDA sampled 48 powdered milk samples from four suppliers to infant formula makers in February 2026, two came back positive for a Clostridium carrying a botulinum toxin gene. During the 2025 investigation, the milk supplier gave FDA an incomplete customer list that left out Nara’s manufacturers, and the first Nara baby got sick 160 days after the ByHeart recall. WJLA reported last week that FDA traced the milk to 22 dairies that have never been publicly identified.

Testing is possible now. ByHeart ran about 5,000 C. botulinum tests during its root-cause investigation, and it now says it tests all dairy ingredients, bulk powder and finished product before release. Nothing requires ByHeart to continue, or any other company to begin. At a July 2026 roundtable, FDA presented an interim testing method, still pending validation.

What I see as the fix

The petition asks FDA to finish what it started in 2023. In order of priority:

1. Add the organism to the testing list. Add botulinum neurotoxin-producing clostridia to the finished-product table at § 106.55(e), with a result of none detected, at not fewer than thirty 200-gram samples per production aggregate or an equivalent plan.

2. Test the dairy ingredients before they are used. Require testing of each lot of whole milk powder, nonfat dry milk, milk protein concentrate, whey and similar ingredients, with a negative result as a condition of use.

3. Notify FDA within one business day of any confirmed positive, whether or not the product has left the plant.

4. Finalize the test method within 180 days, and say that the older direct-plating method is not good enough.

5. Know where the milk came from. Require supplier verification and lot-level records identifying the drying facility and each dairy farm.

6. Environmental monitoring as a secondary control.

7. In the alternative, grant what can be granted now, with priority on ingredient testing and the method.

No new law is needed. The list is FDA’s own, and the Commissioner can amend it. Doing so would also matter to Congress: S. 272, which passed the Senate unanimously in April, requires one-business-day notice for any organism on that list. Add botulism to the list, and that notice requirement reaches it automatically.

The petition does not ask FDA to ban any product or brand.

What comments are being sought?

I want to hear from scientists, laboratories, public health officials, formula manufacturers, dairy processors, pediatricians and parents. In particular:

Is thirty 200-gram samples the right finished-product plan, and is it workable at commercial scale? Is the list of dairy ingredients right, and is the exemption for ingredients that have gone through a validated spore-reduction process drawn correctly? Is farm-level traceability practical, and what would it take? Are the environmental monitoring provisions useful, given that ByHeart’s plant testing found nothing? What data on cost, laboratory capacity or method performance should be in the record? And – because the certification requires it – what information unfavorable to the petition am I missing?

Edits and redlines are welcome. If you would like the Word version to mark up, email me and I will send it.

Comments should be emailed to bmarler@marlerclark.com by Friday, October 30, 2026.

I took the same approach with my raw milk cheese warning label petition and my sprout warning label petition, and the comments made both of them better documents. Babies cannot read a label or be warned. The testing has to happen before the can is opened.

Every few years someone asks what job in the federal government I would want. It is a fair question to put to a lawyer who has spent thirty-three years asking the government to do its job. The short answer is that the job I would want does not exist, and I have been asking for it to be created since 2002. The longer answer starts with the one time I applied for the next best thing.

I applied once. The industry went nuts.

In the fall of 2008, with the Obama administration on the way and the Under Secretary for Food Safety post at USDA coming open, I put my name in. I had donated and raised more than $1 million for the campaign, and my kids went with Sasha and Malia to the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus concert the night before the inauguration. In November I published an open letter to whoever would get the job, calling for an end to what I called E. coli conservatism. In January 2009 the Washington Post listed me among the names being mentioned, and in February I confirmed to Meatingplace that I had applied. I went through the FBI background checks. That summer Civil Eats ran a piece headlined “Bill Marler for FSIS”, and Food Democracy Now asked its members to write President Obama and Secretary Vilsack on my behalf.

The timing matters. While the vetting was going on in 2008, I was also spending about $500,000 of my own money with Dr. Mansour Samadpour’s Institute for Environmental Health to test 5,000 retail packages of ground beef for the non-O157 E. coli strains FSIS did not then treat as adulterants. About 2 percent came back positive. The results went into the petition I filed with FSIS in October 2009, and in 2011 FSIS declared the Big Six adulterants, with testing beginning in June 2012. Critics said I had spent the money to drum up business. I spent it to end a line of business, which is what happened. 

That was the candidate the industry was objecting to.

The meat and poultry industry’s reaction to the idea of that trial lawyer running its regulator was about what you would expect, only louder. The job then sat empty for most of two years. It had been vacant since my friend, Dr. Richard Raymond retired; Dr. Elisabeth Hagen (a far better candidate than me) did not receive a recess appointment until August 2010, and the Senate did not confirm her until that September.

I went back to suing people, which is apparently all I am qualified for.

I tell the story because the question deserves a real answer, and the real answer is a job description.

The perfect job: running the one food safety agency I asked for in 2002

On August 4, 2002, in the middle of the ConAgra ground beef recall, I wrote an op-ed for the Denver Post called “Four Steps to Safer Food.” It asked for four things: real sampling, mandatory recall authority, lot records so tainted food could be found, and merging USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service with FDA’s food side into one independent agency for foodborne pathogens. Its first line was a plea: put me out of business.

Twenty-four years on, the scorecard: FDA got mandatory recall authority in the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act; FSIS still does not have it. FSMA’s traceability rule exists on paper, with compliance pushed back to 2028. Sampling is routine in meat plants and nearly nonexistent on farms. The one agency still does not exist.

My perfect job, then, is Administrator of a single federal food safety agency, with FDA’s roughly 80 percent of the food supply and FSIS’s meat, poultry and egg products under one roof, Senate-confirmed, and holding the powers the two existing jobs lack between them:

  • mandatory recall authority over every food, not just the FDA-regulated ones;
  • the power to declare pathogens adulterants, which FSIS used for E. coli O157:H7 in 1994 and has so far applied to Salmonella only once, in breaded stuffed raw chicken products, a 2024 determination it has yet to enforce;
  • authority to walk onto the cattle operation next to the romaine field during an outbreak and sample it, which FDA inspectors cannot do today;
  • a default of naming the implicated firm and publishing the retail consignee list while an outbreak is open, which FSIS has done for Class I recalls since 2008 and FDA does not;
  • warning labels where the science supports them, on raw sprouts and raw milk cheese;
  • pathogen testing requirements where the product has no kill step and the consumer is an infant.

Every item on that list is a petition I have drafted and put out for public comment before filing. The Salmonella petition has been on file at FSIS since January 2020 and was denied without prejudice in 2022. The rest are headed for FDA’s docket this winter.

The first year in the perfect job would be spent ruling on my own petitions, which is either the best argument for the job or the best argument against me.

I should own one thing. When Meatingplace asked me in 2009 what my agenda would be, I said I was “not a huge fan of a single food safety agency.” Seventeen more years of watching outbreaks fall into the gap between two agencies, with FDA unable to go onto the feedlot and USDA uninterested in the lettuce, have put me back where I was in 2002.

The jobs that exist

On the org chart as it stands, there are two, and a third for lawyers.

FDA Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods. Created in the 2024 reorganization, the job runs the Human Foods Program and nearly everything that keeps me busy: romaine, Cyclospora, sprouts, raw milk cheese, infant formula. The petitions I am about to file would land on that desk. It is not Senate-confirmed. The catch is the farm gate. The Deputy Commissioner can order a recall but cannot send an inspector onto the cattle operation next to the lettuce, so the job means fighting that gap from the inside instead of the outside.

USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety. The job I was vetted for and my friend Tom Vilsack said I could not have. The strongest case for it is that FSIS is the one agency that has already done what I asked. The 1994 decision to call E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef, and the industry’s response to it, took my hamburger practice away. From 1993 to 2002 roughly 95 percent of my firm’s revenue was E. coli cases linked to hamburger; today it is close to zero. The Salmonella half of that work is unfinished. Dr. Mindy Brashears, sworn in as Under Secretary in January, opened her term at a public meeting on what FSIS called one of its most persistent food safety challenges, Salmonella. I hope she finishes the job. The post is Senate-confirmed, which means a hearing where every meat and poultry trade association shows up. I have testified before Congress enough times to know I would enjoy that more than most nominees would.

FDA Chief Counsel. The lawyer’s pick (smile to Peter). A surprising share of what I ask the government for turns on what the agency believes it is allowed to do: whether Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act reaches a feedlot during an outbreak investigation; whether the confidential commercial information rules really stop FDA from naming a firm; whether an adulterant can be declared by interpretive rule, which is how FSIS did it in 1994, and the decision survived the industry’s lawsuit. The Chief Counsel is the person who writes those answers. It is the least visible of the three jobs and may carry the most leverage per hour.

Why none of them would be perfect

Two reasons. I would have to leave the firm I love and recuse myself from every company I have ever sued, which is most of the companies that matter. And I would trade a blog, a subpoena and depositions under oath, for OMB review and a Federal Register timeline measured in years. My economics degree would get a workout in the cost-benefit fights.

Two jobs to skip: FDA Commissioner, where most of the day is drugs, devices and tobacco, and anything at CDC, which can count the sick but cannot recall a head of lettuce.

The point of the exercise

Both real jobs are filled, and this is not an application. The point is the list. Every power the perfect job would carry is a power Congress or the agencies could grant tomorrow without creating anything new. Mandatory recall at FSIS is a statute. Salmonella as an adulterant is an interpretive rule. Farm access is a regulation under Section 361. Naming firms and listing retailers is an amendment to FDA’s recall rules. Warning labels are a paragraph in 21 CFR 101.17. Each one is a petition with my name on it.

I asked to be put out of business in 2002. The beef industry took me up on it. The job that finishes the work is the one I would take. Until someone creates it, I will keep filing petitions and lawsuits, and loving every minute of it.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has put out a short factsheet with a title I wish I had written: Food Safety Begins Upstream: What Cyclospora outbreaks remind us about food and water safety across agrifood systems. It runs four pages. Anyone who grows, packs, ships, buys or regulates fresh produce should read all four.

The timing is hard to miss. This summer the United States lived through the largest Cyclospora outbreak on record. By the time FDA closed its investigation in early October, the outbreak had been linked to more than 12,800 cases across 21 states, with hundreds hospitalized and two deaths in Michigan. CDC declared the outbreak over in September. FDA found strong evidence tying the illnesses to recalled shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico.

Here is the part that matters for this post. FDA collected two environmental samples that tested positive for Cyclospora. One came from a tank holding outgoing wastewater from the processing facility. The other came from a drainage ditch at an iceberg lettuce farm. FDA said it did not have enough evidence to say conclusively how the contamination happened, but that the positives showed the parasite was present in the environment where the lettuce was grown and processed. Taylor Fresh Foods responded that the grower is no longer in its supplier program and that the facility sample came from discharged waste and sewer water outside its plant.

Wastewater. A ditch. Now read the FAO factsheet.

What the FAO says

The FAO makes four points that every produce buyer should tape to the wall.

First, Cyclospora is a human-only parasite. Animals are not reservoirs. If it is on your lettuce or in your water, it got there from human feces. That makes this a problem of sanitation, wastewater and hygiene, not wildlife or neighboring cattle.

Second, once produce is contaminated, washing will not save you. The FAO notes that routine washing does not reliably remove the oocysts and that commonly used chlorine-based sanitizers do not reliably kill them. Cooking works. But nobody cooks shredded iceberg on a taco.

Third, water touches food at more points than most people think. The FAO lists mixing agricultural inputs like pesticide sprays, irrigation, harvesting, washing, cooling, cleaning and processing. Every one of those is a door Cyclospora can walk through if the water has been contaminated with untreated or poorly treated human sewage.

Fourth, and this is the title, prevention must happen before harvest. For foods eaten raw, once the parasite is on the leaf there is very little anyone downstream can do about it.

What the FAO says to do

The recommendations are practical. Governments should map where water enters food production and focus on the higher risk uses and sources, with water standards matched to how the water is used. Farms should provide toilets and handwashing stations for workers, place and maintain them away from fields and water sources, and train workers on hygiene. Laboratories need better methods to detect Cyclospora in food, water and soil, including tests that can tell live, infectious parasites from leftover DNA. And food safety, public health, water and agriculture agencies need to share information faster during outbreaks, including across borders when the supply chain starts in another country.

None of that is exotic. It is toilets, clean water, testing and talking to each other.

My take

I have been doing this for more than thirty years, and the pattern does not change. We spend our energy at the end of the chain on recalls, advisories and lawsuits, after people are sick. The FAO is right that the cheaper, smarter and more humane place to spend it is at the beginning.

Right now, as we noted in our Cyclospora Q&A, no law requires a farm to test its irrigation water or its produce for Cyclospora. Buyers can require it. Big buyers, the ones purchasing millions of pounds of shredded lettuce for restaurant chains, have the leverage to demand sanitation audits, water testing and worker facilities at every farm and packing house in their supply chain, whether that farm is in California, Arizona or Guanajuato. The FAO and WHO have been publishing guidance on this for years, including a 2021 report on the safety and quality of water used with fresh fruits and vegetables. The science is not the problem. The will is.

Twelve thousand eight hundred sick people is what happens when we treat water and sanitation as someone else’s job. As the FAO put it, food safety begins upstream. It is time the produce industry acted like it.

On February 28, 2007, five months after bagged baby spinach from the Salinas Valley sickened more than 200 people in 26 states and killed five, the Ag Forum invited me to give the lunch talk at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. The Monterey County Herald’s story the next morning opened by saying that for many in the valley I was Public Enemy No. 1. The room was standing room only at $35 a plate. Lunch was spinach salad followed by spinach-stuffed chicken. A CNN crew and a USA Today reporter stood at the back, and in front of me sat somewhere between 200 and 300 growers, shippers and packers, depending on which reporter was counting, who had spent the winter calling me “the E. coli guy.”

The produce industry is gathered in Orlando this week for the International Fresh Produce Association’s show. Nobody there invited me. The growers of 2007 did, and here is what happened.

Why they invited me

On paper the invitation made no sense. That September, FDA had told the country to stop eating fresh spinach for the better part of two weeks, and Salinas Valley growers lost an estimated $100 million in sales. Investigators traced the outbreak to a single field on a San Benito County ranch leased by Mission Organics, processed at Natural Selection Foods in San Juan Bautista and bagged under the Dole label, and found the outbreak strain in feral pigs, cattle and water nearby. December brought lettuce E. coli outbreaks at Taco Bell and Taco John’s. Mexico banned California spinach and lettuce. In January, FBI and FDA criminal investigators served search warrants on Growers Express in Salinas and on Natural Selection Foods. My firm had sued Dole, Natural Selection and Mission Organics and represented most of the people who got sick and the families of the five who died.

KSBW reported that the Ag Forum committee wanted the room to hear the victims’ side. Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue admitted from the podium that he was a little surprised by the guest. I told The Packer I felt like Daniel walking into the lions’ den. All of that was true.

What I told them

Four things, mostly.

That strict liability is the law. “I don’t have to prove fault. I don’t have to prove you’re bad. All I have to prove is that my client got sick from eating your product.” A jury is twelve consumers, and everybody eats.

That the people in the room were not my worry. They were serious about food safety or they would not have paid $35 to listen to me. The people who were not in the room were my worry, and the marketing agreement the industry was then devising made no sense as a California-only standard when the competition grew in Arizona, Texas, New Jersey and overseas. One rulebook for everyone, imports included.

That it was a Dole outbreak. My clients ate Dole baby spinach, and the outbreak strain had been found in thirteen bags. Dole’s lawyer had told me it was not a Dole outbreak. I told the room what I told her: the hell it isn’t, it’s your bags.

That the beef industry had already shown them the way. From 1993 to 2002, nearly all of my work was hamburger, Jack in the Box to ConAgra. In August 2002 I asked the beef industry in print to put me out of business. By 2003 I had no hamburger victims to represent, because the industry and USDA had changed how ground beef was made. Six months before spinach, on March 1, 2006, I had made the lettuce industry the same offer in writing. Now I made it in person: pay attention to your farmers, to the people at UC Davis and to the regulators; work your tails off not to poison anybody; and if it happens anyway, be ready to say you are sorry. There was hope for my retirement and hope for their industry. Please put me out of business. I closed by saying, in all sincerity, that I hoped never to see any of them again.

They applauded.

What they said back

I had told them I do not laugh all the way to the bank, but I do go to the bank often, so I was not expecting warmth. The room was quiet while I talked, and the questions afterward were pointed. Lorri Koster of Mann Packing told The Packer she did not think I was accusing anyone of deliberately doing wrong, that something was obviously broken, that if it was not me somebody else would sue them, and that I was “a necessary evil.” I have been called worse. I reposted the article under that headline. The Oregonian’s Alex Pulaski, who was writing a long piece about my practice that month, called the crowd hostile and kept the line about twelve consumers. Nearly three years later Brad Sullivan, the lawyer who represented the industry, told the Seattle Times the growers had been “looking for scapegoats,” that I took the hard questions, and that afterward farmers lined up to shake my hand. The handshakes were real. I did not drop a lawsuit.

What became of it

Within the year, Western Growers wrote food safety metrics for growing and harvesting leafy greens, California and Arizona created the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements and put signatories under state audit, and testing irrigation water became routine in the Salinas Valley. My firm settled the last of its 76 spinach cases in the fall of 2008, and none of the spinach cases reached a jury. No spinach outbreak since has come close to 2006. In that narrow sense, the lunch worked.

In the wider sense it did not. Yuma, 2018: 210 sick in 36 states, five dead, and the outbreak strain in an irrigation canal running past a feedlot. Salinas, 2019: 167 sick. November 2024: 89 sick and one dead, traced through one processor to one grower, and FDA named nobody; four of the seven people with kidney failure are my clients. September 2026: a fourteen-person romaine E. coli file closed without a grower, a processor or a state. This summer: 12,883 Cyclospora illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths from shredded iceberg lettuce, the largest outbreak of its kind in American history. Beef took me out of the hamburger business within a year of my asking. Lettuce has kept me in business for more than a quarter century.

What I would say now

The same speech. The law has not changed, the jury has not changed, and the request has not changed. What changed is the tools: the one federal program that sampled produce for pathogens was zeroed out in 2012, CDC stopped counting Cyclospora in FoodNet in July 2025, and the traceability rule the industry says it supports is on hold until 2028 by act of Congress. The beef playbook, line by line, is in the post that accompanies this one, and the asks are in my October 3 Publisher’s Platform: test, trace, name, keep the cattle away from the food, pay for the people who count the sick, and put your names on the three petitions.

In 2007 the growers of the Salinas Valley did something the trade associations have not done since. They put the lawyer suing them at the front of the room, paid to hear him, and listened. The invitation is open in the other direction. Orlando this week, Salinas next spring, anywhere you like. I will eat the salad.

The International Fresh Produce Association’s Global Produce & Floral Show opens in Orlando this week. I am not on the program. I have one request for the people who are, the same one I made of the beef industry twenty-four years ago: put me out of business. Please.

Two pleas, two industries

On August 4, 2002, after ConAgra recalled more than 19 million pounds of ground beef, I wrote an op-ed asking the beef industry for four things: sample the meat, give the government mandatory recall authority, keep lot records, and put one agency in charge.

On March 1, 2006, I made the lettuce industry the same offer. FDA had just issued its fresh-cut produce guidance after the August 2005 Dole bagged lettuce E. coli outbreak, the fourth such outbreak in four years. My asks were simpler: stop irrigating with water contaminated by cattle and human feces, wash the product, give field and plant workers toilets and handwashing, and keep sick workers home. I closed with a line I still stand by: with a little luck, it would force one damn trial lawyer to find another line of work.

Six months later, bagged baby spinach from the Salinas Valley sickened more than 200 people in 26 states, put 104 in the hospital, gave 31 of them kidney failure and killed five. The outbreak strain turned up in cattle and wild pig feces on a ranch under a mile from the field. My firm represented seventy-six of the sick, including the families of the five who died. Luck never showed up.

On February 28, 2007, five months after spinach, I said it to their faces. The Ag Forum invited me to lunch at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas: standing room only, $35 a plate, spinach salad, a CNN crew in the back. I told the growers to look at what the meat industry had done after Jack in the Box and copy it, and I asked them, please, to put me out of business. They applauded. The outbreaks kept coming.

What beef did with the request

It did not do all four things. It did enough. It started in September 1994, when FSIS Administrator Michael Taylor told the American Meat Institute that raw ground beef carrying any E. coli O157:H7 was adulterated and would be recalled. The industry sued to stop him; a federal court in Texas upheld the policy that December, in a case I still call my favorite. After 2002 the rest followed: trim tested before it went into the grinder, product held until the result came back, interventions on the carcass, and in 2011 six more Shiga toxin-producing serogroups declared adulterants. Federal ground beef samples positive for O157:H7 fell from 0.86 percent in 2000 to 0.17 percent in 2004.

My firm’s hamburger E. coli cases ran from Jack in the Box in 1993 to ConAgra in 2002, and today they are close to zero. Not zero; I have a ground beef kofta case in San Diego as I write this. Close. It is the best thing that has happened in food safety in my lifetime, and the industry that sued over the adulterant rule is the one that made it work.

What leafy greens did with the request

After spinach, the industry built something real. Western Growers wrote metrics, California and Arizona created the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements in 2007 and put signatories under state audit, and the industry seeded the Center for Produce Safety. I have said so in print, and I have sued LGMA members. The outbreaks did not stop. CDC counted 40 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli outbreaks linked to leafy greens between 2009 and 2018: 1,212 illnesses, 77 cases of HUS and eight deaths, more than half of them romaine. Leafy greens are the second most common source of foodborne E. coli O157 outbreaks. The first was ground beef, and look where its trend line went.

Yuma, 2018: 210 sick in 36 states, 96 hospitalized, 27 with HUS, five dead, and the outbreak strain in an irrigation canal past a feedlot with room for 100,000 head. The LGMAs tripled the feedlot buffer to 1,200 feet. Salinas, 2019: 167 sick, 85 hospitalized, 15 with HUS. Fall 2020: 40 sick, and the outbreak strain in cattle feces uphill from the fields.

November 2024: 89 sick in 15 states, 36 hospitalized, seven with HUS, one dead, traced through a single processor to a single grower. FDA closed the file in February 2025 without a word to the public; NBC News and a stack of records named Taylor Farms and the grower. Four of the seven with kidney failure are my clients. This summer: 12,883 Cyclospora illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths from shredded iceberg lettuce, the largest of its kind in American history, with the parasite found in a wastewater tank at the plant and a ditch at a grower. On September 10, FDA closed a fourteen-person romaine E. coli O157:H7 file and named no grower, no processor and no state.

Twenty years after spinach, leafy greens are still having the argument beef finished in 1994.

The beef playbook, translated into lettuce

Test the raw material before it goes in the grinder. In beef a positive means a recall, so plants test trim, hold the lot and ship on a negative. A pathogen on lettuce eaten raw is adulteration too; nobody is required to look. For lettuce the grinder is the field and the shredder: test the water for the parasite rather than a bacterial stand-in, test product before it ships, and hold it for the result. The industry says a pathogen on lettuce is a needle in a haystack. Beef said the same thing in 1994. In 2010, federal sampling found 29 positives in 11,616 ground beef samples. Every needle was found.

Keep the cattle away from the food. Beef puts hide washes and steam between the animal and the meat. In lettuce the animal is next door, and the buffer is a trade association metric no feedlot owner ever signed. Enforceable setbacks between feedlots and the fields and canals that serve them, and a right for FDA to walk onto an implicated feedlot and sample, as my draft citizen petition asks.

Trace the lot. Since 2016 every beef grinder, plant or grocery store, keeps a log. Congress ordered FDA to write the produce equivalent in 2011; FDA finished it in 2022, pushed compliance to July 2028, and Congress wrote the delay into law last November. The industry says it wants the rule. Tell the appropriations committees, in writing, and comply now.

Name the plant and publish where the product went. When a beef lot tests positive, USDA names the plant and, since 2008, publishes the list of stores that received it. In 2024 a romaine outbreak killed someone and FDA named nobody; in 2026 it did it again. My two other draft petitions ask FDA to name implicated firms and to publish retail consignee lists in every Class I recall. The industry should sign them, because an unnamed outbreak is a category-wide outbreak, and every honest grower pays for it.

Put someone in charge and pay for it. A federal inspector stands in every slaughterhouse every day it runs. For produce, the only federal program that sampled it, USDA’s Microbiological Data Program, cost about $5 million a year, triggered 23 recalls in 2010 and 2011, and was zeroed out in 2012 with the produce lobby pushing. On July 1, 2025, CDC dropped Cyclospora from FoodNet. Rebuild the trip wire, put the parasite back on the count, and fund the state labs that found this summer’s outbreak.

The economics

One of my three degrees is in economics, so let me put it that way. The 2018 Yuma outbreak, 210 people, cost the industry an estimated $276 million to $343 million. This summer lettuce unit sales fell 19 percent in two weeks; Western Growers’ chief executive told the New York Times the drop neared 30 percent, with millions of heads of healthy California lettuce plowed under. California grew none of the outbreak lettuce. A positive test and a named grower cost one company one season. An unnamed outbreak costs every grower in the country. The beef industry learned that a recall with a name on it is cheaper than a category without one. That is the whole lesson, and it took beef about a decade.

Put me out of the leafy green business

Bruce Taylor’s October 8 letter says Taylor Farms will stop harvesting iceberg lettuce in central Mexico during Cyclospora season and join a task force with FDA. Good. One company, one product, one region. The beef industry did not fix hamburger one plant at a time. It fixed it as an industry, under a rule, with testing it did not want and recalls it did not enjoy, and it worked.

IFPA, Western Growers, the California and Arizona LGMAs, FMI and NGA: you are in the same rooms in Orlando this week. You have my lists. In short: test, trace, name, keep the cattle away, and pay for the people who count the sick. Do that and I will keep the promise I made beef in 2002 and lettuce in 2006. I will find another line of work.

Put me out of the leafy green business. Please.

Paris Martineau is an investigative reporter at Consumer Reports, and on October 9 she published the best post-mortem anyone has written on the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak: The Cyclospora Outbreak Is Over. The Gaps It Exposed Are Not. Read it. Consumer Reports spent the hours after the recall notice calling companies to decode a list written in abbreviations, and she carried the story through FDA’s closure on October 2. The piece is built around four takeaways. I agree with all four. A tip of the pen, and a few things I would add to each.

The record first. FDA closed its investigation on October 2 at 12,883 confirmed illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths in 21 states, linked to shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. Two environmental samples in Mexico tested positive, one from a tank of outgoing wastewater at the processing facility and one from a drainage ditch at a grower identified in the traceback. No lettuce tested positive, and FDA says there is not enough evidence to determine how the contamination happened. CDC’s season count, last updated September 15, stands at 19,883 laboratory-confirmed cases, which leaves 7,000 confirmed cases with no food named. FDA has promised an Outbreak Investigation Report before the 2027 season. That season opens May 1.

Takeaway one: the recall notice could not be read

She reconstructs the first eighteen hours. The notice went up on a Friday afternoon, July 17, without the word recall and without a product. The corrected version listed roughly thirty products in the company’s internal shorthand, with letter codes standing in for the customers who received them and no indication of where the lettuce was sold. Consumer Reports decoded some of it by calling companies with similar-sounding brand names. Only Taco Bell, Walmart, Sysco and Jack in the Box confirmed receiving the lettuce; Subway, Cross Valley Farms, Markon and Peak Fresh Produce were not publicly tied to the recall until FDA’s enforcement report weeks later. Taylor Farms told her the codes were the ones food service customers needed to pull product, and that most of the lettuce never reached a retail shelf.

What I would add: that is a description of FDA’s recall system, not just of one company’s use of it. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has published the names of retailers that received Class I recalled meat and poultry since 2008. FDA has had guidance since 2018 saying it may do the same for food; the consumer-facing list in this recall was a list of states. I have drafted a citizen petition asking FDA to require retail consignee lists on the FSIS model and to classify every recall within ten days, and a companion petition asking FDA to name the growers, processors and distributors its traceback identifies while an outbreak is still open. Both are unfiled drafts dated October 8, and on Friday I put them in front of Bruce Taylor and the leafy greens industry with a request for comments before I file.

Takeaway two: FDA and CDC left the public guessing

She walks through the false positive. A border sample was reported positive on July 18 and retracted on July 19, and a lot of people read the retraction as clearing the lettuce. It did not, and FDA had to say so at a press conference; the company’s since-deleted social posts claiming FDA had apologized, a claim FDA denied, did not help. Brian Ronholm, Consumer Reports’ director of food policy and a former USDA deputy under secretary for food safety, describes the rest: weekly federal updates while several states posted daily, FDA and CDC updates that did not match, and an FDA distribution map that showed New York until Consumer Reports asked about it, after which New York disappeared.

What I would add: I wrote on the night of July 19 that the retraction changed nothing, because the people who got sick had eaten the evidence weeks earlier and the case against the lettuce was epidemiology and traceback, not a lab result. FDA said the same thing five days later in an update that is still on its page: the false positive did not change the basis for the investigation or the epidemiological data behind the recall. The messaging gap she describes was also a knowledge gap, and it still is. Seven thousand confirmed cases this season have no food attached to them.

Takeaway three: the rule that was not in force

She lays out the record from the emails the New York Times and Bloomberg obtained through public records requests. Michigan asked Taco Bell’s parent, Yum Brands, for supply chain records on July 1, again on July 3, and a third time on July 6, when some arrived. FDA asked on July 8 and got the relevant records on July 13. The recall came on July 17. The Food Traceability Rule would have required those records within 24 hours of the request. Its compliance date was January 20, 2026. The administration moved it to July 20, 2028 in March 2025, and in November Congress wrote into the continuing resolution that ended the shutdown, Section 780 of Division B of H.R. 5371, that FDA may not spend appropriated money administering or enforcing the rule before that date. Ronholm names FMI, the Food Industry Association, as having lobbied for the delay.

What I would add: the lobbying disclosures name more than FMI. The International Foodservice Distributors Association reported supporting the 30-month extension in its own filing, the National Restaurant Association listed H.R. 5371 by number, and Publix and the National Retail Federation reported lobbying on the 2024 bill that would have stripped lot-code duties from retailers and restaurants. The Senate Appropriations Committee went the other way and directed FDA not to delay enforcement past July 2028; the rider was a House product. Congress can repeal it before May 1. FDA’s next public meeting on lot-level traceability, the engagement Congress ordered in place of enforcement, is November 6.

Takeaway four: ten actions, none aimed at what failed

She read FDA’s October 2 list of ten planned activities and found that most were already underway under the 2021 action plan, that none were aimed at the specific failures of this outbreak, and that none touched the budget cuts, the thin investigations staff or the lost monitoring programs underneath them. Ronholm calls the list a subtle admission that FDA’s outbreak and investigation protocols need to be rewritten, and says the difference would come from leadership that identifies sources faster, holds industry accountable and tells consumers clearly what it knows.

What I would add: I went through the ten on October 7 and called them commitments, not commandments. They are surveillance, studies, training and panels, and nothing in them requires anyone to test irrigation water or produce for the parasite before harvest. Six days after FDA’s ten, Bruce Taylor announced four of his own: an indefinite suspension of central Mexico iceberg harvest and processing during the CDC-defined Cyclospora season, more water and crop testing, research into detection, and a public-private task force with FDA. I answered with an agenda for that task force: 23 things the company, the industry, FDA and Congress can do before May 1, 2027. The task force has 200 days from today.

What Consumer Reports did next

The article was not the end of it. On October 8 Consumer Reports wrote to Donald Prater, FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, with eight questions and a November 6 deadline: what delayed the deployment to Mexico, why no import alert has issued on iceberg lettuce from central Mexico, what accounts for the month it took to classify the recall as Class I, how information moved between the federal agencies and the states, whether the department’s consolidation of communications functions hurt FDA’s ability to talk to the public, and how many people in the Human Foods Program actually work outbreaks. Those are the right questions. Fifteen letters from members of Congress have produced no published answer and no hearing. Maybe a consumer organization will do better.

Hedberg has the honest line in her piece: a fair amount of work still has to come together before anyone can say what happened this year or how to approach next year. The report FDA has promised is where that work belongs, and it has to be out before the lettuce goes in the ground. I said on October 3 that Congress, Secretary Kennedy and the produce industry could put me out of the lettuce business. Paris Martineau just wrote them the checklist. Read her piece, then read the eight questions, and watch November 6.

At the end of September, I posted draft citizen petitions asking FDA to put a warning on two foods the agency has told vulnerable people to avoid for years: cheese made from unpasteurized milk, and raw and lightly cooked sprouts. I asked cheesemakers, sprout growers, seed suppliers, retailers, restaurant operators, public health officials and people who have been sickened to tell me what I got wrong. Many of you did, and the drafts are better for it.

The revised drafts are posted here: I have extended the comment window to Thursday, October 15, and I will file both petitions shortly after.

What the petitions ask

Neither petition asks FDA to ban anything, lengthen anything or restrict who may buy anything. Both ask the agency to add a paragraph to 21 CFR 101.17, the regulation that has required a warning on unpasteurized juice since 1998 and a safe handling statement on shell eggs since 2000.

For cheese made from unpasteurized milk:

WARNING: This product is made from unpasteurized (raw) milk and may contain harmful bacteria that can cause serious illness in children, older adults, pregnant women, and persons with weakened immune systems.

The cheese petition also asks FDA to finish something it started. In 2013 the agency said it would reevaluate the 60-day aging rule for raw milk cheese. In 2015 it took public comment on that question. Eleven years later there is no proposed rule and no explanation. The petition asks for one or the other within a year, and for publication of the raw milk cheese sampling data FDA already collects, including its 2025 H5N1 testing.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/10/Raw-Milk-Cheese-Petition_CLEAN_10-12-26.pdf

For raw and lightly cooked sprouts:

WARNING: Sprouts may contain harmful bacteria, such as Salmonella, E. coli and Listeria, that can cause serious illness, kidney failure or death. These sprouts have not been cooked or pasteurized, and the bacteria may be inside the seed, where washing cannot reach them. Children, the elderly, pregnant women, and persons with weakened immune systems should not eat raw or lightly cooked sprouts.

The sprout petition would also reach seed sold at retail for home sprouting, and sprouts served at delis, salad bars and restaurants, by a sign, placard or menu statement.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/10/Sprout-Warning-Label-Petition_MarlerClark_10-12-26_CLEAN.pdf

What has happened since the first drafts

On October 5 the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement on raw milk and milk productsstating that aged cheese sold under the 60-day exception still poses an infection risk and naming warning labels among the measures pediatricians should push for. The Academy also described that cheese as “clearly labeled as unpasteurized.” It is not required to be. FDA has said so itself. When the nation’s pediatricians assume a label the law does not require, the case for requiring one makes itself.

On October 7 FDA reported that a seed sample from the supplier in the Evergreen Fresh Sprouts broccoli sprout outbreak matched the outbreak strain by whole genome sequencing. The same day a second retail seller recalled broccoli seed packed from that lot and sold online and on Amazon. Home sprouters bought that seed in packages that said nothing.

The outbreaks that prompted these petitions are still open. The Graziers raw milk cheese outbreak has sickened 13 people in nine states, eight hospitalized and three with hemolytic uremic syndrome; the median age is five. The Everything Sprouts alfalfa outbreak stands at 76 sick in 16 states, and the Evergreen broccoli sprout outbreak at 32 sick in six states.

Your comments changed the drafts. A restaurant culinary director with twenty-one years in professional kitchens pushed me on point-of-sale statements and the FDA Food Code, and the sprout petition now asks FDA to carry the warning into the Food Code’s consumer advisory, the same menu notice already required for a hamburger cooked to order. The sprout warning itself was rewritten to say plainly that these sprouts have not been cooked or pasteurized. And rather than sweeping in microgreens and soil-grown shoots now, the petition asks FDA to take that question up on the record.

What I still want to hear

Cheesemakers: Is a single prescribed sentence, with a placard option during the transition, workable for a farmstead operation? What would a label change actually cost you?

Cheese counters and online sellers: Will a placard at a cut-to-order counter work in practice? Is showing the warning on the product page before checkout the right rule for online sales?

Sprout growers and seed suppliers: What validated process, measured in the finished sprouts rather than on the seed, should earn an exemption from the warning? Should the warning eventually reach microgreens and shoots?

Restaurant operators: Is a menu or placard statement for sprouts workable, and does folding it into the Food Code consumer advisory make sense?

Physicians and public health officials: Have I named the right groups at risk, in the right words?

How to weigh in

Email me at bmarler@marlerclark.com or comment below by Thursday, October 15. After I file, FDA will assign each petition a docket number on regulations.gov, where anyone can comment formally, and the agency has 180 days to respond.

In the interest of full disclosure, and as the petitions themselves state, I represent people sickened in the Graziers, Twin Sisters Creamery and Evergreen Fresh Sprouts outbreaks.

Adults who want raw milk cheese or raw sprouts can keep buying them. These petitions ask for one thing: that the advice the government already gives in press releases and on web pages show up where the decision is made, on the package.

The Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH) has released its final report on last fall’s Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) outbreak. In the report, the source is called “Event A” – “a public event within Maricopa County with multiple food vendors and petting zoo exhibits” that ran over multiple weekends and ended on Sunday, October 26, 2025. Parents, Food Safety News, the Arizona Republic and the calendar all call it what it was: the Arizona State Fair, which ran in Phoenix from September 19 through October 26, 2025.

The numbers

Eighteen people were part of the outbreak – 16 confirmed by whole genome sequencing (WGS) and two probable cases that were diagnosed by culture-independent tests and linked by their attendance at the fair. The 16 sequenced isolates were within 0-2 SNPs of each other, which, as the county put it, indicates a common source.

The victims were mostly children. The median age was 10, with a range of 2 to 28 years. Eleven (61%) were hospitalized and six (33%) developed hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). That is an extraordinarily severe outbreak – the county itself called the outbreak “notable for its severity.” Illness onsets ran from October 28 through November 14, peaking on October 29.

Sixteen of the 18 (89%) reported animal contact. Thirteen (72%) attended the fair on October 26 – its final day – and 11 of those 13 visited the animal areas. One additional case visited a different, unrelated petting zoo that same day. The most frequently reported animal exposures were goats (83%), pigs (67%) and donkeys (42%).

Overall, the county saw 58 STEC cases from September 19 through November 30, compared to a five-year average of 32 for the same period – a statistically significant increase.

Petting zoo: odds ratio of 190

MCDPH ran a case-case analysis comparing outbreak cases to STEC cases from earlier in 2025. Several exposures popped up early – pre-cut apples, turkey eaten outside the home, social gatherings – but those were based on small numbers and wide confidence intervals, and no common food, grocery store, restaurant or geographic cluster was found. Petting zoo exposure, on the other hand, carried an odds ratio of 190.0 (95% CI: 34.6-1092.0). In epidemiology, you do not see numbers like that very often.

The county concluded that animal contact was “the primary driver of this outbreak,” while noting that no single animal was identified and no environmental or laboratory confirmation of a specific animal source was obtained.

Handwashing – or the lack of it

Here is the part of the report that should get the attention of every fair board and petting zoo operator in the country. Of the 11 sick people who visited the animal areas at the fair, only five (45%) recalled handwashing stations being available. Eight (73%) recalled hand sanitizer. Eight (73%) reported washing their hands after animal contact.

That tracks with reporting by the Arizona Republic that State Fair officials later confirmed the petting zoo exhibit did not have handwashing stations with soap and running water attached nearby. Hand sanitizer is not a substitute for soap and running water – especially on the hands of a small child who has just been rubbing a goat or a pig.

The county’s own recommendations are hardly new: handwashing stations that are available and visible, clear signage, and separating animal contact areas from places where people eat and drink. These measures have been recommended for petting zoos for decades. They were not adequately in place at one of the largest public events in Arizona.

Great American – and Fresno, 20 years ago

The county report does not name the petting zoo operator. The Arizona Republic has: for the past 15 years, the State Fair’s petting zoo was run by Great American Entertainment of Stephenville, Texas.

That name should sound familiar. In October 2005, at least six children who visited the petting zoo at the Big Fresno Fair were sickened with the same strain of E. coli O157:H7. That petting zoo was operated by Great American Petting Zoo. One of those children, a two-year-old girl, developed HUS, suffered kidney failure and several strokes, and was left with lasting health problems. The Big Fresno Fair paid $2.2 million to settle her case, and agreed to put handwashing stations outside the petting zoo.

And what was available at the Fresno petting zoo in 2005? Alcohol hand sanitizer stations. Twenty years later, the same operator, a different fair, sick children, HUS – and, again, hand sanitizer rather than soap and running water. Lessons that are paid for in children’s kidneys should not have to be learned twice.

“No intervention at Event A was possible”

The county notes that because most cases were exposed on the fair’s last day, there was no opportunity to intervene at the fair itself. That is true as far as it goes. But a children’s hospital alerted MCDPH on November 3 – with nine pediatric cases over a single weekend and five families already naming the fair – and the state did not issue a health alert to providers until November 12. As the Republic has reported, state and county health officials withheld from the public the details of the source and size of the outbreak while the case count was rising. Parents of children who were at the fair and had a stomach ache deserved to know what to watch for. HUS does not wait for a press release.

What comes next

Some lessons have been learned. The Arizona State Fair has dropped its petting zoo for 2026, and the Maricopa County Fair dropped direct public animal contact and pony rides. But Arizona Senate Bill 1082, which would have required commercial petting zoos to control access to animals, ensure patrons wash their hands and post warning signage, died. Voluntary decisions by a couple of fairs are not a standard.

MCDPH says it will work with state and local partners to develop guidance for petting zoos and similar venues. Guidance is good. Requirements – with soap, water and someone checking – are better. Six people, most of them children, developed HUS because a fun day at the fair ended in a hospital bed.

As I noted last fall, Marler Clark was retained to investigate the illnesses linked to the Arizona State Fair petting zoo. The county’s report confirms what those families told us from the start.

Report – https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/10/STEC-OCT-NOV-2025-Final-Report.pdf

Deschutes County Health Services has told doctors in Bend and the rest of Central Oregon that it is investigating, with the Oregon Health Authority, a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis infections. The Health Alert Network advisory, which Food Safety News reported on October 12, 2026, names no source, no case count, no other state and no onset dates. As of this morning no federal page acknowledges that the outbreak exists. I wrote up the advisory itself on Food Poison Journal over the weekend. This post is about the gap between what the doctors were told and what the rest of us were told.

The advisory tells clinicians what to ask and tells the public nothing.

The advisory asks providers in Deschutes, Crook and Jefferson Counties to watch for diarrhea, fever and cramps consistent with salmonellosis, and to take a five-day exposure history that covers eggs and egg-containing foods including fresh or locally sourced eggs, raw unpasteurized milk, contact with chickens, baby chicks, lizards, snakes and turtles, and specific restaurant names, locations and meal dates. It asks that any positive PCR be followed by a reflex culture so the state lab can sequence the isolate, because without an isolate there is no whole genome sequencing and without sequencing there is no way to link an Oregon case to one in another state.

That is a competent advisory. Every item on it is also something a member of the public could act on this week: cook eggs through, skip the raw milk, wash hands after handling chicks, and hold onto receipts. The exposure list reads as the standard Enteritidis list, and the request for restaurant names and meal dates says the investigators are still looking at restaurants. None of that reached the public through any Oregon or federal channel. It reached the public because a trade publication found the PDF.

No federal page acknowledges the outbreak.

CDC has posted nothing. When I opened CDC’s active investigations dashboard this morning it counted fifteen active multistate Salmonella investigations, and the only open Salmonella outbreak notices on CDC’s site are the Evergreen broccoli sprouts outbreak and the pet turtles outbreak, plus the alfalfa sprouts notice that carries both E. coli and Salmonella Agona. The dashboard says, in its own words, that “some of the investigations above have CDC Outbreak Notices to let people know actions they can take to stay healthy.” Deschutes County just told its doctors what those actions are.

FDA’s CORE investigation table, still stamped October 7, has no Enteritidis row. The only 2026 Enteritidis row it ever carried was the Midwest shell egg outbreak, reference 1378, and that one has been moved to the closed table. If this outbreak is being worked at the federal level, it is being worked somewhere the public cannot see, which for eggs and poultry could mean FDA, FSIS or both.

Three state Salmonella clusters this fall have no serotype and no source in public.

Oregon is not alone. Utah’s Bear River Health Department announced twenty-one confirmed cases in Cache and Box Elder Counties on September 1 and has not updated the count, named a serotype or named a source since; I wrote about it the day it came out. West Virginia’s Monongalia County Health Department said on September 30 that it was investigating a higher-than-normal number of cases; its health officer told the Dominion Post sixteen were lab-confirmed over about two weeks, with a few overnight hospitalizations and no common link, and I covered that too. Neither department has said which Salmonella it is.

JurisdictionFirst public wordConfirmed cases disclosedSerotype disclosedSource disclosedFederal notice
Bear River Health District, UtahSeptember 1, 2026 (media release)21NoNoNone
Monongalia County, West VirginiaSeptember 30, 2026 (release; count to local press)16NoNoNone
Deschutes County, OregonOctober 11–12, 2026 (provider advisory surfaced in press)None givenYes: EnteritidisNoNone

Sources: Bear River Health Department release (Sept. 1, 2026); Monongalia County Health Department release (Sept. 30, 2026) and the Dominion Post (Sept. 30, 2026); Deschutes County Health Services advisory as reported Oct. 11–12, 2026; CDC and FDA pages checked Oct. 12, 2026. Check: the two clusters that gave a number total 21 + 16 = 37 confirmed cases; Oregon gave none, so the public total across the three is at least 37.

I am not saying the three are connected. I have no evidence that they are, and the Bear River department has said its strain did not match the Evergreen sprout strain, which is the only match anyone has publicly ruled out. The point is narrower. Thirty-seven confirmed cases across three counties in two states, and a multistate outbreak in a third state, have been described to the public without a serotype in two of the three and without a source in all three, and the one federal tool built to tell the public about multistate outbreaks has nothing on any of them.

The advisory’s file name says September 3, and the county should say when it was issued.

The advisory sits on the county’s document server under the file name “Advisory—Salmonella-Outbreak-09032026.” The server blocks automated readers, so I have not been able to confirm the date on the face of the document, and neither Food Safety News nor my own weekend post could date it. If that string is the issue date, Central Oregon’s clinicians have known about a multistate Enteritidis outbreak for five and a half weeks. If it is not, the county can say so in a sentence. Either way the first question for Deschutes County and the Oregon Health Authority this morning is the simplest one: when did you know, and when did you plan to tell the people who eat the eggs?

This is the gap the two petitions I filed last week are meant to close.

On October 8 I sent FDA two citizen petitions after thirty-eight people got sick from chicken wraps that no agency would name. The first asks FDA to publish the suspect food, the states, and the illness and hospitalization counts while an investigation is open, and to stop treating an implicated firm’s name as confidential. The second asks for store lists on Class I recalls and for a product pulled because of an outbreak to be called a recall whatever the company calls it. Those petitions are addressed to FDA, and the Deschutes outbreak may turn out to belong to FSIS or to CDC’s notice desk instead. The principle does not change with the agency. If an outbreak is serious enough to alert every clinician in three counties, it is serious enough to alert the patients.

Oregon, CDC and the other states can fix this with five facts.

The count, the states, the onset range, whether a food or an animal has been identified, and the date the advisory went out. The serotype is already public, which is more than Utah or West Virginia have given. None of those five facts compromises an investigation; CDC publishes all of them on every outbreak it chooses to post. Last week I wrote that Gallup found only 47 percent of Americans confident in the federal government’s ability to keep food safe, a record low. Outbreaks the public learns about from a PDF meant for doctors are how a number like that is earned. If you are in Central Oregon and have had diarrhea, fever and cramps in the last week, see a doctor, ask for a stool culture and not just a PCR, and tell them about the advisory; CDC’s symptoms page puts onset at six hours to six days after exposure. I will update this post when Oregon or CDC says more.

Saturday, October 10, 2026

Last Saturday’s edition closed on three files shut without a cause and eleven open files carrying 675 sick with no food named. This week FDA matched the broccoli sprout outbreak to a seed lot, three seed brands recalled it from five online marketplaces, and the supplier is still unnamed; the E. coli O157:H7 file FDA shares with USDA got a food and no brand; the no-food ledger fell to 619; and Taylor Farms announced its own remedy six days after FDA announced ten. The through-line of this fourteenth column: the sources are known, the names are not.

FDA matched the Evergreen broccoli sprout outbreak to seed lot W4105 on Wednesday, and by Friday three brands of home-sprouting seed from that lot had been recalled. FDA’s October 7 update links the outbreak to broccoli sprouts and microgreens grown from a contaminated seed lot; FDA’s own seed sample tested positive and whole genome sequencing matched it to the Salmonella Bovismorbificans strain making people sick; the unnamed supplier recalled lot W4105. Counts are unchanged since September 24: 32 sick in six states, three hospitalized, onsets July 7 to September 3, 24 in Washington. EAK Distributionof Casper, Wyoming, pulled its HOME GROWN broccoli seed from Amazon October 2; Eden Brothers of Arden, North Carolina, recalled Calabrese broccoli seed in packets, one-ounce and one-pound sizes October 7, sold July 8 through September 28; Gardeners Basics of Spanish Fork, Utah, recalled one-pound Waltham 29 sprouting seed October 8, sold through Amazon, its website, TikTok Shop, Walmart, eBay and Etsy, and says its supplier told it September 26 that FDA had found Salmonella in the seed, eleven days before the public learned of the match. Food Safety News reported Friday that FDA still will not name the supplier. I covered the second seed recall at Food Poison Journal, and on Monday the firm announced it has been retained by a Washington resident sickened in this outbreak.

The other sprout outbreak sits at 76 sick, and its seed supplier is named in public only by one of its own customers. CDC’s October 1 update: 76 sick in sixteen states, six hospitalized, onsets May 31 to September 7, 64 E. coli, nine Salmonella Agona, three with both; Wisconsin counts 27 sick and three hospitalized as of October 5. FDA’s advisory, also October 1, names seed lot SAL2-24JB, says it went to another sprout grower, and names neither grower nor supplier. Todd’s Seeds, which recalled its own alfalfa seed off that lot, names its source: International Specialty Supply (International Sprout Holdings, Inc.) of Cookeville, Tennessee. LEASA Industries of Miami recalled more than 15,000 cups of alfalfa sprouts grown from seed that may have carried E. coli, initiated September 4, classified October 2, Enforcement Report only, Florida and New Hampshire, no press release and no word on whether LEASA is the second grower. Across both sprout outbreaks 108 people are sick. Comments on my draft sprout warning label petition and the companion raw milk cheese petition run through October 15.

Thirty-eight people are sick in the E. coli O157:H7 file FDA shares with USDA, and the file has a food now and still no brand. FDA’s outbreak table, re-stamped October 7, fills file 1421’s product column with a multi-ingredient wrap with chicken, marked suspect: ready-to-eat, USDA-regulated, removed from the market before the link was confirmed, past shelf life. The agencies are asking whether an ingredient was contaminated, and FDA has started an inspection. The count has been 38 since September 30, from 25 when the file was posted September 23. No CDC notice, no FSIS alert, no store list, no recall; Food Safety Newsreports USDA has posted only a link to FDA’s table. Hospitalizations and HUS are undisclosed. I wrote Thursday on what FDA said and on why a known food with no name falls through both agencies.

Taylor Farms announced its own remedy on Thursday, six days after FDA announced ten. Bruce Taylor’s letter, dated October 8, says the company will indefinitely suspend harvesting and processing central Mexico iceberg for the United States and Canada during the CDC-defined Cyclospora season, expand year-round health monitoring, increase irrigation water and crop testing, invest in detection research, and join what it calls a public-private task force with FDA, scientists, industry and public health officials. No FDA page uses the words task force; the agency’s list is the ten actions of October 2, which I went through on Wednesday. The letter carries neither the count, the dates nor the two environmental positives; my open letter to Mr. TaylorFriday supplies them with a 23-item agenda. Unchanged: FDA’s closed file at 12,883 sick, 570 hospitalized, two dead, 21 states, last onset August 17; CDC’s season count at 19,883 cases and 1,064 hospitalizations as of September 15.

Two more letters landed the same week, from opposite directions. Consumer Reports wrote FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, Donald Prater, October 8 those investigators took nearly a month to begin environmental sampling and on-site inspection in Mexico and the recall classification took more than a month, with eight questions due November 6. Western Growers told members October 7 that Mexico’s COFEPRIS acknowledged the two positives October 3 and said they alone do not establish produce as the source, the argument I answered Sunday. The industry meets in Orlando next week at IFPA’s Global Produce and Floral Show, October 13 to 16, with an FSMA 204 session and my twenty-years-after-spinach questions waiting. FDA published notice Friday of a November 6 virtual meeting on lot-level traceability, part of the engagement Congress required when it barred enforcement before July 20, 2028.

The Graziers raw milk cheese file got an on-site inspection this week, a call from the pediatricians to ban the product, and no new numbers. FDA’s advisory, re-stamped October 9 without new text: 13 sick in nine states, eight hospitalized, three with hemolytic uremic syndrome, last onset August 26, more than half five or younger; the outbreak table shows an inspection initiated at an undisclosed location. On October 5 the American Academy of Pediatrics published a policy statement in Pediatrics renewing its call to ban raw milk and raw milk products, cheese included, noting nearly half of raw dairy illnesses are in people under 20. I am asking FDA for less, a warning label and the 60-day aging reevaluation it promised in 2013. Louisiana posted an advisory October 5 with no Louisiana cases.

FDA’s no-food ledger fell from 675 to 619 this week, and nobody got better. The October 7 tablecarries fifteen active files, nine with no food named: Salmonella Newport 116, Salmonella Oranienburg 99, Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- 43 with the outbreak ended and an inspection under way, Listeria at 44, 11 and 11, Cyclospora at 235, 38 and 22. The drop: the wraps got a vehicle and a fourth Cyclospora file, 18 sick, closed, along with the frozen blueberry file and the romaine E. coli file, whose Executive Incident Summary Abstract is finally posted. CDC’s dashboard, updated October 7: 31 active multistate investigations, sixteen Salmonella, eight E. coli, six Listeria, one Campylobacter, down from 33. FDA’s October 5 blueberry update says the Chilean grower did not provide all requested records, that the October 2 expansion to Walmart and Trader Joe’s products came from an on-site foreign inspection, and that the firm is on Import Alert 99-35; CDC re-stamped its closed page the same day, as I noted at Food Poison Journal.

Two documents this week showed how often the agencies know the food and do not say so.FDA’s CORE+EP 2025 annual report, covered by Food Safety News October 6, counts 69 incidents, 26 responses and 11 advisories; I counted five outbreaks where FDA knew the food and issued no warning. Phyllis Entis used a FOIA request to pry loose a redacted 2025 CORE report on an eight-case Listeria outbreak and traced it to California peaches and a packer whose peaches were recalled in October 2025; I said thank youThursday. Monongalia County, West Virginia, is still investigating sixteen lab-confirmed Salmonella cases in two weeks with no source, which I wrote up Monday.

Phyllis Entis’s ledger at eFoodAlert went three days without a United States item and then filled in a hurry. October 3 carried the LEASA sprouts and a frozen pizza allergen recall; October 4 through 6 had no U.S. alerts. October 7: Eden Brothers, FSIS’s public health alert on GRACE canned chicken Vienna sausages illegally imported from Jamaica and sold in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maryland and Texas, and two FDA warning letters. October 9: Gardeners Basics, and Krasnyi Oktyabr’s Starfish Seafood Trio cold-smoked salmon, halibut and trout from Latvia, recalled for Listeria monocytogenes that New York’s agriculture department found in routine sampling October 1 and FDA posted eight days later. The same state program caught Walker’s Wine Juice of Forestville, New York, selling pumpkin juice with a pH too high for its hot-fill process and no kill step, a botulism risk pulled from its store and wineries in twelve states. Allergens: soy in Saint Francis frozen pizzas, milk in Nature’s Own Hawaiian Bread, sesame in Oliva hummus. No FSIS recall surfaced, only the alert.

Gallup put a number on all of this, and it is a record low. Sixty-five percent of Americans are confident in the safety of grocery-store food, down from 73 percent a year ago and 81 percent in 2019; 47 percent trust federal oversight; 73 percent avoided a brand or food after a recall. I offered ten ways to win it back Thursday, having opened the week with a Publisher’s Platform asking to be put out of the lettuce business before 2027. The Senate will not vote on Heidi Overton’s FDA nomination before November 9. Judge Chhabria’s pause on USDA’s relocation of about 2,600 employees runs through October 13, no ruling yet. Spotlight on America asked how botulism got into infant formula, which H.R. 7867 would start to answer by requiring testing. The two draft petitions on naming implicated firms and publishing consignee lists, dated October 8, ride with Friday’s open letter for comment before filing.

That’s the week — a seed lot matched by genome sequencing and recalled from five marketplaces with no supplier named, 38 people sick from chicken wraps with a food and no brand, a no-food ledger at 619, a lettuce company announcing its remedy before the agency finished its list, and a ban call landing on a cheese outbreak still at thirteen. 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.