Hamburger E. coli Was 95 Percent of My Practice Until Federal Inspection Ended It. On-Farm Slaughter Would Bring It Back.

By Bill Marler on August 28, 2026

On August 28, 2026, President Trump said he would give farmers and ranchers the right to process their own food, in a Truth Social post calling the four largest meat processors a monopoly. Here it is in full:

“Ranchers and Farmers have always been a number one priority for me. They work very hard, are smart, efficient, and immaculately CLEAN, but for years I have heard that they have had a tremendous problem with the Big Processors, who many say are a nasty Monopoly. There are, essentially, 4 of them, a very non competitive number, and they make life miserable for our wonderful Farmers and Ranchers, and I can’t let that happen, can I? So, in order to break this powerful monopoly, with much of its ownership based outside of the U.S., I am authorizing legal documents to be drawn in order to allow Farmers and Ranchers to be given the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD. This should move quickly. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Reuters reporters Leah Douglas, Katharine Jackson, Daphne Psaledakis and Susan Heavey reported the same day that the White House did not respond to requests for detail, and Bloomberg noted that it is unclear whether the President has the authority to do this at all. The Washington Post put the substance of it plainly, describing a plan to let ranchers bypass USDA-inspected meat plants. CNN reported where the idea came from: on Wednesday’s Glenn Beck program, Beck told the President that “the inspections are insane,” and Trump asked whether ranchers and farmers would do a good job of processing beef with less regulation, then said he would look at it that day. Whatever those legal documents turn out to say, they run straight at the reason I no longer make a living suing beef companies.

From 1993 to 2002, at least 95 percent of my firm’s revenue came from hamburger cases.

I started this work in January 1993, representing children sickened in the Jack in the Box outbreak. Hundreds were sick. Four children died. From that outbreak until the ConAgra recall in the summer of 2002, at least 95 percent of Marler Clark’s revenue came from E. coli cases linked to hamburger. I could count on a significant ground beef outbreak and recall arriving like clockwork every spring or summer. In 2002 I wrote an op-ed for the Denver Post asking the beef industry and USDA to put me out of business.

They largely did it. Ground beef E. coli is now close to zero as a share of what this firm does, and I have said so in print more than once. The millions the industry spent on interventions and the work of a generation of food safety professionals made the difference. It is the single best thing that has happened in food safety in my lifetime, and I do not say that grudgingly.

One sentence in a September 1994 speech did most of the work.

On September 28, 1994, FSIS Administrator Michael Taylor told the American Meat Institute that the agency considered raw ground beef contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 to be adulterated under the Federal Meat Inspection Act. The exact language is preserved in the Federal Register. The industry sued and lost. On October 17, 1994, FSIS began sampling raw ground beef for the organism, and in 1998 it raised the sample size from 25 grams to 325 grams because the smaller sample was missing low-level contamination. After the 2002 ConAgra recall in Greeley, the agency ordered every ground beef plant to reassess its controls.

On June 4, 2012, six more Shiga toxin-producing strains — O26, O45, O103, O111, O121 and O145 — became adulterants in raw non-intact beef, a change Marler Clark had petitioned for in 2009. In June 2020 FSIS extended that testing from beef manufacturing trimmings to ground beef, bench trim and other components.

None of that happened on a farm. Every piece of it happened inside a federally inspected establishment, with federal personnel standing there to take the sample, hold the lot and stop the shipment. Take the inspector out and the entire apparatus has nothing to attach to.

A President cannot write a new exemption into the Federal Meat Inspection Act.

The inspection requirement is statutory, and so are the exemptions. For livestock there is one meaningful exemption, custom slaughter under 21 U.S.C. § 623, and the product goes back to the animal’s owner marked not for sale. FSIS says plainly in its own guideline that inspection is required, unless exempted, for meat from cattle, sheep, swine and goats, and it lists every exemption there is: personal use, custom slaughter, retail stores, restaurants, and slaughter in an unrecognized Territory. Selling uninspected beef to the public is not among them. Changing that takes Congress.

FSIS says absorbing 2,000 more plants would compromise its food safety mission.

Set aside the law for a moment and look at the arithmetic, starting with what thinning this system already did. Juan Vassallo reported for Investigate Midwest in May that complaints about the safety of meat, poultry and egg products rose nearly 40 percent in a single year, from 1,443 to 2,016, in a year when USDA cut its workforce by 18 percent and FSIS lost about 9 percent of its staff. That is this system with an inspector still in every plant, only fewer of them. FSIS spends about $1.24 billion a year to cover roughly 7,100 federally inspected establishments. The agency’s own fiscal 2027 budget justification warns that state reimbursement rates are falling toward 38 percent, that states may pull out of their inspection programs, and that taking on an estimated 2,000 additional establishments could severely strain its resources and compromise its food safety mission.

Two thousand plants is described by the agency as an existential problem. There are roughly 1.9 million farms in this country. Nobody is sending an inspector to the ranch, and nobody is proposing to. The only way to give a farmer the right to process his own beef for sale is to delete the requirement that anyone inspect it.

An immaculately clean steer carries E. coli O157:H7 in its intestines.

The President’s post says ranchers are immaculately clean, and I have no doubt most of them are. That has never been the point, and the confusion between the two is the oldest one in this field. E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Campylobacter live in the intestinal tracts of healthy cattle on clean farms. The organism reaches the carcass off the hide and the gut during dressing, and grinding then takes what was on the surface and distributes it through the interior where cooking may not reach it. As few as ten organisms can make a child sick. None of it is visible.

Everything the industry built — hide-on interventions, carcass washes, trim testing, test and hold — exists because what you can see on an animal has almost nothing to do with the pathogen load you cannot. A rancher’s good character has never been a kill step.

Meat with no establishment number cannot be traced or recalled.

This is the part that worries me most, and it gets almost no attention. A grant of inspection carries an establishment number, production records and lot identity. That is what makes a traceback possible, and a traceback is what makes a recall possible. Product slaughtered on a farm and sold down the road has none of it.

Illnesses from that product would be sporadic and scattered, arriving one at a time in counties that never compare notes, the kind of cluster that never crosses the threshold to be recognized as an outbreak in the first place. Most of them would never be counted. When somebody’s child ends up on dialysis, the first thing the family loses is any ability to find out why — and the second is any way to keep it from happening to the next family.

The consolidation complaint is real, and custom slaughter is not the fix.

I want to be fair about what sits underneath the President’s post, because it is not made up. The administration’s own figures, which an independent fact-check confirmed, put the four largest packers at about 85 percent of beef processing, up from 36 percent in 1980, and independent producers really do wait months for a kill date. That is a genuine problem with genuine remedies. The Cooperative Interstate Shipment program lets state-inspected plants under twenty-five employees ship across state lines with an inspector still on the floor. USDA’s Small Processors Action Plan put $60 million into processing expansion grants and cut overtime inspection fees. Those tools exist and are underfunded. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Friday that a slate of beef processing announcements begins Monday, and Noah Wicks and Olivia M. Bridges of Agri-Pulse published the full list she posted: waiving red tape in processing, rescinding outdated guidance, growing support for small processors, and expanding ranchers’ ability to sell across state lines. That last one is the Cooperative Interstate Shipment program, and it is the right direction to move in.

What binds a small plant is capital, labor and scale. It is not the inspector. Removing the inspector does not build a plant, does not add a kill line and does not move the price of ground beef. It only removes the one person in the building whose job is the public’s.

I am not alone in this. The Meat Institute, the trade association for the very packers the President’s post calls a monopoly, came out against the idea the same afternoon, saying that allowing “uninspected meat to be sold to unwitting consumers” is the wrong approach and risks this country’s reputation for producing the safest meat in the world. It answered the price rationale in the same breath: if the goal is lower beef prices for American families, lowering food safety standards is the wrong response. Its fuller answer, reported by Noah Wicks and Olivia M. Bridges at Agri-Pulse, goes to the premise rather than the risk: farmers and ranchers already have several routes to process and market the livestock they raise, through the custom exemption or by opening a state or federally inspected plant of their own. The post assumes the door is closed. It is not.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association was blunter in the same story. Weakening federal meat inspection and food safety standards, it said, “is not the answer,” and beef sold to American consumers should go on meeting rigorous, science-based standards no matter the size of the processor. Asked what would actually help, the cattlemen named lower fuel and fertilizer costs, protection of the herd against foreign animal disease, and expanded opportunities for mid-size and regional processors. That is the same place I arrived from the other direction. It is not often that the packers, the cattlemen and the plaintiffs’ lawyer land together on a question, and it is worth noticing when we do.

I spent nine years making a living on hamburger, and I have spent the twenty-four years since telling anyone who would listen that the beef industry met the challenge and that losing the work was the best outcome I could have asked for. I meant it then and I mean it now. I would rather not get it back.

FDA’s New GRAS Rule Cites Tara Flour. Our Daily Harvest Clients Are the Reason It Can, and It Still Would Not Have Kept the Crumbles Off the Shelf.

By Bill Marler on August 28, 2026

Posted in Case News

On August 11, the FDA published its proposed rule on Substances Generally Recognized as Safe, 91 FR 51834, Docket No. FDA-2025-N-3262, with comments due December 9, 2026. HHS announced it the day before as a landmark food policy reform. The fact sheet describes it simply: manufacturers would have to tell FDA when they decide on their own that an ingredient is safe.

Page 51841 provides the agency’s example. In 2022, a popular at-home food-delivery company used tara flour in a human food product and recalled it after roughly 400 adverse event reports describing gastrointestinal distress, hepatotoxicity, and hospitalization. The company conducted its own root cause analysis and identified tara flour. FDA asked for records showing that the company had reached a GRAS conclusion on the ingredient and received none. Tara flour had never been the subject of a GRAS notice, or even a pre-submission meeting.

The company was Daily Harvest. Those roughly 400 adverse event reports are our clients. Marler Clark represented 339 of the approximately 470 people sickened by Daily Harvest’s French Lentil + Leek Crumbles^[1], as well as 33 people sickened by Revive Superfoods’ Mango & Pineapple Smoothies—another product sold in the U.S. and Canada that contained tara flour. Nearly forty of them lost a gallbladder.

On December 27, 2023, I wrote to Jim Jones, then FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods^[2], and laid out the chain: tara flour milled by Molinos Asociados in Peru, imported by Smirk’s in Colorado, put into the Crumbles by Stone Gate Foods in Minnesota, and sold to consumers who had no way to know that the ingredient had never been evaluated for safety in the United States.

We asked FDA to determine whether anyone had ever sought GRAS status for tara flour. Our search of FDA records showed that nobody had. We also asked what Smirk’s had done to satisfy its Foreign Supplier Verification Program obligations, given that FDA’s own CORE incident summary said the importer had an FSVP plan for tara protein flour but that more information was needed. And we pointed FDA to what Canada had already done. On September 28, 2023, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency told Canadian businesses to stop buying and selling tara flour as an unassessed novel food^[3].

Credit where it is owed. Ilana Korchia in our office built the regulatory spine of that work^[4]. She is the one who took a mass personal injury case about a bag of frozen lentil crumbles and turned it into a question about 21 U.S.C. §§ 321(s), 342, 348 and 384a: whether the ingredient itself was lawful and who in the supply chain was responsible for verifying that it was.

On April 10, 2024, FDA’s Division of Food Ingredients issued a memorandum on tara flour derived from the seed germ of Caesalpinia spinosa^[5], concluding that the use of tara flour in food did not meet the criteria for general recognition of safety; that there was no common use in food before 1958; that the available toxicity evidence was insufficient to establish safe use; and that, as a result, the ingredient was an unapproved food additive and food containing it was adulterated under section 402(a)(2)(C)(i) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. FDA posted that determination on May 15, 2024, added tara flour to its post-market not-GRAS inventory, and began screening it at ports of entry.

That brings us back to the proposed rule. FDA is now using tara flour as its example of why the voluntary GRAS system is not enough.

The proposed rule is worth supporting, and I will file a comment saying so. It would make notification mandatory rather than optional, requiring companies to put their GRAS determinations on the public record. Notices would appear in a public, searchable GRAS notice inventory. That public record matters. A filed notice, or the conspicuous absence of one, is evidence. When a company later tells a jury it had no reason to know its ingredient was unsafe, the record will tell a different story.

But this is not premarket approval, and FDA says so plainly. A company can put a substance into interstate commerce and notify afterward. It can keep selling while its notice sits in the queue. It can keep selling even if it never files a notice at all. The stated consequence for skipping the requirement is simply that the violation becomes a factor in how FDA prioritizes substances for post-market review.

Run the facts of 2022 through the new rule and ask what actually changes. Daily Harvest still designs the product. Smirk’s still imports the flour. Stone Gate still puts it into the Crumbles. The product still ships in April. People still start getting sick in June. Somewhere in there a form gets filed, or not, and the only difference is that afterward we would have a better paper trail for the lawsuits. That is progress, not prevention.

The timeline is the second problem. Comments close in December. A final rule follows, whenever it follows. It takes effect 60 days after publication. Compliance with the notification requirement is proposed for 18 months after that. On the most optimistic schedule, the first year in which anyone is actually obligated to notify FDA about an ingredient is 2029.

The “legacy” pathway is the third problem. For substances already on the market under a self-affirmed conclusion, a streamlined submission asks for the identity of the substance, its conditions of use, and evidence it was already in commerce. It does not require the underlying safety documentation. A company that quietly self-affirmed an ingredient in 2015 can register it in 2029 without ever showing anyone why it believed the ingredient was safe.

Then there is the import problem, which is where our clients actually got hurt. Of the more than 1,200 GRAS notices FDA has filed, 617 came from foreign firms and 503 of those from countries where English is not the primary language. Tara flour traveled from a mill in Peru through an importer in Colorado to a manufacturer in Minnesota, and the law already required somebody in that chain to verify it. FSVP has been on the books since FSMA. It did not stop this. Layering a notification duty on top of a verification duty that no one audits does not produce verification.

What I will ask for in the comment period is straightforward. Notice should come before introduction into commerce, not after. Noncompliance should carry a stated legal consequence rather than a place in a prioritization queue. The streamlined pathway needs a minimum evidentiary requirement and a hard deadline to convert to a full notice. FDA also needs reviewers, and Congress needs to fund them. Finally, the public inventory should be designed for the public—not merely searchable, but understandable and usable by a parent standing in a grocery aisle.

Comments are due December 9.

^[1]Daily Harvest, Inc., Daily Harvest Issues Voluntary Recall of French Lentil + Leek Crumbles Due to Potential Health Risk(company announcement posted by FDA, June 23, 2022), and Daily Harvest, Updates on Our Voluntary Recall of French Lentil + Leek Crumbles (advisory page, updated May 31, 2023).

^[2]Letter from William D. Marler to James “Jim” Jones, Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods, U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Re: Status of Tara Flour, a Novel Ingredient not Generally Recognized As Safe, in the United States (Dec. 27, 2023). The letter collects the underlying record as attachments, including the CFIA notice, the FDA recall announcement, FDA’s CORE incident summary, and the Chittiboyina, Chan & Smith, and Choi et al. publications.

^[3]Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Notice to Industry: Tara Protein Powder (Tara Flour) Not Assessed for Safety by Health Canada (Sept. 28, 2023), Attachment No. 1 to the December 27, 2023 letter.

^[4]Marler Clark memorandum, Foreign Supplier Verification Program and Food Additive Authorities (May 14, 2024) (collecting 21 U.S.C. §§ 321(s), 342, 348, and 384a).

^[5]Memorandum, U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Office of Food Additive Safety, Division of Food Ingredients, Regulatory status and review of available information pertaining to tara protein/flour derived from the seed germ of the plant, Caesalpinia spinosa: lack of general recognition of safety for its use in foods (Apr. 10, 2024).

I Wrote to Two Committees About Botulism in Infant Formula in June. The Genome Answered Before Congress Did.

By Bill Marler on August 28, 2026

Posted in Case News

On June 23 and June 29, 2026, I wrote to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions about Clostridium botulinum in powdered infant formula — 48 hospitalized infants in the ByHeart outbreak, four more in the Nara Organics outbreak, and a federal rule that still requires no one to test infant formula for the organism that paralyzed them. Neither letter drew a reply. On August 27, 2026, the federal government confirmed the central factual claim in both of them, and confirmed it with a laboratory result rather than an inference. On August 28 I wrote to both committees again. All four letters are below.

I asked both committees for the same three things

The June 23 letter went to Chairman Brett Guthrie and Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr., in support of H.R. 7867, the Infant Formula Safety Modernization Act of 2026, which Representative Rosa DeLauro introduced in March and which received a Subcommittee on Health legislative hearing on April 29. I asked the Committee to mark the bill up and report it favorably, to hold an oversight hearing, and to put the parents of the injured infants at the witness table. That letter is published here, and the heart of it is not my argument. It is Appendix A — fourteen families describing, in their own words and with their children’s photographs, what infant botulism did to a two-month-old.

The June 29 letter went to Chairman Bill Cassidy and Ranking Member Bernie Sanders, and it began with credit, because the Senate had earned it. On April 29 the HELP Committee reported the Protect Infant Formula from Contamination Act, S. 272, by a vote of 22 to 0, and the full Senate passed it the same day by unanimous consent. In a Washington that agrees on almost nothing, that is not a small thing. My point to that Committee was narrow: S. 272 requires one-business-day notice only for the organisms already on the books — Cronobacter and Salmonella — and does not reach the one that put these babies in intensive care. That letter is published here.

Neither letter was answered, and that is not what this post is about

Congressional committees receive an enormous volume of mail, most of it from people with an interest in the outcome, and I am one of them. A letter from a plaintiffs’ lawyer has no claim on anyone’s reply, and I am not writing to complain about the silence. I am writing again because the record changed. In June I could tell these committees what I believed the evidence would show. In August the government showed it.

On August 27 the government said the two outbreaks were one contamination

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the Nara Organics outbreak over. The final count is four infants — two in California, one in Pennsylvania, one in Washington — with illness onsets on April 20, May 17, May 20 and May 31, 2026. All four were hospitalized. None died. CDC found that epidemiologic, traceback and laboratory data showed that Nara Organics Whole Milk Organic Infant Formula was contaminated with Clostridium botulinum and made infants sick. Its earlier update had said only that the formula might be contaminated. The agency dropped the qualifier.

Then came the finding that ought to move this from a lawyer’s argument to a committee calendar. Whole genome sequencing linked a patient sample from the Nara outbreak to material collected during the investigation of the 2025 ByHeart outbreak — a patient sample, product samples and an ingredient sample. FDA describes the same result more specifically, reporting a match to a ByHeart clinical sample, a powdered infant formula base sample, and four samples of unopened cans of ByHeart formula. CDC states that FDA’s traceback determined that the formulas sold by both brands were made with milk supplied by Organic West Milk and spray dried by Dairy Farmers of America, and that the matching sequences indicate a common source of contamination for the two outbreaks.

In June I wrote that the contamination did not strike two unrelated companies by chance, and that it traveled through one shared supply stream the system missed twice. The support for that sentence was a traceback and a trade-press report. The support for it now is the government’s own sequencing. The same organism has been found in an infant fed one brand and in the product and the ingredient of the other. A strain does not move between two babies who never consumed the same product by accident. It moves through the thing they shared. I have been making that argument about this ingredient since June, and I would rather have been wrong.

One question the sequencing does not answer, and I would rather say so myself

Neither agency has determined a root cause. FDA says it cannot yet tell whether the milk was contaminated before it was dried or during the drying process. That question decides how responsibility is divided among the brands, the milk supplier and the processor, and it is the question I expect to spend the next two years on. It does not touch whether the formula was contaminated, and it does not touch whether the formula paralyzed babies. CDC decided both of those on August 27.

My June letters undercounted, and the correction runs the wrong way

Both June letters said three Nara infants and fifty-one babies in total. The agencies added a fourth Nara case as the investigation continued, so the correct totals are four and fifty-two. Both follow-up letters state the correction openly rather than quietly restating the number, and I wrote about the fourth case when it was added. Fifty-two infants hospitalized across two outbreaks, many of them on ventilators, each treated with BabyBIG antitoxin that the State of California prices at $69,300 a dose.

The sequencing speaks to four specific provisions of the House bill

H.R. 7867 is not a general expression of concern. It does six concrete things, and the August 27 result speaks directly to four of them. The testing list: federal regulation still requires finished-formula testing only for Salmonella and Cronobacter and says nothing about Clostridium botulinum, so the organism now sequenced across two brands, two outbreaks and fifty-two hospitalized infants is the one organism nobody is required to look for. Environmental monitoring: a single strain persisting through this ingredient stream across two manufacturers, a national recall, a federal investigation and a formal closeout is not an incidental event — it is a resident organism, and Zone 2 and Zone 3 monitoring is how a resident organism gets found. Foreign manufacturers: the Nara formula was made abroad, its milk came from an American supplier, it was dried by an American processor, and the sequencing has now tied it to an American outbreak — the route the bill anticipated is the route the organism actually took. Notice to Congress: consider what this committee would have known in 2025 had that provision been law, and how much of what I am reporting today you would already have had.

The mechanism built to prevent a second outbreak failed on a customer list

During the 2025 ByHeart investigation the FDA did what the playbook calls for. It ran a trace-forward and asked Organic West Milk who else it supplied, so the next brand could be found before the next baby was hurt. The customer list did not include Nara Organics, and Organic West has since told the FDA that it should have. ByHeart recalled all of its product on November 11, 2025. CDC declared that outbreak over on February 26, 2026. The first Nara infant became ill on April 20, 2026 — 160 days after the recall, and 53 days after the government told the country the first outbreak was finished. The one mechanism designed to prevent a second outbreak existed, the agency used it, and an incomplete answer defeated it. We now know at the level of the genome exactly what got through. I have been asking what Nara knew and when it knew it since June, and this is the part of the record that answers a different question — what the government asked, and what it was told.

The three asks are unchanged, and there is now a fourth

First, pass a bill that reaches botulism. The House Committee should mark up H.R. 7867 and report it favorably; the hearing is behind it and the next step is procedural. The Senate should take up a companion measure or write its own. Second, hold the oversight hearing. Bring the FDA, Dairy Farmers of America, Organic West Milk, Nara Organics and ByHeart to the table. The questions are sharper than they were in June because there is now a laboratory result to ask about: how long has this organism been in this ingredient stream, who tested for it, by what method and how often, and who prepared the 2025 customer list, who reviewed it, and when did each company learn that the same milk had reached a second brand. Third, put the parents at the witness table. They are willing to do more than write, and no expert and no lawyer, myself included, can substitute for the parent who lived it.

The fourth is new. Put a written question to the FDA, with a deadline. The agency’s root cause investigation has been open since November 2025, and its own public page on this subject has not been updated since July 13, 2026 — it still says there is not enough evidence to determine whether the shared suppliers are the source of the contamination, language its own sequencing has now overtaken. Ask the Commissioner what the root cause investigation has found, whether the agency intends to require testing or environmental monitoring for Clostridium botulinum by regulation, and if so on what schedule. A date certain would tell Congress whether legislation is necessary or merely useful. The absence of one would tell you something too. I made a version of this point directly to the agency in June, and the answer so far has been letters.

We have done this before

The Jack in the Box tragedy moved USDA to declare E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef in 1994 — one decision that has kept countless children out of hospital beds in the decades since. That was a rule. What the powdered infant formula industry has received on botulism is a series of letters, the first of them sent on March 8, 2023, naming the organism by genus and species, three and a half years ago. Letters are not a rule. Fifty-two families already know what the sequencing means, and they would like to know that Congress does too.

My thanks to both committees for their work on infant formula this year, and my standing offer: I will answer any question from either committee or its staff, and I will make the families available to them.

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.

The Nara–ByHeart Link: One Milk Supply, One Spray Dryer, One Organism

By Bill Marler on August 27, 2026

Posted in Case News

Two different infant formula brands, made by different companies on different continents, sickened infants with Clostridium botulinum seven months apart. What the two products had in common was not a factory. It was an ingredient. FDA’s traceback determined that the ByHeart formula implicated in the November 2025 outbreak and the Nara Organics formula implicated in the 2026 outbreak were both made with organic whole milk supplied by Organic West Milk and spray dried into powder by Dairy Farmers of America. On August 27, 2026, the laboratory work caught up to the paperwork: whole genome sequencing showed that C. botulinumisolated from an infant sickened by Nara formula is a genetic match to C. botulinum isolated from an infant sickened by ByHeart formula, to a powdered infant formula base sample collected in the ByHeart investigation, and to four samples of unopened cans of ByHeart formula. The same organism reached babies through two brands. The only place the two supply chains overlap is upstream of both formula plants — at the milk and at the dryer.

The production point of view.

Follow the powder forward. Organic West Milk supplies raw organic whole milk. Dairy Farmers of America takes that liquid milk, and spray dries it into organic whole milk powder — the bulk dairy base that a formula manufacturer buys by the tote and blends with oils, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals to make finished infant formula. That powder then goes to whichever formula maker bought it. In 2025 it went to ByHeart, whose formula is made in the United States. In 2025 and 2026 it also went into the Nara Organics product, which FDA says was manufactured in Europe at two firms the agency had inspected before these illnesses, issuing observations citing deficiencies to both. Two brands, two sets of formula plants, two countries of manufacture — and one shared dairy base flowing into both.

That is why the shared ingredient matters more than anything either brand did on its own canning line. A contamination event at a formula plant contaminates that plant’s product. A contamination event in the milk, or in the drying step that converts milk to powder, contaminates every downstream customer that bought from the affected production — regardless of how clean the formula plant is, whose name is on the label, or which continent the can was filled on.

Production step	ByHeart (Nov. 2025 outbreak)	Nara Organics (2026 outbreak)
Raw organic whole milk	Organic West Milk	Organic West Milk
Spray drying into whole milk powder	Dairy Farmers of America	Dairy Farmers of America
Formula manufacture and canning	ByHeart, United States	Two firms in Europe
Brand and label	ByHeart Whole Nutrition Infant Formula	Nara Organics Whole Milk Organic Powdered Infant Formula
Retail	National, incl. Target, Walmart, Kroger	National, Target stores, Target.com, Nara.com
Reported illnesses	48 infants, 17 states	4 infants, 3 states

Sources: FDA, Post-Outbreak Response Activities (July 13, 2026); FDA outbreak advisory updates of June 26, July 6 and August 27, 2026; CDC outbreak pages for both investigations. The two chains are identical through the dryer and diverge only after it.

Two features of this product make an upstream contamination event carry all the way to a bottle. First, C. botulinum forms spores, and FDA states plainly that spore-formers survive typical pasteurization and harsh environmental conditions — so heat treatment of the milk upstream does not remove them. Second, powdered infant formula is not a sterile product and has no terminal kill step after blending and canning; the finished powder is not retorted or otherwise treated in a way that would destroy surviving spores. Contamination that is present in the milk or introduced during drying is therefore not corrected by anything that happens later. It is packaged.

FDA has not resolved which of those two points the organism entered at. Its position on August 27 remains that there is not enough evidence to determine whether the milk was contaminated before drying or during the drying process, and its root cause investigation stays open with a focus on ingredients. That is an unresolved question between two defendants’ operations, not a gap in the link between the two outbreaks.

The laboratory point of view — what whole genome sequencing actually showed.

Whole genome sequencing reads the full DNA of a bacterial isolate. Two isolates that are indistinguishable, or separated by only a few base differences, are the same strain — which in practice means they came from the same contamination event rather than from two unrelated encounters with an organism that is common in soil and dust. It is the difference between saying two products shared a supplier and saying two products shared a contamination.

What was published in the ByHeart investigation:

FDA’s inspections of the ByHeart facilities identified C. botulinum in a powdered milk ingredient.
FDA and ByHeart sampled dairy ingredients at Dairy Farmers of America. Two samples from one lot of organic whole milk powder were shown by WGS to match a clinical sample and a positive infant formula sample. That is a closed chain: milk powder at the dryer, to finished formula, to a sick baby.

What FDA added on August 27, 2026:

One clinical sample from an infant in the Nara outbreak is a genetic match to a clinical sample from an infant in the 2025 ByHeart outbreak; to a powdered infant formula base sample collected during the ByHeart investigation; and to four samples of unopened cans of ByHeart formula.

The word doing the most work there is unopened. A positive from an opened can invites the argument that a household, a scoop or a countertop introduced the organism after purchase. Sealed cans foreclose it. The strain was in the product as it left the manufacturer.

Put the two publications together and the chain runs the length of the supply. The Nara infant’s isolate matches the ByHeart infant’s isolate. The ByHeart infant’s isolate was previously reported to match organic whole milk powder sampled at Dairy Farmers of America. If the clinical sample described in the August 27 update is the same patient isolate described in the earlier one — which FDA has not stated, and which is the first thing to confirm — then the organism recovered from a baby fed Nara formula is indistinguishable from the organism recovered from a lot of milk powder at the dryer that served both brands. That is the inference the published record supports. It should be pled as an inference and confirmed with the isolate identifiers, the NCBI accessions and the SNP distances before it is stated as a fact.

Sources.

FDA, Outbreak Investigation of Infant Botulism: Powdered Infant Formula (June 2026), updates of June 13, June 26, July 6 and August 27, 2026, https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/outbreak-investigation-infant-botulism-powdered-infant-formula-june-2026.
FDA, Post-Outbreak Response Activities: Clostridium botulinum Illnesses Associated with Consumption of Powdered Infant Formula, content current as of July 13, 2026, https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/post-outbreak-response-activities-clostridium-botulinum-illnesses-associated-consumption-powdered.
CDC, Infant Botulism Outbreak Linked to Powdered Infant Formula, June 2026, August 27, 2026, https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/outbreaks-investigations/infant-formula-june-2026/index.html.
CDC, Infant Botulism Outbreak Linked to Infant Formula, November 2025, https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/outbreaks-investigations/infant-formula-nov-2025/index.html.

CDC Has Closed the Nara Organics Infant Formula Botulism Outbreak at Four Babies. The Strain From One of Them Matches Four Unopened Cans of ByHeart Formula.

By Bill Marler on August 27, 2026

Posted in Case News

CDC declared the Nara Organics infant botulism outbreak over on August 27, 2026. Four babies in three states — California, Pennsylvania and Washington — were sickened by Nara Organics Whole Milk Organic Powdered Infant Formula, with illness onsets running from April 20 through May 31, 2026. All four were hospitalized. None died. Nara recalled every lot on June 13. And the laboratory work that closed the file ties one of those four infants to the ByHeart formula outbreak that CDC had already declared over three months earlier.

Four babies, four hospitalizations, and no case added since early July.

The case count has not moved since the July 6 update. FDA says no new case has been added since July 3; CDC says none has been added since its own July 6 update. Either way the investigation sat still for roughly eight weeks before CDC closed it. The four illness onsets are not evenly spaced, and the gap in the middle is the part worth looking at.

Illness onset date	Sick infants	Days since previous onset
April 20, 2026	1	—
May 17, 2026	1	27
May 20, 2026	1	3
May 31, 2026	1	11
Total	4	41-day onset span

Source: CDC, “When People Got Sick: Infant Botulism Outbreak, June 2026,” downloadable data file, retrieved August 27, 2026. Interval column computed from the onset dates in that file. Check: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 4, which matches the total of 4 cases CDC and FDA both report.

One baby got sick on April 20 and then nothing for 27 days. Three more got sick inside a two-week window in late May. The recall came on June 13 — 54 days after the first baby got sick, and 13 days after the last one.

CDC’s own data file puts two of the four cases in California. FDA’s map caption says one.

CDC’s locations page maps four infants across three states. The file behind that map has California at two. FDA’s August 27 advisory reports the same four cases from the same three states and then describes its map as one case in Washington, one in Pennsylvania and one in California. That adds to three. The count is four; the caption is wrong, and the caption is what a reporter reads.

State	Sick infants	CDC display range
California	2	1 to 5
Pennsylvania	1	1 to 5
Washington	1	1 to 5
Total	4	3 states

Source: CDC, “Where Sick People Lived: Infant Botulism Outbreak, June 2026,” downloadable data file, retrieved August 27, 2026. Check: 2 + 1 + 1 = 4, matching the reported total. FDA’s narrative map caption on the same date describes one case per state, which sums to 3.

The strain from one sick Nara baby matches a ByHeart baby, ByHeart base powder, and four unopened cans of ByHeart formula.

This is the finding that matters. FDA reports that whole genome sequencing of one clinical sample from an infant in the Nara outbreak is a genetic match to a clinical sample from an infant in the 2025 ByHeart outbreak, to a powdered infant formula base sample collected during the ByHeart investigation, and to four samples of unopened cans of ByHeart formula. One organism. Two outbreaks. Two brands. Seven months apart.

Read the match set carefully, because the shape of it tells you what is still missing. Everything the Nara baby’s isolate matched is on the ByHeart side of the ledger — a ByHeart patient, ByHeart base powder, ByHeart cans. FDA does not report a match to any Nara product sample, and it does not say the Nara can it was testing in July has been sequenced at all.

Both brands’ formula was made from milk supplied by Organic West Milk and dried by Dairy Farmers of America.

FDA’s traceback determined that the Nara lots linked to these illnesses were made with milk supplied by Organic West Milk and spray dried by Dairy Farmers of America — the same milk supplier and the same dryer behind the ByHeart formula that sickened 48 infants in 17 states. FDA says the matching sequences and the shared supply chain together indicate a common source of contamination, and then says the thing everyone should sit with: there is still not enough evidence to determine whether the milk was contaminated before drying or during the drying process. Nine months into the first outbreak, the agency cannot yet say which side of the spray dryer the C. botulinum came from.

This is the whole-milk-powder problem I have been writing about since the first outbreak. Both products were built on it, and FDA warned this entire industry in writing in March 2023 that C. botulinum belonged on its risk list.

Nara was left off the customer list Organic West gave FDA during the ByHeart investigation.

During the 2025 outbreak, FDA ran a trace-forward to find out which other formula makers were getting Organic West milk. By FDA’s own account, Organic West produced an incomplete customer list that did not show its milk going to the manufacturers of Nara Organics formula. Organic West told FDA during this investigation that the earlier list was incomplete and should have included Nara.

Put the dates next to each other. ByHeart broadened its recall to all product on November 11, 2025. CDC declared the ByHeart outbreak over on February 26, 2026. The first Nara baby got sick on April 20, 2026 — 160 days after the ByHeart recall and 53 days after federal officials announced that outbreak was finished. A complete customer list in November would have pointed investigators at a second brand drawing from the same milk while there was still time to do something about it. That is not hindsight. That is the ordinary purpose of a trace-forward.

FDA still has not said what the unopened Nara can from the same lot showed.

In July, FDA reported that C. botulinum had been confirmed in an open can of Nara formula fed to one of the sick infants, and that it was testing an unopened sample from the same lot with results expected in the coming weeks. The closeout says samples were collected from patients, from finished product and from ingredients — and then reports a single clinical match. No finished-product result. No ingredient result. If the unopened can came back positive, that is a fact families and pediatricians should have. If it came back negative, that is a fact the industry should have, because it goes straight to how well anyone can sample their way out of this hazard.

One more gap. The FDA advisory tells readers to see its Post-Outbreak Response Activities page for more information. That page is stamped current as of July 13, 2026 — 45 days ago — and still says there is not enough evidence to determine whether the shared suppliers are the source or route of contamination. It has not caught up to the sequencing result FDA announced today.

The recalled formula carries Best By dates into 2027, which means some of it is still in kitchens.

Powdered formula does not spoil in any way a parent can see, and the recalled product carries Best By dates ending in 2027. It was sold nationwide through Target stores, Target.com and Nara.com between July 2025 and June 2026, and all of it was recalled on June 13. An outbreak being over does not make a leftover can safe.

Do not feed it to your baby. Throw it away, or return it.
Before you discard a container, photograph the label, the lot number and the Best By date.
Wash anything that touched the formula — bottles, counters, scoops, dispensers — in hot soapy water or the dishwasher.
Know the signs: constipation, poor feeding, a weak or altered cry, loss of head control, difficulty swallowing, decreased facial expression. Get care immediately. Physicians should call the Infant Botulism Treatment and Prevention Program at 510-231-7600, available around the clock.

Questions parents are asking today.

I still have a can of Nara Organics formula. Is it safe now that the outbreak is over?

No. The recall covers every lot, and the closing of an outbreak investigation says nothing about the can in your cupboard. Throw it away.

My baby drank this formula. How long do I have to watch?

Symptoms of infant botulism can take as long as several weeks to appear. CDC’s guidance is to watch for a month after your infant last consumed the product, and to seek care immediately for poor feeding, loss of head control, difficulty swallowing or a decrease in facial expression. The clinical overview is here.

Is any formula on the shelf right now affected?

No other brand has been named. Recalled Nara product should no longer be for sale anywhere. FDA’s root cause investigation is still open and is focused on ingredients, which is the honest answer to a question about what else might be involved: the agency does not yet know.

Two brands, one strain, and a testing rule that still does not name this organism.

I represent families in both the ByHeart and the Nara outbreaks, and we have sued over this formula, so read me accordingly. But you do not need a stake in it to follow the sequence. The same milk went into two brands. The list that would have connected them was incomplete. A strain from a can of one brand turned up in a baby fed the other. And the federal regulation that tells formula makers what to test finished product for still names Salmonella and Cronobacter and does not name C. botulinum.

Four babies is a small number and a total one if you are one of the four. What I want out of this closeout is not a headline. It is a complete customer list every time a regulator asks for one, a finished-product and ingredient testing requirement that names the organism that keeps showing up, and a supplier that cannot hand two brands the same problem while the file on the first one is being closed. I have asked Congress for exactly that. The lab result FDA published today is the strongest argument for it yet.

The Fifty-State Cyclospora Count Is 32,506. Hawaii Is Investigating a Case With No Travel and No Recalled Lettuce.

By Bill Marler on August 26, 2026

Posted in Case News

The fifty-state Cyclospora floor stands at 32,506 tonight, August 26, 2026, and the news is in a state that has never been part of this outbreak. The Hawaii Department of Health announced today that it is investigating a sixth case of cyclosporiasis, an Oʻahu resident who became ill at the end of July and did not travel outside Hawaiʻi during the period when they were likely exposed. No suspected food source has been identified, and the department says plainly that no recalled Taylor Farms de Mexico lettuce was distributed to or sold in the islands. The five earlier Hawaii cases this season were all travel-associated.

That reason is gone, so all six are counted here and the total rises by six. North Carolina published today as well, at 940 cases statewide with hospitalizations unchanged at 32 and the source still unknown, which is the same 940 my chart was already carrying because the row was right and the date on it ran a week early. Federal figures have not moved since Tuesday. CDC counts 17,180 laboratory-confirmed domestically acquired cases with data current through August 24, against 1,180 for the same stretch of 2025, and the outbreak investigation stands at 10,930 illnesses in seventeen states with at least 454 hospitalizations and two deaths. Michigan reports tomorrow, and the season closes on Sunday.

Here is where all fifty states stand tonight. The Lettuce column is whether FDA has confirmed that recalled Taylor Farms de Mexico lettuce reached that state. The last column is the different and more important question: whether anybody has tied that state’s illnesses to Taylor Farms at all.

State	2026 cases	As of	All of 2025	Lettuce	Taylor Farms
Michigan	14,277	Aug 20	50	Yes	Linked
Ohio	5,452	Aug 13	76	Yes	Linked
Missouri	2,152	Aug 23	none reported	Yes	Linked
Indiana	2,069	Aug 19	27	Yes	Linked
Illinois	1,437	Aug 18	301	Yes	Linked
North Carolina	940	Aug 26	300	Yes	Linked
New York	939	Aug 17	694	Yes	Unknown
Kansas	807	Aug 19	29	Yes	Linked
Kentucky	620	Jul 29	45	Yes	Linked
Oklahoma	544	Aug 18	41	Yes	Linked
Florida	407	Aug 8	210	Yes	Unknown
Iowa	327	Aug 20	64	Yes	Linked
Texas	315	Aug 11	512	Yes	Unknown
West Virginia	313	Aug 21	8	Yes	Linked
Arkansas	287	Aug 24	13	Yes	Linked
Virginia	234	Aug 24	115	Yes	Unknown
Nebraska	218	Aug 6	51	Yes	Linked
Wisconsin	216	Aug 5	65	Yes	Unknown
Colorado	150	Jul 17	205	No	Unknown
Massachusetts	145	Aug 5	74	Yes	Linked
Alabama	85	Aug 3	19	Yes	Unknown
Pennsylvania	82	Jul 29	not notifiable	Yes	Linked
Washington	71	Aug 21	not available	May have	Travel link
Maryland	69	Jul 17	123	Yes	No link found
New Hampshire	69	Aug 4	7	Yes	Linked
New Jersey	46	Jul 11	180	Yes	Unknown
California	41	Jul 14	not available	May have	Unknown
Minnesota	41	Jul 17	none reported	No	Unknown
Connecticut	35	Jul 17	41	Yes	Unknown
Maine	27	Aug 7	4	Yes	Linked
Oregon	23	Jul 24	not available	No	Travel link
Arizona	19	Jul 17	49	No	Unknown
Georgia	11	Jul 17	116	Yes	Unknown
Tennessee	11	Jul 17	38	Yes	Unknown
Mississippi	7	Jul 22	not notifiable	Yes	Unknown
Hawaii	6	Aug 26	not available	No	No link found
Alaska	5	Jul 16	6	No	Unknown
Rhode Island	4	Jul 17	6	May have	No link found
South Dakota	3	Jul 16	3	May have	Unknown
Louisiana	1	Jul 17	99	Yes	Unknown
Utah	1	Jul 17	37	No	No link found
Delaware	no count published	—	1	May have	Unknown
Idaho	no count published	—	not notifiable	No	Unknown
Montana	no count published	—	8	No	Unknown
Nevada	no count published	—	not notifiable	No	Unknown
New Mexico	no count published	—	9	No	No link found
North Dakota	no count published	—	4	May have	Unknown
South Carolina	no count published	—	45	Yes	Unknown
Vermont	no count published	—	3	May have	Unknown
Wyoming	no count published	—	0	No	Unknown
All fifty states	32,506			31	17

Counts as published by each state health department, compiled from the linked sources on August 26, 2026. Forty-one states publish a 2026 count and those forty-one sum to 32,506. Hawaii is counted for the first time here, because the five travel-associated cases that kept it out of the sum are now six and the sixth reports no travel. Nine states publish no count at all. Every figure is a floor.

The Secretary Is Right About Real Food. Forty Percent of Americans Say They Are Eating Less of It Because of Cyclospora. Here Are Six Things HHS Could Do About That, and One Thing the Secretary Should Stop Doing.

By Bill Marler on August 26, 2026

Posted in Case News

I agree with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the thing he cares most about. The American diet is making people sick, ultra-processed food is a real driver of chronic disease, and whole food is better food. I have been arguing versions of that for years and I am not going to stop because it became somebody else’s slogan. Where the Secretary and I part company is on what is standing between his agenda and the grocery cart. This summer the answer is a parasite, and the measurable result is that Americans are eating less fresh produce than they were in May.

The credit for this one belongs up front. Marcia Brown and Sophie Gardner wrote the piece that prompted it, in Politico on August 8. It is careful, it is sourced, and they did the hard part, which was getting people on the record who do not ordinarily line up on the same side of anything. Go read theirs first. What follows is me riffing on their reporting and adding the part I would want the Secretary to read. Twelve days later one of the people they quoted stopped talking through a reporter and wrote it out himself, and I have folded that in below.

Give him the additives half of his agenda, because he has actually moved it.

On August 10 he announced a proposed rule ending self-affirmed GRAS and requiring companies to notify FDA whenever they conclude an ingredient is safe. It published in the Federal Register the next day at 91 FR 51834, docket FDA-2025-N-3262, with comments open through December 9. I have argued for mandatory GRAS notification for a long time, and I will say plainly that no administration before this one proposed it. The same day, HHS and USDA sent the government’s first proposed definition of ultra-processed foods for final review. Neither of those is small. His line that parents should not need a chemistry degree to understand what their children are eating is correct, and I would put it on a slide.

That is the chemistry half of food safety. The other half is biology, and biology has been running the news since May.

Forty percent of Americans say they are buying less produce, and that is a chronic disease outcome.

CBS News and YouGov asked in late July, in the middle of this outbreak, and 40 percent of Americans said they were buying and eating less fresh produce because of it. Four percent said more. A Quinnipiac poll fielded the same week found 55 percent of registered voters with not much confidence or none at all in government oversight of food safety. I put the whole set of them side by side earlier this month, along with the European, British and Canadian numbers, which are flat or rising while ours fall.

Read that 40 percent the way the Secretary should read it. Nobody who quits salad quits eating. They move to the shelf-stable aisle, to the things engineered not to spoil, and they get sick more slowly from something that will never make the news. Susan Mayne, who ran FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition for eight years, put it as plainly as it can be put in an essay in STAT: consumers should not be faced with a trade-off between nutrition and food safety. That is not an attack on the real food agenda. It is the precondition for it. Every week this outbreak goes unexplained, his own program loses ground on his own metric.

The industry sees it coming before the government does. Joelle Mosso of the Western Growers Association told Politico that retailers have already cut orders in anticipation of falling demand, and that consumers are being handed a message telling them to eat more of the thing they are simultaneously being warned off. I wrote to Western Growers about this in July and I will say the same thing here. The fear outlasts the hazard every time. Onion purchases fell far past anything the recall covered. Chipotle sales sagged for months after an E. colioutbreak that ended long before the customers came back. The recalled lettuce is gone from the shelves, and the produce aisle is still down.

The people making this point are not his opponents.

Jerome Adams, Surgeon General in the President’s first term, told Brown and Gardner the department is urging Americans to eat more fresh produce while warning that the wrong fresh produce will make them badly ill, and cannot say which is which, and that the mixed message is pushing people off salad right now, which is the opposite of what eat real food is supposed to accomplish. Marion Nestle, who has spent a career on this and who has said she supports parts of the MAHA agenda, told them it is hard to tell people to eat real food when the food has pathogens in it. She is right and going after her for saying so was a mistake made by people who ought to be counting her as an ally. Their piece also notes that HHS has held one press call on this outbreak season, and that the Secretary launched a cooking show during it.

The sharpest version came from Frank Yiannas, who was FDA’s top food safety official in the President’s first term and who I have known since his Disney and Walmart days. He told Politico there had been no clear, timely communication about which products were implicated and which were not, or what consumers could actually do, and that the vacuum filled with fear and misinformation. What it cost, he said, was consumer confidence in exactly the foods we want people eating more of. That is a Trump appointee describing the Secretary’s own agenda being damaged by a communications failure rather than by a parasite.

Adams did not leave it at a quote in somebody else’s story. On August 20 he put his name on a column in USA Today headlined that he is a former Surgeon General and the Secretary has the wrong priorities, and he made the argument himself. The sentence at the center of it is the one I have been circling all summer, which is that you cannot effectively focus on chronic disease while acute infectious outbreaks keep overwhelming you. He gets there by way of something the Secretary said before he had this job, which is that we should give infectious disease a break for eight years. Adams calls that a fundamental misunderstanding of public health. It is also the cleanest explanation I have seen of why the produce aisle is down. He then asked for five specific things. One of them is on my list below in nearly the words I would have used. Three of them should have been and were not. One of them is his, and I am leaving it to him.

It is not only the lettuce, and the next one resets the clock.

Set Cyclospora aside for a paragraph. In the same two months, roughly 19 million eggs were recalled over Salmonella that sickened close to a hundred people. A separate Salmonella outbreak traced to jalapenos, which Politico put at more than three hundred people in twenty-seven states two weeks ago, now stands at 431 in thirty-two states with 57 hospitalizations. A dozen people were sickened by E. coli in frozen blueberries. Another dozen got Listeria from soft cheese and one of them died. Add the alfalfa sprouts Minnesota named on Thursday and that is four live outbreaks in a single weekend.

Sandra Eskin, who ran food safety at USDA and now leads Stop Foodborne Illness, put the structural problem to Politico in one sentence: an outbreak like this one, followed a few months later by another, undoes the message entirely. She is right, and it is worse than she says, because the clock does not reset at zero. It resets lower. Each one takes another slice out of the same confidence and none of it comes back on its own.

The numbers behind the fear are not small, and they are still moving.

As of August 18, CDC counts 15,716 laboratory-confirmed cyclosporiasis cases acquired in this country since May 1, with 828 hospitalizations and two deaths, across 47 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Another 11,841 are unconfirmed or need further work. The comparable figure for the same stretch of 2025 was 1,180. The outbreak tied to recalled Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce accounts for 10,930 of them in seventeen states, with at least 454 hospitalizations, as of August 20. My own fifty-state chart, built from what the state health departments publish themselves, stood at 31,972 on Saturday. The season does not close until August 31 and the counting will run well past it.

Six things the Secretary could start this week.

Before the list, the fair part. HHS says CDC and FDA have communicated throughout, through social media, continuously updated outbreak pages and ongoing work with reporters, and that consumers have been told to avoid implicated product and see a doctor if they get symptoms. CDC did ask states in early July to report cyclosporiasis weekly rather than monthly, which is a real improvement, and nobody made him do it. And some of what went wrong is structural rather than anybody’s decision about this outbreak. Daniel Jernigan, who ran CDC’s emerging and zoonotic diseases center, describes the parasitic disease program losing capacity as a knock-on effect of the malaria money disappearing, not as a choice anyone made about Cyclospora. The career communications staff who would ordinarily have handled a foodborne outbreak were cut in last year’s reorganization. I am not interested in blaming the people still at their desks in Atlanta and College Park. I am interested in what the man who runs both agencies does next.

These are drawn from a longer list I published on August 7. I have narrowed it to what sits inside his own department, and four of the six need no rulemaking, no appropriation and no act of Congress.

1. Publish one national number and say what it counts. His department currently publishes 10,930, and 15,716, and 27,557 if you add the pending cases, for the same summer, and a reader has no way to know which one answers the question. Pick one, define it, date it, and stand behind it. An agency that will not say how big a problem is cannot expect to be believed when it says the problem is handled.

2. Talk about the outbreak as often as he talks about dinner. One press call, in a season that has now put more than 800 people in the hospital. CDC has posted about it on its X account twice. A commenter under one of his own department’s real food posts asked, in about that many words, whether anybody was ever going to say how to navigate this thing. I have no objection to the cooking show. I object to the ratio. And if the answer is that the people who used to do this work were let go, then hire them back, because a Secretary who briefed the country on this outbreak every week in plain language, naming what is known and what is not, would do more for produce consumption than any recipe.

3. Finish what CDC started on August 20. That day CDC said for the first time that it is genotyping samples from sick people and that the parasites causing these illnesses are genetically related. Read it precisely, because it ties the patients to each other rather than to any product. It is still the first laboratory evidence of any kind in this outbreak, and a day later San Francisco used the same tool to connect one of its own residents to it. Publish the genotype data and fund the capacity to run it everywhere. New York has 939 cases since May and no named source at all, and nobody has asked Albany whether its isolates have been typed.

4. Put Cyclospora back in FoodNet. On July 1, 2025, CDC cut the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network from eight pathogens to two, and this one was among the six dropped. I will be honest about what this ask is and is not. FoodNet measures trends rather than detecting outbreaks and restoring it would not have found this one. It is also the cheapest reversal available to him, it is the single cut he has personally defended, and it is the reason nobody can say with authority how far outside the normal range this summer actually sits. And I am not the only one asking. Three days ago the former Surgeon General asked for the same restoration in USA Today, all eight pathogens and not one of them optional, and he made the same point about the price of it that I would have made, which is that putting the other six back is a question of prioritization rather than a massive new budget request.

5. Grant the naming petition. Stop Foodborne Illness asked FDA in February to name the companies whose product is implicated in an outbreak. It has been pending since. That is the same organization whose chief executive Politico quoted on how a second outbreak undoes the message, and the same organization a senior adviser in his department spent a week calling a front group. Consumers cannot avoid what nobody will identify, and in produce, where there is frequently no brand on the item at all, the disclosure has to reach the processor and the grower to be worth anything.

6. Stop delaying traceability. Section 204 is already law. FDA’s own analysis of pushing compliance to July 2028 put the forgone public health benefit above the industry savings, and Congress then wrote the non-enforcement date into an appropriations rider on top of it. He can ask for the rider to come out. I went through the arithmetic and the industry positions yesterday.

Adams asked for three things I did not, and all three of them belong on the list.

He asked the administration to fill the vacancies. FDA has no confirmed commissioner and CDC has a director who was sworn in three weeks ago. I had that in my closing paragraph as a reason to go easy on the Secretary. Adams is right that it belongs on the list instead. An acting commissioner can go on CNBC and say the food supply is the safest in the world; a confirmed one can be made to answer for that sentence in a hearing room, under oath, with a transcript. Send the nominations up.

He also asked that the inspectors and epidemiologists who are left be aimed at high-risk foods and at imports, and he named the two foods this summer has actually been about, jalapenos and leafy greens. That is the item on his list I most wish I had written myself. The lettuce came from central Mexico. The jalapenos came from Sinaloa. Import inspection is where the biology of this summer entered the country, and FDA moved its own inspection upstream from the processing plant to the growers in Mexico on August 20, the same day his column ran. He asked in the same breath for faster traceback and recall protocols, which is my sixth item wearing a different coat.

And he asked that whatever international health security money survived the USAID cuts go to targeted partnerships and rapid data sharing in high-risk regions, on the ground that detection abroad protects Americans at home. I would not have thought to put that on a domestic list, and he is right that it belongs there. Every contaminated field in this story was in another country. Our surveillance system met this outbreak at the point where Americans were already in the hospital.

There is a fifth item on his list, on vaccines, and I am not taking it up. Not because I think he is wrong about it. Because it is not what I do, and because the minute food safety gets folded into that argument it stops being something a room of people can agree to fix and starts being a side to be on. I will say only this much. His fourth item and my second are the same instrument. We both want the Secretary to stand at a podium and say a plain sentence out loud. Read his column and take the rest of it up with him.

One more, and it is not on the list because it is not a policy. Spend an hour with a family from this outbreak. One of the 454 people hospitalized, or the family of one of the two who died in Michigan. Not a briefing, not a photograph, not a roundtable with the trade associations in the other chairs. I have been asking people in these jobs to do that since 1993, and I have never watched anyone come out of that hour still able to say a thing is under control.

None of this is partisan, and none of it would have prevented this outbreak.

I want to say both of those plainly, because I would rather say them myself than have them said back to me. The contamination happened in a field in central Mexico in the spring, and no American surveillance program was going to stop it from happening. What these six would have done is make the outbreak shorter, smaller and legible, sooner named and faster traced and honestly counted. And not one of them belongs to a party. The Microbiological Data Program was created under a Republican president and killed under a Democratic one. The traceability rule was written under one administration and delayed under two. The two people who have made this case most plainly in public this month both served in this President’s first term, and one of them made it three days ago on the opinion page of the largest newspaper in the country.

There is one place where I am not asking him to do more. I am asking him to stop.

He campaigned against what he called the government’s aggressive suppression of raw milk. As Secretary he has said he is advocating for it, and he toasted the release of the MAHA report with raw milk in the White House. This is where he and I are not close. Raw milk has no proven nutritional advantage over pasteurized milk and carries something on the order of a hundred times the risk of foodborne illness, a risk that falls hardest on small children. Pasteurization is the most successful food safety intervention in American history. I have kept RealRawMilkFacts.com running for years so that anyone who wants the evidence rather than my opinion can go get it.

Annie Waldman spent months at the country’s largest raw dairy for ProPublica. Federal and state regulators have tied at least 233 illnesses and 40 hospitalizations to that one farm across eight outbreaks since 2006. Its owner told her he had put a couple of kids in the hospital and then called himself a pioneer. I represented one of those kids. He was seven years old in 2006, spent nine days on a ventilator and eighteen days on dialysis after an E. coli O157:H7 infection took his kidneys, and he is twenty-seven now and still under a nephrologist’s care. His mother has spent the twenty years since testifying against raw milk bills in state after state.

Here is the part that belongs in this piece rather than in an old argument. In March, that farm’s raw cheddar was linked to another O157:H7 outbreak, nine people in three states, more than half of them under five, one child with the same kidney complication. CDC told the public to consider not eating it. FDA gave no consumption advice at all. Three federal health employees told ProPublica that political appointees had watered the language down. The company refused to recall for eighteen days and then did it under protest. In January the government had quietly dropped its enforcement effort. Asked in April whether he had a moral responsibility to tell people not to drink raw milk, the Secretary said every product can contain contaminants, and that his department informs the public and lets people make the choice.

Informing the public is the whole job, and it is precisely what his department did not do. You cannot say you are letting people choose and then let your own agencies tell a parent to consider not feeding their toddler the cheese. That is not information. It is a hedge with a child on the other end of it. Every one of the six things above is the same request in a different aisle, which is to say the number, name the product, say the sentence plainly. Raw milk is the aisle where the sentence is easiest to write and where he has been least willing to write it.

The Secretary has the harder job of the two of us. I get to write about this. He has to fix it, and he has to fix it with agencies he has not finished staffing, in the middle of three simultaneous outbreaks. That is an argument for sending the nominations up, not an argument for waiting. He is asking Americans to build their health around fresh, whole, minimally processed food, and this summer a great many of them looked at the lettuce and quietly decided against it. Nobody gets talked back into the produce aisle. You make the produce safe, and then you show your work.

Tuesday Night the Fifty-State Cyclospora Count Hit 32,500. CDC Added 1,464 Confirmed Cases and 94 Hospitalizations Today, and Fewer Than Half the Country’s Hospitalizations Have Been Tied to the Recalled Lettuce — Which Is Not the Same as Saying the Rest Are Not Related.

By Bill Marler on August 25, 2026

Posted in Case News

Adding up what each of the fifty state health departments reports on their own websites, the floor under the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak this Tuesday evening, August 25, is 32,500 people.

CDC posted its weekly national update today: 17,180 laboratory-confirmed cases acquired in the United States since May 1, 922 hospitalizations, 2 deaths, and cases in 48 states plus the District of Columbia, with symptom onsets running from May 1 through August 19 — six days before the page went up. At least 11,844 more cases are still waiting on confirmation or investigation.

CDC added 1,464 confirmed cases and 94 hospitalizations in a week, and the backlog finally stopped growing

A week ago, CDC counted 15,716 confirmed domestically acquired cases and 828 hospitalizations. Today it counts 17,180 and 922. That is 1,464 more people confirmed and 94 more people in a hospital in seven days.

The year-over-year comparison CDC prints in its own key points has not softened. For the same stretch of 2025 the agency counted 1,180 domestically acquired cases. The 2026 figure is more than fourteen times that.

What the Taylor Farms outbreak actually is, and the two places anybody has named

It is worth stopping to say plainly what this outbreak is, because the shape of it explains most of the argument above. It began as a restaurant investigation. On July 17 CDC told people not to eat shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico served at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia — 1,644 people who reported eating at Taco Bell, in five states, with 94 hospitalizations and onsets going back to May 13. FDA’s traceback had converged on a single supplier of the shredded lettuce those restaurants used. Michigan pulled the food histories of 190 of those patients and found that 90 percent had eaten iceberg lettuce.

By July 24 the Taco Bell count was 1,947 across nine states, with Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania added. Then on August 5 CDC changed the definition. The outbreak stopped being people who ate at Taco Bell and became people who reported exposure to Taco Bell or to recalled Taylor Farms de Mexico lettuce anywhere, and the count jumped to 6,358 in fifteen states. That is the sentence that carried this from a restaurant cluster to a national one, and it is worth reading twice. It also means the last time anybody published how many of these illnesses are Taco Bell illnesses was July 24, at 1,947. The outbreak is now 10,930. Nobody has updated the restaurant share in a month.

Outside Taco Bell, exactly one place in this country has ever been named. Nine people who ate at the cafeteria salad bar at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene, New Hampshire, were confirmed with cyclosporiasis in July, out of sixteen the hospital identified as exposed, ten of them its own employees. By August 3 the hospital told a reporter it had treated 34 patients who tested positive, that 28 of them had eaten from that salad bar before the Taylor Farms product was pulled, and that 21 of the 28 were Cheshire employees.

There is a reason New Hampshire is the one place with a name on it, and it is not that the lettuce there was different. A hospital can see illness in its own workforce and report it the same week. Twenty-one sick employees in one building is a signal a grocery store cannot generate and a fast-food counter cannot generate. The same lettuce went to foodservice customers in thirty-one states, and to Marketside bags on Walmart shelves in fifteen. Cheshire is not where it uniquely made people sick. It is where the building kept an attendance list.

Everywhere else the trail stops at the loading dock. The recall itself names nine buyers, and the federal enforcement file shows what each of them took: Walmart under the Marketside label at 109,476 cases, Taylor Farms’ own foodservice packs, Cross Valley Farms for US Foods, Sysco, Markon, Peak, Jack in the Box, YUM, and Subway — which at 8,075 cases is the largest restaurant chain in the recall and has said nothing publicly about it in five weeks. Jack in the Box disclosed on its own that recalled lettuce reached its stores in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, and said no illnesses were reported at its locations. Not one illness has been publicly attributed to any of those channels. That is not because none happened. It is because a person who ate a salad at home in June has no reason to connect it to anything, and nobody has asked them.

CDC has tied 454 of the country’s 922 Cyclospora hospitalizations to the recalled lettuce, and has not said what the other 468 are

This is the number that needs saying carefully. The federal outbreak tied to Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce accounts for 454 hospitalizations.

Here is what that does not mean. Sitting outside the outbreak count is not a finding that the Taylor Farms’ lettuce did not make those people sick. It means nobody has said either way. Federal attribution in this outbreak runs through interviews — somebody has to remember what they ate in June, weeks before anyone knew to ask — and with a six-week reporting lag, cases keep getting pulled into the outbreak long after they are first counted. Eight states were added to the federal list in August alone.

And the reach of the recalled product is the reason to keep an open mind rather than a closed one. FDA’s own distribution list has the lettuce going to foodservice customers in 31 states, with nine more that may have received it, plus Marketside retail product at Walmart in 15 states. Whatever the explanation, states that took delivery of the recalled lettuce and are not on the outbreak list are not thereby cleared — they are unexamined. New York is the plainest example: 939 cases since May 1, on FDA’s confirmed distribution list, and no attribution published in either direction.

The honest sentence is the uncomfortable one: for somewhere between a third and a half of the people counted sick in this country this summer, nobody has yet said whether the recalled lettuce is the reason or not. CDC said on August 20 that genotyping shows the parasites from sick people in the outbreak are genetically related to each other, which is the first laboratory tool in this investigation that does not depend on anyone remembering a meal. If that testing is run widely, the question can be answered. Until it is, we do not know.

The federal Taylor Farms’ outbreak figure has not moved since Thursday

CDC and FDA both still report 10,930 illnesses, 454 hospitalizations, two deaths and seventeen states, with the last illness onset on August 11. Both pages are stamped August 20. Neither agency has added a state since August 5, and the August 20 update was the first of the entire outbreak to add none.

Six states moved, and three of them had been sitting on my chart too low for a week

Since Sunday night, six state numbers changed and the rest held. Illinois is at 1,437 confirmed and probable cases with 69 hospitalizations as of August 18. My chart carried 1,260. That is 177 more people, and it is the largest single correction on the board this week. Kansas is at 807 as of Wednesday, August 19, against the 748 I was carrying, with 32 hospitalizations — 59 more people.

Iowa posted 327 laboratory-confirmed infections across 58 counties in its Thursday, August 20 weekly report, up from the 300 in 55 counties I was carrying. Virginia moved to 234 as of August 24, up 20, with the domestic column rising 13 and the international column rising 10. Arkansas posted 287 on August 24, up 10 from 277. Oklahoma is at 544 as of August 18, up 38 from the 506 I was carrying, with 36 hospitalizations. Those six increases add 331 people, and 32,169 plus 331 is 32,500.

State	2026 cases	As of	All of 2025	Lettuce	Taylor Farms
Michigan	14,277	Aug 20	50	Yes	Linked
Ohio	5,452	Aug 13	76	Yes	Linked
Missouri	2,152	Aug 23	none reported	Yes	Linked
Indiana	2,069	Aug 19	27	Yes	Linked
Illinois	1,437	Aug 18	301	Yes	Linked
North Carolina	940	Aug 18	300	Yes	Linked
New York	939	Aug 17	694	Yes	Unknown
Kansas	807	Aug 19	29	Yes	Linked
Kentucky	620	Jul 29	45	Yes	Linked
Oklahoma	544	Aug 18	41	Yes	Linked
Florida	407	Aug 8	210	Yes	Unknown
Iowa	327	Aug 20	64	Yes	Linked
Texas	315	Aug 11	512	Yes	Unknown
West Virginia	313	Aug 21	8	Yes	Linked
Arkansas	287	Aug 24	13	Yes	Linked
Virginia	234	Aug 24	115	Yes	Unknown
Nebraska	218	Aug 6	51	Yes	Linked
Wisconsin	216	Aug 5	65	Yes	Unknown
Colorado	150	Jul 17	205	No	Unknown
Massachusetts	145	Aug 5	74	Yes	Linked
Alabama	85	Aug 3	19	Yes	Unknown
Pennsylvania	82	Jul 29	not notifiable	Yes	Linked
Washington	71	Aug 21	not available	May have	Travel link
Maryland	69	Jul 17	123	Yes	No link found
New Hampshire	69	Aug 4	7	Yes	Linked
New Jersey	46	Jul 11	180	Yes	Unknown
California	41	Jul 14	not available	May have	Unknown
Minnesota	41	Jul 17	none reported	No	Unknown
Connecticut	35	Jul 17	41	Yes	Unknown
Maine	27	Aug 7	4	Yes	Linked
Oregon	23	Jul 24	not available	No	Travel link
Arizona	19	Jul 17	49	No	Unknown
Georgia	11	Jul 17	116	Yes	Unknown
Tennessee	11	Jul 17	38	Yes	Unknown
Mississippi	7	Jul 22	not notifiable	Yes	Unknown
Alaska	5	Jul 16	6	No	Unknown
Rhode Island	4	Jul 17	6	May have	No link found
South Dakota	3	Jul 16	3	May have	Unknown
Louisiana	1	Jul 17	99	Yes	Unknown
Utah	1	Jul 17	37	No	No link found
Hawaii	5, all travel	Aug 14	not available	No	No link found
Delaware	no count published	—	1	May have	Unknown
Idaho	no count published	—	not notifiable	No	Unknown
Montana	no count published	—	8	No	Unknown
Nevada	no count published	—	not notifiable	No	Unknown
New Mexico	no count published	—	9	No	No link found
North Dakota	no count published	—	4	May have	Unknown
South Carolina	no count published	—	45	Yes	Unknown
Vermont	no count published	—	3	May have	Unknown
Wyoming	no count published	—	0	No	Unknown
All fifty states	32,500			31	17

The season ends in six days and the counting does not

CDC treats May 1 through August 31 as the Cyclospora season. That is a calendar boundary and nothing more. With a six-week lag between the day somebody gets sick and the day they land in a federal total, illnesses that began in early August will still be arriving in October. Oklahoma put it as well as anyone last week, telling reporters that many of its newly reported cases are being added to previous weeks rather than to the current one.

The floor is 32,500 tonight and it is a floor, not an estimate. It counts only what fifty state health departments have published about themselves. CDC’s own literature puts the underdiagnosis multiplier for this parasite at roughly eighty-three to one, which would put the real number of people who got sick this summer somewhere near 1.4 million. That estimate comes from Scallan and colleagues, Foodborne Illness Acquired in the United States, Major Pathogens, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2011, which puts the underdiagnosis multiplier for Cyclospora at 83.1. The people who quit buying salad were not overreacting to a number. They were reacting to the one nobody has printed.

The recall covered sixteen days of a season that had been running for months

One thing about this outbreak has bothered me since July, and I have not seen anyone write it down. The recall notice says the shredded iceberg product was distributed June 29 through July 16. CDC says the first illness in this outbreak began June 14. Cyclospora takes about a week to make somebody sick, so that person ate the lettuce around June 7 — three weeks before the first day of product anybody recalled. Both of those statements are on federal pages right now, and they cannot both be complete.

There is a reason for the June 29 date and it is arithmetic rather than epidemiology. Not one of the 236,192 cases in the recall carries a use-by date earlier than July 19, two days after the recall was announced. Lettuce cut in May or early June had already expired by July 17. It had been eaten. You cannot recall it, so it was not recalled. The front edge of this recall is the recall date minus the shelf life. It is not a finding about when the contamination started.

That raises the question nobody has asked out loud. Was the same plant shipping the same product to the same customers in May and June? Everything in the record says yes. The recalled lots span fourteen production days on six-day weeks, dark only on the two Sundays — a plant in the middle of a season, not one starting up. The Walmart Marketside entry alone is 109,476 cases across 61 distinct lot codes produced in sixteen days, and nobody onboards a private-label program for a national grocer and ships a hundred thousand cases in a supplier relationship two weeks old. And the company says on its own website that as of July 18 it temporarily suspended production of all products at the central Mexico facility. You suspend something that was running.

The import data says the same thing about the pipeline. USDA’s weekly iceberg lettuce shipment report carries a line for imports by truck from Mexico. In the last week of April 2025 it shows 260 units of ten thousand pounds — 2.6 million pounds of Mexican iceberg in a single week — with 11,015 units, about 110 million pounds, season to date, against 17,917 units for the entire prior season. Mexican iceberg crosses at Laredo and Pharr every day of the year, and Guanajuato is the part of Mexico closest to those crossings. That is a continuous supply stream. The recall is sixteen days of it.

Two honest limits on all of that. The USDA figures are commodity-level and name no company, so this is an argument about the pipeline the recalled lettuce moved through rather than proof about any one shipper. And I have not been able to confirm the calendar of the central Mexico iceberg season from a grower or a trade source; the April volumes and the company’s own suspension language both cut against a late-June start, but I would rather say what I have not confirmed than let somebody else say it for me.

The question stands, and it is a fair one with no accusation in it. How many cases of central Mexico iceberg lettuce left that plant between May 1 and June 29, and who bought them? The company knows to the case. FDA knows too, because every one of those shipments filed a prior notice at the border. Nobody has published the answer, and nobody has been asked for it in public.

WANTED A PARALEGAL — 10+ YEARS

By Bill Marler on August 25, 2026

Posted in Case News

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.

Six and a Half Million Households Quit Buying Salad in a Single Month. Eighty-Two Percent Say They Will Come Back When This Is Contained. The Industry Cannot Message Its Way to Contained.

By Bill Marler on August 24, 2026

Posted in Case News

Numerator put a number this week on what everyone in the produce business already feels. More than 6.5 million American households stopped buying salad mixes and kits in the month ending July 26, against the month before. Eighty-seven percent of produce shoppers know about the Cyclospora outbreak. More than a quarter of households say they have quit salads and fresh greens entirely and another one in ten has cut back, which Numerator puts at roughly $280 million in consumer produce spending at risk for every month this continues. In the states with more than two hundred reported cases, per-household spending fell 10.7 percent. Salad trips at quick-service restaurants fell more than 16 percent.

The finding I would put in front of every board in this industry is the last one in the release. Among the people who stopped buying bagged salad, 82 percent say they will buy it again once the outbreak is contained. Contained. Not once they have been reassured. Not once the campaign runs. Not once somebody explains again that we have the safest food supply in the world. Consumers have named their condition, it is factual, they can check it, and they are waiting.

The second finding is the one public health should be worried about. People are not substituting. Forty-five percent said they had switched or planned to switch to other forms of produce, but household penetration rose three-tenths of a point for canned vegetables and one-tenth for frozen. That is not a shift inside the category. That is Americans eating fewer vegetables, and it is landing on the same public the federal government is telling to eat more whole food.

None of this is falling where the contamination was. California lettuce was never implicated in this outbreak, and California growers plowed under about a third of the crop that was ready to harvest anyway. Sysco stopped buying Mexican iceberg altogether while its chief executive said in the same breath that Taylor Farms is a high-quality, high-integrity shop, and both of those things were true at once. When a buyer cannot show a customer which case came from which field, walking away from the whole category is the only risk management left to him. That is what a collective reputation is. I have written this before under the title Reap What You Sow. Traceability is not a tax on the innocent. It is the only thing that protects them.

And it is why a communications answer will not work here. When IFIC asked people who lack confidence in the food supply why, they said profit is prioritized over safety, fifty-nine percent; that the parts of the food system do not work together, fifty-four; that regulation is insufficient, forty-six; and that there are too many recalls, forty-three. Not one of those is a messaging problem. And confidence in federal food safety oversight was already at a record low of fifty-three percent last July, before a single person in this outbreak got sick. The line has never once recovered from an outbreak that moved it.

The way back is the substantive list, and I have made it twice already this summer. The trade associations can move tomorrow morning without anyone’s permission: say out loud that the Food Traceability Rule should take effect on its original schedule and put a Cyclospora-specific water standard into the leafy greens metrics without waiting for FDA to write one. Growers, shippers and buyers can treat the water and validate the treatment against the right organism, because the metrics already require treatment of surface water applied overhead within twenty-one days of harvest and then score it against generic E. coli, while FDA says in its own voice that chlorine does not work on this parasite and that indicator testing will not find it. Add human-specific markers so you know when human waste is in your irrigation source. Build the lot-level records now instead of in 2028, because any large buyer can require traceability by contract without help from Congress. Extend field sanitation to every crew and not only to operations with eleven or more hand laborers. And publish the audit results, which was Dave Puglia’s idea and not mine.

I have been hard on this industry all summer, and I have also given credit where it was earned and said which groups asked for the delay, and which did not. Here is the credit that matters now: 82 percent of the people who walked away have already told a pollster the terms of their return. Nobody has to guess what the customer wants. Contained is not a slogan. It is a lot code, a water standard aimed at the organism that is actually in the water, and a record somebody can pull in a day instead of a month. Build that and the customers come back on their own. Keep lobbying against it and the next season buys the same lesson at the same price.

Marler Blog

Marler Blog

Hamburger E. coli Was 95 Percent of My Practice Until Federal Inspection Ended It. On-Farm Slaughter Would Bring It Back.

FDA’s New GRAS Rule Cites Tara Flour. Our Daily Harvest Clients Are the Reason It Can, and It Still Would Not Have Kept the Crumbles Off the Shelf.

I Wrote to Two Committees About Botulism in Infant Formula in June. The Genome Answered Before Congress Did.

The Nara–ByHeart Link: One Milk Supply, One Spray Dryer, One Organism

The production point of view.

The laboratory point of view — what whole genome sequencing actually showed.

What was published in the ByHeart investigation:

What FDA added on August 27, 2026:

Sources.

CDC Has Closed the Nara Organics Infant Formula Botulism Outbreak at Four Babies. The Strain From One of Them Matches Four Unopened Cans of ByHeart Formula.

The Fifty-State Cyclospora Count Is 32,506. Hawaii Is Investigating a Case With No Travel and No Recalled Lettuce.

The Secretary Is Right About Real Food. Forty Percent of Americans Say They Are Eating Less of It Because of Cyclospora. Here Are Six Things HHS Could Do About That, and One Thing the Secretary Should Stop Doing.

Tuesday Night the Fifty-State Cyclospora Count Hit 32,500. CDC Added 1,464 Confirmed Cases and 94 Hospitalizations Today, and Fewer Than Half the Country’s Hospitalizations Have Been Tied to the Recalled Lettuce — Which Is Not the Same as Saying the Rest Are Not Related.

WANTED A PARALEGAL — 10+ YEARS

Six and a Half Million Households Quit Buying Salad in a Single Month. Eighty-Two Percent Say They Will Come Back When This Is Contained. The Industry Cannot Message Its Way to Contained.

Blogs

Disease

Insight & Litigation