Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, an Arkansas City, Kan., establishment, is recalling approximately 14,158 pounds of ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced.
The products subject to recall include:
• Approx. 40-pound cases of “BEEF FINE GRIND 81/19 NATURAL,”
My mom and dad were both public employee union teachers. They worked hard all their lives teaching kids and young adults. My brother is a union plumber. In honor of my parents, my brother and Wisconsin and other state union workers who are fighting for their rights, I am closing my law firm early on
I had an nice chat a few weeks ago with the folks over at Fruit Grower Magazine on their cover story on the Food Safety Modernization Act – An Opposing View – The nation’s top consumer advocate/attorney on food safety says the bill will benefit many growers. Here is the interview:
One of the top experts on the Food Safety Modernization Act is a man whose very name evokes fear and quite possibly hatred in the hearts of food company executives across the country. Bill Marler unquestionably has become the top food safety lawyer in the nation. His Seattle, WA, firm, Marler Clark, handles literally thousands of cases per year.
In fact, after being retained to represent people sickened in the headline-grabbing Jack in the Box and Odwalla juice cases, he decided to found Marler Clark in 1998 to deal with nothing but food safety cases. His firm is usually working on 75 to 100 outbreaks at any one time, he says, and is currently handling a total of 150 cases right now involving by far the leading crops when it comes to food safety problems — leafy greens and sprouts — predominately sprouts.
His firm represented 100 people who sued for damages in the 2006 spinach outbreak, or 95% of the people sickened. Of the five people who died, his firm represented four of them. The only family he didn’t represent elected not to sue, he says.
In the 18 years since he embarked on the infamous Jack in the Box case, for which he won a judgment of $12.5 million for one family, his firm has collected nearly $600 million from defendants. He even has an epidemiologist on the payroll. He has eight attorneys on staff, and two of the original four worked against him on the Jack in the Box case. “By the end of that case they knew more about E. coli than anyone else,” he says.
Marler’s InvolvementContinue Reading Interview with Fruit Grower Magazine on the Food Safety Modernization Act
Given my job, it is little wonder that I tend to focus on the problems with a product when it actually causes illnesses. There are, however, times when looking at recalls can also make you aware of problems that seem to repeat themselves.
March 2011 – Skippy Peanut Butter: Salmonella
Unilever United States, Inc.
December 2010 – Multistate DeFranco and Sons In Shell Hazelnuts
An outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 was associated with eating DeFanco and Sons in-shell hazelnuts (also known as filberts)that had been purchased from bulk bins in grocery stores or in a repacked form sold from November 2, 2010 to December 22, 2010 in multiple states
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) laboratory has confirmed E. coli O157:H7 contamination of in-shell hazelnuts (also known as filberts) collected from the home of an ill Minnesotan. The contaminated hazelnuts are part of a multi-state recall announced last Friday, March 4, by DeFranco and Sons, a California-based nut and produce distributor.
The Minnesota Department
Routine surveillance activities by health departments in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan identified seven E. coli O157:H7 cases with the same DNA fingerprint with onsets between December 20, 2010 and January 28, 2011. Three have been identified in Wisconsin, three in Minnesota and one in Michigan.
Investigations by health officials revealed an association between illnesses and
Although it seems like I just landed from Istanbul, I am off this Firday to California to give a talk on Saturday to a meeting of the Northern California American Society for Microbiology on “Separating the Wheat from the Chaff – How we do what we do and use science to do it!”
Ryan Newkirk, Craig Hedberg, and Jeff Bender in FOODBORNE PATHOGENS AND DISEASE did a masterful job of explaining how to do an foodborne disease outbreak investigation – from the perspective of a milkborne one
Objectives: The main objectives of this study were to establish baseline characteristics for milkborne outbreaks, establish an expected milkborne outbreak profile
