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colbert.jpgTuesday, February 26, 2008, 10:00 a.m.

2322 Rayburn House Office Building

WRITTEN TESTIMONY BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE

Chairman and members of the committee, my name is William Marler. I am a trial lawyer. My law firm Marler Clark, located in Seattle, Washington, specializes in representing victims of foodborne illness.

Unfortunately, for my clients, I have been in business too long. It began in 1993 with over 700 people sickened, hundreds hospitalized – many with life-long complications – and four deaths – stemming from the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak. 

I thank you for the honor of being allowed to testify before this committee. I am proud of the work that this committee has done to try to improve food safety throughout the U.S. This will be my first time testifying before the U.S. Congress. Although I have never had the honor to testify, I was there in 1994 for Senate hearings about the lack of safety in our food supply. I was with Brianne Kiner, then a nine year old girl, who spent six months hospitalized, suffered acute kidney failure and multiple strokes, had her large intestine removed, was in a coma for over a month, and spent 100 days on dialysis, all from eating a hamburger. Thirteen years later, I was here again, this time with Ashley and Isabella Armstrong – victims of the more recent Dole Spinach E. coli outbreak that sickened 205, killing 5; with Sean Pruden – a victim of an E. coli outbreak at Taco Bell that sickened nearly 100; and with Terri Marshal, whose mother-in-law has remained in a nursing home since December 2006 after eating a few spoonfuls of Salmonella-tainted peanut butter.Continue Reading It’s Friday night and I am watching Stephen Colbert on C-SPAN testify on immigration and it made me think about my testimony from 2008 before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on food safety

In all the heat that has been generated against House Bill 2749 and Senate Bill 510, two sections (Sec., 121 in HB 2749 and Sec., 205 in SB 510), are the babies that have been thrown out with the bathwater. If passed these sections have the greatest opportunity to fundamentally change how food is produced in the United States.  Here is the reality, most outbreaks are figured out AFTER the outbreak is over (or nearly so), and most recalls are generated by ill consumers (a.k.a., canaries with grocery carts).

US-CDC-Logo_109309.pngRead those sections for yourself. However, here is my take on them:

Both Bills opening provisions are essentially the same except the Senate version excludes in Section (E) (House version (b) (5)), “including working toward automatic electronic searches” and “in order to identify new or rarely documented causes of feed-borne illness and submit standardized information to a centralized database.” The remaining provisions of the opening provisions are identical. The Secretary of HHS (remember these bills ONLY relate to FDA and the products it oversees) “acting through the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shall enhance food-borne illness surveillance systems to improve the collection, analysis, reporting and usefulness of data on food-borne illnesses…”

So, how do Sec., 121 in HB 2749 and Sec., 205 in SB 510 accomplish that?Continue Reading Lets give the CDC and State Health Departments the tools to stop outbreaks faster

Everyone has become a bit bothered by the Salmonella Outbreak that has sickened over 1,500 people and caused the recall of 550,000,000 eggs.  In the next few weeks, I will be visiting the Iowa factory that produced these fine eggs – some several million chickens.  But, is my chicken experiment in our backyard a sustainable…

In 1999, I was being encouraged to run for the US Senate against then Senator Gorton.  As part of my “vetting,” I met with Senators Daschle, Boxer and Reid in the minority leaders office.  Under the watchful gaze of LBJ, I was asked why I was considering giving up a law practice.  My answer was simply, that…

I have been called a lot of things (even I would not publish them on my own blog), but “Toxic Avenger” is a new one.  You need to pick up the latest WIRED Magazine to read it, but here is a teaser photograph:

photoavenger.JPG

I’m thinking about getting a costume like the guy in the movie…

Since the 1999 article by Mead PS, Slutsker L, Dietz V, McCaig LF, Bresee JS, Shapiro C, Griffin PM, Tauxe RV., Food-related illness and death in the United State have been estimated at approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. Three pathogens, Salmonella, Listeria, and Toxoplasma, are…