Frozen is not sterile, and organic is not a promise of safety — a bag of blueberries grown in Chile and sold under a trusted store brand has now put four people in the hospital.

Here is where things stand. The FDA and CDC, with state and local partners, are investigating a multistate outbreak of E. coli O145:H28 tied to frozen GreenWise-brand organic blueberries. As of the July 6 update, there are 12 confirmed cases, 4 hospitalizations, and no deaths across two states, concentrated in Florida with a single case in Georgia. People got sick between May 11 and June 5. It began when the Florida Department of Health flagged a cluster of O145 illnesses to the CDC on July 1; interviews pointed hard at the berries, with seven of nine people interviewed reporting frozen blueberries and five of them naming GreenWise organic berries bought at Publix. Publix pulled the product from its shelves on its own before the recall even issued.

The recall came on July 3, when Frutas y Hortalizas del Sur S.A. of San Carlos, Chile, pulled the 10-ounce bags carrying lot code 60401 and a Best By date of February 9, 2028. Those berries went to Publix stores across Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

So go check your freezer. That is not a throwaway line — the Best By date on these bags runs all the way to February 2028, which means a recalled bag can sit frozen and forgotten for a year and a half, long after this outbreak drops out of the news. Look for the 10-ounce GreenWise organic package with lot code 60401. If you find one, throw it out or take it back to Publix for a refund, and clean any surface it touched. If you dumped the berries into a freezer bag and can’t tell whether they’re part of the recall, throw them out anyway. Freezing preserves E. coli as faithfully as it preserves the fruit — the cold does not make them safe; it just buys the bacteria time.

O145 is one of the “big six” non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing strains, and it is every bit as dangerous as the O157:H7 most people have heard of. It can cause bloody diarrhea and hemolytic uremic syndrome — the kidney failure that hits children hardest. Four hospitalizations in an outbreak of twelve tells you how virulent this one is.

Marler Clark has been retained by one of the Florida families — a young boy and his grandmother who both fell ill after eating the berries. The very young and the elderly are exactly the people O145 punishes worst, and exactly the people who did nothing wrong but buy fruit at the grocery store. This is my lane, and it has been since 1993. FDA and state investigators are still working to pin down where in the supply chain — somewhere between a Chilean farm and a Florida freezer — the contamination got in. We intend to find out too.