Dinesh Ramde of Minneapolis Associated Press reported in "Man sues ConAgra over pot pie tainted with salmonella," on our client Eric J. Mand of Malone of Fond du Lac County who bought a ConAgra Banquet pot pie in mid-September. A few days after eating one, he became so sick with severe gastrointestinal symptoms that he required hospital care on two separate days. Today we filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin a lawsuit on his behalf. I am on my way to Salt Lake City to mediate Dole Spinach E. coli cases, so one of my crack associates stepped into the media void:

"Foodborne illness is sometimes passed off as a mild stomachache but I assure you, if you talk to a victim like Eric, this is certainly not something you would ever want to go through," said Drew Falkenstein of the law firm Marler Clark. "This is not a flu virus."

Mr. Ramde also reported that my firm, “Marler Clark, based in Seattle, has filed six other lawsuits against ConAgra in connection with the pot pie recall. The others were filed on behalf of residents of Michigan, Minnesota and Nebraska, as well as three in Washington.”  We have been retained by 20 others.  According to the CDC, at least 272 isolates of Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- with an indistinguishable genetic fingerprint have been collected from ill persons in 35 states. Ill persons whose Salmonella strain has this genetic fingerprint have been reported from Arizona (1 person), Arkansas (4), California (18), Colorado (9), Connecticut (7), Delaware (5), Florida (2), Georgia (2), Idaho (11), Illinois (7), Indiana (3), Iowa (1), Kansas (4), Kentucky (9), Massachusetts (7), Maryland (7), Maine (2), Michigan (3), Minnesota (7), Missouri (18), Montana (6), Nevada (6), New York (10), North Carolina (2), Ohio (11), Oklahoma (1), Oregon (4), Pennsylvania (18), Tennessee (6), Texas (4), Utah (12), Virginia (9), Vermont (2), Washington (27), Wisconsin (24), Wyoming (3).