Bill Marler, a Seattle-based attorney representing 93 people sickened from the outbreak, said he will decide in the next few weeks whether to add the three other farms to his lawsuits, which already target Mission Organics.
Bill Marler, a Seattle lawyer who represents 93 of the victims of the spinach E. coli outbreak and who was a plaintiffs’ lawyer in the Jack in the Box and Odwalla E. coli cases in the 1990s, said the industry is fooling itself by self-regulation.
“The problem with voluntary good agricultural practices is they are voluntary,” Marler said. One result of the Jack in the Box incident was rules for the meat industry enforced by Department of Agriculture, he said.
“The bottom line was that they produced mandatory good agricultural practices that were backed by inspections and bacteria product testing. Without that, it is meaningless,” Marler said.
“No one in the industry should take solace from the fact that Mission Organics is named as the most likely source of contaminated product,” said Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney who represents nearly 100 victims of last fall’s outbreak. “All of these farms could have the same problems.”
Marler is suing the grower and the processor, Natural Selection Foods, as well as Dole Foods, which sold the spinach under its own label.
