Two federal pages carry the running account of what is making Americans sick right now: FDA’s Investigations of Foodborne Illness Outbreaks table and USDA’s Outbreak Investigations: Response table at the Food Safety and Inspection Service. I wrote them up on August 8, August 12 and September 2. Here is where they stand after
Saturday, September 26, 2026
This is the twelfth Saturday column. Last Saturday’s edition ran under the headline FDA Confirmed the Sprout Seed Recall and Still Did Not Say Who Sold the Seed; its point was that the answers existed, just not on the page where people look. This week the pages filled in, and every
Last Friday, Target told a federal court that it had no duty to ask a single question about the infant formula it sold – even in the middle of a national infant botulism outbreak, and even after the FDA sent Target a warning letter about that outbreak. Target’s position is simple: not our job.
What
Just landed in Norway, and the first thing I read off the plane was Tom Gremillion’s new piece for the Consumer Federation of America, “Food Safety and Corruption.” Read the whole thing. Nobody in Washington connects the dots on food safety better than Tom, and nobody says it more plainly. Thank you, Tom — for
We need a lawyer who can find the defendant and a paralegal who can find the one page that matters.
Marler Clark has been suing the companies that poison people since 1993 — since a nine-year-old girl named Brianne Kiner nearly died from a hamburger. Sixteen years later it was Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance
Saturday, September 19, 2026
This is the eleventh Saturday column. Last Saturday’s edition ran under the headline CDC Closed the Largest Cyclospora Outbreak in American History at 12,883 Sick; its point was that closed is not the same as answered. This week the answers turned up in places nobody would think to look: FDA confirmed
De Ann Davis, senior vice president of science at the Western Growers Association, published a piece on August 31 arguing that FDA outbreak communication is itself a food safety tool and needs to work better. I missed it when it came out. It deserves a reply, because I agree with most of it, and
FDA’s CORE outbreak investigations table is the closest thing the public has to a running list of the foodborne illness outbreaks the agency is working. When I checked it this morning, September 16, it still carried a September 10 date. It lists sixteen active investigations. Add the case counts on the table to the counts
On September 9, 2026, the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan good-government group, published a brief arguing that federal workforce and funding cuts have diminished the country’s public health capacity. It used this summer’s record Cyclospora outbreak as one of its case studies. I think the argument is right. I also think several of the
On Sunday and Monday I posted about this outbreak. One post showed that FDA already answered the argument Taylor Farms is making, in a 2020 warning letter to another salad company. The other walked through every public version of the theory that the parasite came out of Michigan and Ohio water, and the papers offered
