Victim’s E. coli Fight Shows the Urgency of Food Safety
Twelve months ago, Faye Bryant had just turned 60 and was about to begin her retirement. She was healthy, strong and was looking forward to spending more time with her grandchildren and working in her large garden.
Faye and her husband, John, live in the small town of Moultrie, Georgia. They often ate at a local restaurant, the Barbeque Pit. Unbeknownst to them, the Barbeque Pit sold beef products produced by Nebraska Beef, Ltd. The beef was adulterated with E. coli O157:H7. On the day Faye was about to begin her retirement, she developed symptoms of E. coli O157:H7 poisoning. Her illness nearly killed her.
After months of hospitalization and ongoing rehabilitation, Faye is still recovering. She’s been left with life-long residuals that profoundly affect virtually every aspect of her life.
In the year since Faye was sickened, thousands of other Americans have become victims of foodborne illness. Many, like her, owe their illnesses to companies that repeatedly violate food safety regulations or ignore them altogether. For example, our firm is involved in the nationwide Salmonella outbreak caused by Peanut Corporation of America. In that case, the processor knowingly distributed and sold peanut products that tested positive for Salmonella. Three of our client families lost loved ones in that outbreak.
Another Salmonella outbreak, involving pistachio nuts produced at the Setton Pistachio plant in Terra Bella, Calif., includes allegations that the company knowingly shipped pistachios that were potentially contaminated with salmonella (although the company is on record as denying that claim). Nebraska Beef, the producer of the product that sickened Faye Bryant, has been implicated in previous E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks.
As a result of these outbreaks and others, it appears there will finally be some long overdue changes to our food safety laws. As needed as they are, all the laws and regulations will not prevent greedy or incompetent companies (or both) from selling adulterated food. Sadly, the only thing available to foodborne illness survivors that really causes companies to change (or go out of business) is forcing them to pay for the harms and losses they cause people like Faye Bryant.
This is one anniversary that people like Faye Bryant will not be celebrating.
The writer, Mr. Pritzker, is founder and president of PritzkerOlsen, P.A., a national food safety law firm that has collected tens of millions of dollars for victims of E. coli O157:H7, Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS), Salmonella, Listeria and other types of food poisoning. Fred has been an outspoken critic of ineffective food safety laws and the nation’s understaffed food inspection program. For more information visit www.pritzkerlaw.com or call 1-888-377-8900 (Toll Free).
Report Card: Going Nowhere Fast on Food Safety
A unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gathers data each year from 10 states to track the frequency of E. coli O157:H7 and other foodborne illnesses. National food safety lawyer Fred Pritzker has written an editorial, suggesting that problems run deeper than saying the nation has reached a plateau in controlling the spread of deadly pathogens in our food. Pritzker is founder and president of Pritzker Olsen Attorneys, a firm that is involved in practically every major foodborne illness outbreak and one that is dedicated to educating the public about food safety issues and advocating for badly needed food safety legislation. To contact a food poisoning lawyer at the firm, call 1-888-377-8900 (Toll Free) or write to us online for a free case consultation.
The Federal government’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) recently released preliminary data about the frequency of certain foodborne illnesses in 10 monitoring states for the year 2008. This is the equivalent of the government’s report card for food safety. The scores, as they say, leave much room for improvement.
The “take away” point from this data is that “progress toward the national health objectives [for foodborne pathogens] has plateaued, suggesting that fundamental problems with bacterial and parasitic contamination are not being resolved.” My comment [and their goal] is simply “No Shit.”
Stripped of its “journal speak,” the data shows that after making progress for a few years, efforts to safeguard our food have fallen flat: “The lack of recent progress toward the national health objective targets and the occurrence of large multistate outbreaks points to gaps in the current food safety system and the need to continue to develop and evaluate food safety practices as food moves from the farm to the table.”
A closer reading of the data actually points to more serious problems. For example, in just one year (from 2007 to 2008), test samples of ground beef yielding E. coli O157:H7 nearly doubled from 0.24% to 0.47%. This is really quite shocking.
It was also interesting to note that only 25.7% of E. coli O157:H7 infections and 7.4% of Salmonella cases are associated with outbreaks. In other words, in the vast majority of human illness associated with these two pathogens, the source is never identified.
In a way, this is even more shocking. It shows we’re still very inadequate when it comes to testing for and analyzing foodborne pathogens – in other words, what we don’t know will hurt us.
Food Poisoning Lawyer: The Shame of Underinsurance
National food safety lawyer Fred Pritzker of PritzkerOlsen, P.A., has recovered millions of dollars for victims of food poisoning. He is involved in nearly every major outbreak of foodborne illness in the United States and has been utilized as an expert on food safety by The New York Times, CBS News, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Lawyers USA, The Associated Press and Law & Politics. Here he writes an opinion column on the travesty of underinsurance at restuarants where food poisoning can take its toll on hundreds of victims in short time periods.
A Modest Proposal: Enough Insurance to Compensate Foodborne Illness Survivors
By FRED PRITZKER
Late last summer there was a devastating outbreak of E. coli O111 traced back to the Country Cottage restaurant in Locust Grove, Oklahoma. 341 people were sickened and one person died. While the source of the outbreak – the restaurant – was quickly identified, the disease-causing organism was not isolated on the restaurant premises or in the food and water served there. Thus, the final outbreak report (just released by the Oklahoma State Department of Health) concluded:
In the absence of isolating the outbreak organism from any environmental specimen, including restaurant surfaces, food, well water and animal feces, or from a restaurant employee who reported diarrheal illness, the original vehicle of contamination could not be determined. The exact mode of spread within the restaurant was not established, however, the epidemic curve and exposure analyses suggests there was ongoing foodborne transmission of E. coli O111:NM to Country Cottage restaurant patrons between August 15 and August 24, 2008.
Not surprisingly, this outbreak created some political fallout in the Sooner state. The state’s attorney general was quoted as saying “they [OSDH] botched the investigation and are very reluctant to admit they botched the investigation.” He said his own office determined the likely cause of the outbreak was poultry litter that contaminated the restaurant’s well water. Local politicians and, of course, the poultry industry vigorously dispute the attorney general’s accusations.
What is not in dispute, however, is the fact that E. coli O111 is a virulent pathogen that causes severe illness and death. Also not in dispute is the fact that most of the restaurant patrons will never be fully compensated for the losses they suffered. That’s because although the restaurant had insurance, the amount of the coverage is woefully insufficient to cover the harms and losses sustained by the victims. Do the math: even assuming a liability policy of $1,000,000, the average recovery for an outbreak victim would be under $3,000.
Within a few months of this massive outbreak, the restaurant reopened its doors and presumably is well on the way to building back up its business. That’s probably a good thing, assuming the restaurant owners utilize this tragedy to review and revamp the restaurant’s food safety and sanitation practices.
Of course, the outbreak victims, especially the person who died, don’t have that luxury. Many of them will never recover and even those who do face financial and physical hardship for years to come.
So the restaurant re-opens, the disease spreading vector is never identified, nobody is held accountable and politicians try to advance their careers. What about the victims?
The Locust Grove tragedy illustrates a number of problems – some insoluble, but some fairly easy to remedy. For example, let’s start requiring food purveyors to carry enough insurance to fairly compensate their customers when the food they sell is adulterated with deadly pathogens. This should not be hard or prohibitively expensive.
If the coverage is not available at a fair price in the private sector, let the government underwrite risk pools and excess coverage. There are a plenty of existing programs to model on including flood insurance, crop insurance, vaccine compensation programs, etc.
Insurance is risk spreading when the risk of harm cannot be eliminated. So why should foodborne illness survivors have to go it alone, especially when they are absolutely blameless for the damage they suffer. If we write off toxic assets, can’t we at least underwrite insurance for victims of toxic food?
