Greysolon Ballroom Food Poisoning Outbreak in Duluth Investigated by MN Lawyers
A food poisoning outbreak linked to eating at the Greysolon Ballroom in Duluth, MN has sickened more than 40 people, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Those sickened attended events at the ballroom on Saturday, one a wedding and the other a corporate party. About 350 people attended these events, and it is likely that far more than 40 people were sickened.
“Our Minnesota law firm represents people sickened in food poisoning outbreaks throughout the United States,” said Fred Pritzker, one of the nations leading food safety lawyers. “People sickened in an outbreak have the right to seek medical expenses, lost wages and other damages from those legally responsible for the illnesses.”
Health investigators are interviewing people sickened in the outbreak, all of whom ate at the Greysolon Ballroom. This is epidemiological evidence that food served at the ballroom was the source of the outbreak. The food was served by Greysolon Ballroom by Blackwoods, owned by New London Corp.
Minnesota Campylobacter Lawyers Investigate Campylobacter in Winona, MN
Our Attorneys Have Won Money for Campylobacter Victims
Our Campylobacter lawyers are investigating an outbreak of campylobacteriosis in Winona, Minnesota. The source of the outbreak is most likely a restaurant, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Although we know what restaurant is suspected, we are not able to release this information at this time.
Video: MN Attorney Discusses Campylobacter
Our attorneys have handled many Campylobacter claims against restaurants and others. Campylobacter can cause death and a severe illness called Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS). One of our GBS clients is paralyzed from the neck down.
Our law office is in Minneapolis, MN, and we are one of a handful of law firms that represents Campylobacter victims throughout the United States. To contact our attorneys, please call 1-888-377-8900 (toll free) or submit our online form for a free consultation.
Food Safety Reform Threatened by Greed
Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on a proposed food safety bill that will likely be moving through Congress this summer. The proposed legislation, still in draft form, contains requirements that all food manufacturers write and carry out safety plans, pay an annual registration fee of $1,000 to the Food and Drug Administration to fund increased inspections, and keep track of the distribution of all food products.
New FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg testified that this bill is “a major step in the right direction.” One would think that after the string of national Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks over the past year anyone could realize our nation’s food safety system needed to be reformed. Unfortunately, that apparently is not the case.
Pamela G. Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association spoke at the hearing against a plan to charge food makers $1,000 per facility per year to pay for increased inspections, and was skeptical that the proposed changes would truly be beneficial.
Unfortunately for Ms. Bailey, consumers understand that a safety system largely based on industry self-regulation is simply not working. The fox has guarded the henhouse for too long, and now is the time for real action.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that last year alone there were nearly 1.4 million cases of Salmonella, causing 415 deaths and costing our nation over $2.6 billion. Similarly, last year there was over 73,000 cases of E. coli O157:H7, including 38 deaths, and costing nearly $500 million. Just recently the Salmonella outbreak associated with peanut butter produced by the Peanut Corporation of America is estimated to have cost over $1 billion, and taken at least nine lives.
Americans deserve much better. If even a tiny fraction of foodborne illness cases can be eliminated, the costs of increased inspections will be returned many times over, not just in money, but in lives.
History is not on the industry’s side in this debate. It has almost universally opposed increased regulation going all the way back to the historic Meat Inspection Act of 1906. The wretched conditions of the Chicago meatpacking industry first described in The Jungle made the public demand safer food over one hundred years ago, and was the catalyst for reform then. Once again, we must let industry and our elected officials know that reform is needed to reduce the prevalence of foodborne illness.
Undoubtedly reform is needed. Increased inspections and traceability is a good start. For the food industry to claim that a $1,000 per facility fee to improve and increase inspections is too great is simply foolish. I wonder if Ms. Bailey would be willing to tell the families of those killed by foodborne illness that $1,000 a year was too much to pay to prevent the loss of a family member’s life?
The writer, Mr. Pritzker, is founder and president of PritzkerOlsen, P.A., a national food safety and food poisoning law firm that has collected millions for victims of food poisoning. PritzkerOlsen has years of experience and proven success representing the families and victims of E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, Listeria, Botulism and other foodborne disease.
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.
