Food Safety Advocate: Barbara Kowalcyk
Today's Daily Record, a newspaper out of Morris County, New Jersey, featured an article on former Marler Clark client Barbara Kowalcyk. Barbara served on the Board of Directors for S.T.O.P. (Safe Tables Our Priority) for several years, and recently formed the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention (CFI).
Barbara and her husband, Michael, were propelled into food safety advocacy in 2001, when their two-year-old son, Kevin, died after suffering an E. coli O157:H7 infection and hemolytic uremic syndrome. In the article, Barbara was quoted on what led her to become an activist:
"Our public health department didn't have the resources or, frankly, the desire to spend a lot of time investigating our case because it wasn't part of an outbreak," Kowalcyk said. "They did very little to help us. We only found out what we did because we contacted an attorney and he worked on our case."The Kowalcyks had limited knowledge of foodborne illness before their son got sick. The family lived in Wisconsin at the time. They now live in Loveland, Ohio, near Cincinnati.
"We knew a lot more than most people do. We didn't eat out very often, yet we really didn't know enough," Kowalcyk said. "We both are highly educated; we both have master's degrees. I am a biostatistician by training and spent my entire career working in clinical research, so I am publicly health-minded anyway. We were well aware that food could kill."
