NPR recently interviewed Ken Costello, a Nebraska man who became ill with E. coli after eating contaminated spinach, and whose mother-in-law died after also becoming ill with a spinach-linked E. coli infection.
The hospital had not tested her for E. coli as part of their routine testing. Costello had to seek independent testing on the
The Associated Press reports that cattle ranchers have been working to prevent fecal contamination in the Salinas Valley spinach and lettuce fields.
Ranchers were taking steps to keep livestock droppings from infecting produce long before the recent outbreak. These include designating watering holes for cattle so they don’t drink from creeks that flow through farms
Michael R. Taylor, former administrator of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and FDA’s deputy commissioner for policy, told the Baltimore Sun his opinion on who is at fault for the recent E. coli outbreak tied to tained spinach.
Despite repeated calls by the Government Accountability Office and the National Academy of Sciences to modernize
After the most recent E. coli outbreak traced to fresh produce, consumers are going organic – but not necessarily mass-produced organic. They’re buying local, often at farmer’s markets, according to the Associated Press.
"We’ve gone from an era when a food-borne outbreak was a potato salad at a church picnic to a multistate, national or
Marler Clark filed a lawsuit today on behalf of the estate of June Dunning, a Haggerstown, Maryland, resident who was part of a nationawide E. coli outbreak traced to contaminated spinach. Ms. Dunning suffered an intense E. coli O157:H7 infection and hemolytic uremic syndrome before passing away on September 15, 2006.
The lawsuit filing coincides
The authors of an editorial in the Washington Post made some points about how to make our nation’s food safety system more efficient and therefore, make our food safer.
In the editorial, they suggest that Congress should provide money to increase inspection staffing and inspection frequency at the FDA. Other suggestions include lawmakers requiring agencies
The FDA and the State of California announced today that test results from a field investigation of the outbreak of E.coli O157:H7 in spinach was found to be positive for E.coli O157:H7. Samples of cattle feces on one of the implicated ranches tested positive based on matching genetic fingerprints for the same strain of E.
An editorial in the Los Angeles Times says that all farms must follow the same food safety practices, and that the FDA needs to develop specific guidelines for the fresh produce industry to follow so the industry can prevent fecal contamination from happening in the first place:
“In addition to testing, common safety practices involve
The Bakersfield Californian posted an editorial about the lack of a regional food safety lab in California. In it, the newspaper mentions that industrial scale processing, packaging and shipping of perishable items often leads to consumer consumption faster than regulatory agencies can react.
The Californian’s editorial accused Rep. John Doolittle of kiilling an effort to
The Brainerd Dispatch reported an update on the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in Longville, Minnesota from this summer. The Minnesota Department of Health released its final report on the outbreak.
The USDA collected a sample of beef trimmings from a meat processing plant that yielded an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7. However, that MDH learned