Attorney Brendan Flaherty Quoted in Cheese Market News
Our law firm is representing several people sickened in the Costco and Bravo Cheese E. coli outbreak. Brendan Flaherty, one of our attorneys, was quoted in the November 19 edition of Cheese Market News, the weekly newspaper of the nation’s cheese and dairy/deli business:
“Companies like Costco are very good because they have retail records with customer numbers that enable them to contact customers directly,” says Brendan Flaherty, an attorney with Pritzker Olsen in Minneapolis. His firm represents injured people in claims involving foodborne illness. Pritzker Olsen represents some plaintiffs in the Bravo Farms recall, including an 85-year-old Arizona woman whose condition developed into life-threatening hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).
“Because Costco is a club, if you purchased a recalled product at Costco, you’ll receive a message from the store explaining that you have a recalled product that shouldn’t be consumed,” says Flaherty. “The exception is samples, because there’s no record of who sampled a product.”
That was the case with the Bravo Farms recall. The company was participating in a Costco Road Show, in which a sampling program accompanied retail sales. After CDC identified the outbreak, FDA was able to test unopened Bravo Farms products that Costco had pulled from its shelves as well as opened packages from infected people’s refrigerators. All contained a rare strain of E. coli that was then matched to an identical strain found in environmental samples at the company’s plant.
