Fresh Baby Spinach
Health officials have linked fresh baby spinach to an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that has sickened 50 people in eight states. One person has died and 8 others have developed hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). Fresh produce has become a major source of foodborne outbreaks in recent years, including the fall 2005 E. coli outbreak that was linked to Dole bagged lettuce.
Pritzker | Ruohonen was the first to file a lawsuit against Dole on behalf of a victim of the fall 2005 E. coli O157:H7 outbreak. To contact Fred Pritzker about an E. coli lawsuit, call toll-free at 1-888-377-8900, e-mail fhp@pritzkerlaw.com, or fill out our online consultation form.
In response to this current E. coli outbreak linked to fresh baby spinach, Dr. Douglas Powell, a leading food safety advocate and researcher, comments on the dangers of contaminated produce and the repsonsibility of growers to address the problem:
On Nov. 4, 2005, Dr. Robert Brackett, director of FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, wrote California lettuce producers, packers and shippers, urging them to re-examine and modify operations from the farm through to distributors to ensure that consumers were provided with a safe product.Dr. Brackett's November letter noted that FDA was aware of 18 outbreaks of foodborne illness since 1995 caused by E. coli O157:H7 for which fresh or fresh-cut lettuce was implicated as the outbreak vehicle. In one additional case, fresh-cut spinach was implicated. These 19 outbreaks accounted for 409 reported cases of illness and two deaths.
A subsequent Dateline NBC report on the Dole outbreak spawned a summer of Internet-amplified warnings about the perils of bagged lettuce, many of them false, which will now, with the latest outbreak, be recycled as truth.
And last week, FDA officials were in California's Salinas Valley -- the "Salad Bowl of the World," -- promising increased scrutiny on the industry.
Fresh fruits and vegetables are good for us; we should eat more. Yet fresh fruits and vegetables are one of, if not the most, significant source of foodborne illness today in North America. With an estimated 76 million illness and 5,000 deaths in the U.S. each and every year from foodborne illness, that's just too much.
The problem with fresh produce is that the very characteristic that affords dietary benefit -- fresh -- also affords microbiological risk.
Because they are not cooked, anything that comes into contact with fresh fruits and vegetables is a possible source of contamination. Is the water used for irrigation or rinsing clean or is it loaded with pathogens? Do the workers who collect the produce follow strict hygienic practices such as thorough handwashing? What happens to that head of lettuce once it gets on to the sorting line, and then gets chopped up? The possibilities are almost endless.
Even more challenging is that many of these problems must be controlled on the farm. There are situations where the most ardent washing of produce by consumers will accomplish ... nothing; in some cases, the dangerous bugs can actually reside within the fresh produce.
Instead of the banal -- and in this case, entirely ineffective -- advice to thoroughly wash all produce, consumers, restaurants, grocery stores, everyone, should be asking some difficult but basic questions: what do growers of fresh lettuce or spinach do to control dangerous microorganisms like E. coli O157:H7?
Source: Douglas Powell and Ben Chapman, Fresh and risky: Commentary from the Food Safety Network, www.foodsafetynetwork.ksu.edu, September 14, 2006.
