Salmonella Lawyer & Attorney : Marler Clark : Salmonella Blog

When it learned that one of its suppliers had equipment contaminated with salmonella, Dunkin' Donuts removed hot chocolate and its Dunkaccino beverages from its menu.

Behind that action was the decision by Minnesota's Plainview Milk Products Cooperative to recall all the instant nonfat dried milk, whey protein, fruit stabilizers and gums or thickening agents that it has manufactured over the past two years because of possible Salmonella contamination.

“Product safety is our first priority and none of the Plainview products that were tested by government agencies and our independent labs found any signs of product contamination," Dallas Moe, coop general manager says. " After the product cleared quality testing and left our facility it was blended with other ingredients and that’s when contamination was found, but in situations like this it’s in the public’s best interest to be overly cautious.”

Further, according to the coop:

Plainview sells its products to other customers who may then incorporate them into their own products. Testing by the USDA of a product produced by one of Plainview’s customers found Salmonella. The product that was produced, a dairy shake powder, contained Plainview product that had been dry blended with a number of other ingredients not manufactured by Plainview.

As part of an investigation by the FDA prior to the recall, environmental and product testing was conducted at the Plainview facility. Product testing found no contamination. Environmental testing (swab samples from walls, ceilings, floors, and equipment) found some positive test results for Salmonella. Plainview is presently in the process of disassembling all equipment in question for cleaning and is taking other precautionary measures such as the use of anti-microbial surface coatings in order to ensure environmental safety.

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration issued this press release on the coop's recall. 

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If you raise chicks and you are in the catering business, you need to be extra careful not to cross contaminate the food you serve with salmonella from the chicks you keep.

It’s looking like that’s what happened in North Dakota where an unlicensed caterer linked to three separate incidents of salmonella food poisoning that sickened more than 75 people and hospitalized nine turned out to also be a chicken rancher.

On the second and third weekends in June, Aggie Jennings of rural McLean County, North Dakota catered a family reunion in Wilton, and weddings in Washburn and McClusky. At each event, people were poisoned with salmonella.

North Dakota health officials say Ms. Jennings did not have a catering license, an apparent Class B misdemeanor. As for charging her with legal responsibility for the outbreaks, they are first waiting for laboratory reports.

Food samples from one of the weddings, along with swab and water samples from the Jennings’ home are being tested for salmonella bacteria.   Jennings’ kitchen is not separate from her home, which is required for a catering licenses.

Read about the investigation in the Bismarck Tribune. 

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 The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned consumers not to eat two brands of pistachios repacked by Orca Distribution West Inc. of Anaheim, California.  The brands are:

• California Prime Produce
• Orange County Orchards

The pistachios may be contaminated with Salmonella, an organism that can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems.  The products affected by the current warning are associated with an earlier recall by Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella Inc. The distributor, Orca, received and repacked some pistachios recalled by Setton Pistachio.

The two brands of pistachios, California Prime Produce and Orange County Orchards, were distributed to retail locations in airports and hotels nationwide. Both brands were packaged in clear 6-ounce flexible plastic Ziploc bags, UPC Number: 8 10826 01116 2, with Sell By Dates of 7/30/09 and 8/30/09.

FDA visited Orca as part of its follow-up checks on Setton Pistachio’s recall. The agency found that products that were part of the recall had been repacked and distributed by Orca under the California Prime Produce and Orange County Orchards brands.

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There was a wedding in Washburn and a family reunion in Wilton that will probably be remembered for a long time. Both North Dakota towns are north of Bismarck.  There apparently was a common ingredient at both events--salmonella.  And it was not pretty.

About 40 people got sick, 11 were hospitalized, and two were in intensive care.

Doug Ness told KSYR-TV that he had to take four days off of work from his job as a chiropractor at Active Life Chiropractic in Bismarck last week. "I couldn`t leave my bed," Ness says. " Basically it was bed to bathroom and it wasn`t much fun."

He was just one of many who got sick from salmonella bacteria after eating from the taco bar at his friend`s wedding in Washburn.   "Later than afternoon I`d heard from some of my friends that went to E.R. and they had I.V.s and were given morphine for the pain or discomfort so from there we kind of knew something was going on," Ness says.

Others reported the same symptoms of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea after a reunion in Wilton hosted by the same caterer.

"There`s a common caterer but it`s really too soon to identify what`s really happened here," state epidemiologist Kirby Kruger told the television station. "We`re still doing some investigation and we`re still waiting for some results to come back."

Read more about the outbreak in the North Dakota's press release from last Friday.

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To list all the peanut products they've recalled takes a couple pages each for Kellogg Co. and Clif Bar Inc.  

For Kellogg's, it includes products like Famous Amos Peanut Butter Cookies and Keebler Soft Batch Homestyle Peanut Butter Cookies.  For Clif Bar, MOJO Dipped Chocolate Peanut and  MOJO Dipped Peanut Butter and Jelly are on the lengthy recall lists.

Neither Kellogg's nor Clif Bar paid much if any attention to conditions at the Peanut Corporation of America,  which produced the peanut products used as ingredients by the other food companies. PCA peanut butter and peanut paste was found to be the source of a Salmonella  Typhimurium outbreak that made at least 700 people sick and killed nine people.

Yesterday, Kellogg's and Clif Bar weighed in as the latest "victims," filing claims in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Lynchburg, respectively for $60 million and $27 million to cover their recall costs.  Those were among the claims that raised the total amount of creditor claims against PCA to nearly $311 million.

Most of the food companies who bought peanut butter and paste from PCA as ingredients for their goods did not file claims for the cost of recall.  As of June 12th, 3,916 products were on the recall list. The deadline for businesses to file claims was yesterday.

Meanwhile, the deadline for filing personal income claims with the Bankruptcy Court has been extended to Oct. 31. 

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Perhaps the most interesting statistic about salmonella is that only 6.1 percent of all the thousands of illnesses it was responsible for in 2006 could be attributed to the recognized outbreaks that are laid out in this week's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

And while the Centers on Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) acknowledges that its picture is incomplete, it's Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System (FBDSS) with the states did manage to track  total of 1,270 Food-Borne Disease Outbreaks, resulting in 27,634 confirmed illnesses and 11 deaths.

Salmonella was second only to Norovirus in causing the most food-borne illnesses. And among bacteria, Salmonella was No. 1, being the most commonly reported bacterial etiologic agent causing 112 or 52 percent of the confirmed outbreaks attributed to bacteria.

Salmonella serotype Enteritidis caused most of those outbreaks, a total of 28 or 13 percent.

Salmonella was responsible for four of the 11 multi-state outbreaks. The salmonella bacteria was transmitted by tomatoes in two of those four multi-state outbreaks. Together they made 307 sick.

Fruit salad was the transmission source in the third multi-state salmonella outbreak, making 41 people sick. And, finally, there was the 2006 peanut butter outbreak that cross many state lines in jars of Peter Pan peanut butter that carried salmonella. That outbreak made 715 sick.

CDC also looked pathogen-commodity pairs responsible for the most outbreak-related cases. Salmonella came up as a partner with fruits and nuts in 776 cases; and with vine-stalk vegetables in 331 cases.

Read the entire report, "Surveillance for Foodborne Disease Outbreaks --- United States, 2006," in MMWR.

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The Consumer Reports Blog has a nice profile up on "Team D," the environmental science students at the University of Minnesota who've been at the center of tracking down recent outbreaks of food-borne illness, including salmonella.  Here's how CR begins the story:

"Graduate students in the University of Minnesota School of Public Health vie to get on an elite team, even if they have to put up with its icky nickname—Team D. That's D as in diarrhea. The team's claim to fame is the speed at which it has tracked down the culprits in several recent high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illness involving salmonella and E. coli.

"Team D played a vital role in figuring out that jalapeño peppers were behind a nationwide outbreak of salmonella last summer, accurately contradicting the best guesses of federal food-safety officials that tomatoes were the likely source. Earlier this year, Team D played a similarly critical role in identifying institutional jars of peanut butter as the source of a cluster of salmonella cases in Minnesota, a finding that ultimately led to one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history by the Peanut Corporation of America."

Check out the rest of "Fast-acting 'Team D' sleuths out sources of foodborne illness" here.

Speaking of Peanut Corporation of America, the Texas corporation that operated its Plainview plant has also now filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.  Creditors may attend a meeting on June 24, 2009 at 10 a.m. in Room 266 of the U.S. Courthouse in Lynchburg, VA.  A list of the creditors can be found here.

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Richardson Elementary School students in Lee's Summit, MO were sent home with warning letters yesterday after two kindergartners were hospitalized with salmonella.

A boy, listed in fair condition, and a girl, whose condition was not being released, were enrolled in Richardson's Kids Country during the school year.

Health officials could not say if the illnesses are school related.

Salmonella is often spread through contaminated food and less frequently from person-to-person or on toys and other objects. The school has instructed its district custodians to do additional cleaning and disinfecting at Richardson Elementary as a precaution.

FOX-4 in Kansas City is covering the situation here.

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