The recent Salmonella outbreak linked to Peanut Corporation of America peanut butter and peanut paste resulted in recalls of thousands of products (3,863 as of March 27, 2009).

In the following opinion piece, food safety attorney Fred Pritzker discusses the responsibility of retailers and others to get recalled products off of the shelves. According to Mr. Pritzker, "To promote food safety, everyone up and down the stream of commerce has to act and bear responsibility and should be held accountable for failing to do so."

Upstream, Downstream: Everyone Has to be Responsible

by Fred Pritzker

The whole point of a food recall is to prevent additional foodborne illness after producers and their adulterated products are identified. That’s why it’s so important for food companies, food distributors, food retailers and federal, state and local authorities to promptly and effectively remove from the marketplace any food known or reasonably certain to cause illness or death.

That’s also why there should be a special place in hell for those companies that knew or should have known a food product was dangerous but continued to sell it anyway.

The ongoing Salmonella outbreak involving Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) is a case in point. It appears from the company’s emails that its officers and employees knowingly shipped adulterated product. If so, the company’s liquidation and the criminal investigation of its principals are both necessary and fair.

But what about the downstream retailers of food products containing adulterated PCA ingredients? Aren’t they just as culpable if they fail to remove contaminated product from their shelves after they knew or should have known of the recall?

This is not an idle musing. Long after the PCA recall was announced and long after the list of adulterated products was known and accessible on a variety of web sites, retailers big and tiny continued to sell these poisonous snacks. I know because I looked.

Many of the recalled products were snack foods with long shelf lives and wide distribution. Many of the retailers who sell them are small outlets with small product stocks and unsophisticated (if any) recall procedures. For many such retailers, there is little economic justification for removing dangerous products and even less risk of public approbation for failing to do so – little consolation for the victims who continue to get sick long after the products should have been removed.

Perversely, the legal system in many states promotes such behavior. So called “pass through statutes” are intended to insulate downstream retailers from lawsuit liability if the upstream producer or manufacturer of the dangerous product is identifiable and solvent. In such cases, the retailer is automatically dismissed from litigation and bears no financial responsibility (dismissals can be avoided if the downstream retailer modified the product or otherwise actively participated in making the product defective).

So what should be done? From the standpoint of efficacy and efficiency, better product traceback and notification systems have to be designed and implemented. However, I have no illusions that any such improvements are really going to rid long lived snacks from the shelves of retailers disinclined to care all that much. What will incentivize such retailers is the threat of criminal sanctions and financial responsibility.

First, create a tight and focused criminal law that makes it a crime to sell a food product that a retailer knows or should know has been recalled. We do it for sales of liquor and cigarettes to minors; there is no reason not to do it for dangerous food products. If criminalizing the behavior is too extreme, create economic penalties by allowing consumers to prove such illegal sales and awarding them attorney fees if they’re successful. Again, there is precedent for such measures in consumer protection statutes on the books in virtually every state.

To promote food safety, everyone up and down the stream of commerce has to act and bear responsibility and should be held accountable for failing to do so.

Labels: food safety, food safety lawyer, press release, Salmonella

"Last Tuesday she woke up after midnight crying. She had a really high fever and bad diarrhea," said Miya's mother, 20-year-old Amanda Spangler.
"I had a really bad feeling about it," she said.

She took her daughter to the doctor the day officials realized they were in the grip of a salmonella outbreak caused by contaminated city drinking water.

"I felt terrible because I gave her the bottle, the formula, that made her sick," Amanda said. "For two days she had no expression on her face. She just lay there."

Miya's father, Joey, said that for part of her week-long illness his daughter was either asleep or crying.

The water was bad, so her parents couldn't bathe her to bring down her temperature, which her mother said topped out at 105.9 degrees.

The baby had a terrible rash. She threw up. She had blood in her stool, her mother said.

Labels: Colorado, Colorado outbreak, Salmonella, symptoms

• 30000 43272: Aunt Jemima Buttermilk Complete, 5 lb.
• 30000 05040: Aunt Jemima Original, 2 lb.
• 30000 05070: Aunt Jemima Original Complete, 2 lb.
• 30000 05300: Aunt Jemima Buttermilk Complete, 2 lb.
  

Labels: Salmonella

Labels: alfalfa sprout recall, California sprout recall, Salmonella

Non-uniform distribution of dipolar molecules and ionic materials within the food.
Differences in microwave absorption of frozen/thawed areas.
Product/component edge heating effects.
Areas of high and low microwave field strength within the oven cavity and product.
Different food component and thermal properties.

Labels: canned vegetable recall, daycare E coli attorney, microwave safety, Salmonella

The categories for establishments are as follows, as stated in the report:

Category 2 establishments are those with sample set results above half but not exceeding the current standard for one or both of their most recent sample sets and Category 3 are those that are exceeding the current standards. Category 1 establishments have the lowest Salmonella rates of the three categories with sample set results at or below half of the current standards.

Labels: beef, food safety, FSIS, poultry, Salmonella

We have been contacted by a family that was hospitalized after eating at Quizno's in Rochester, Minnesota. Our Salmonella lawyers are investigating the outbreak. There are ten culture-confirmed cases of Salmonella, and all ten of the people affected ate at Quizno's around the same time. All 10 of the cases involve a matching strain of Salmonella, meaning the genetic fingerprints of Salmonella isolates collected from each of the ten people are identical or nearly identical. Because each Salmonella outbreak has its own, genetically-unique Salmonella strain, all 10 of the people sickened after eating at Quizno's are part of the same outbreak.

Minnesota health officials suspect that tomatoes are the cause of the outbreak but have not yet ruled out other sources of the outbreak. For legal purposes, it is not essential that the food source of an outbreak linked to a restaurant is found. We have recently settled a Salmonella lawsuit against a Minnesota restaurant where the food source of the outbreak was never pinpointed.

Labels: lawsuit, lawyer, minnesota salmonella attorney, Salmonella, tomoatoes