Pritzker Olsen Attorneys, which was acknowledged by Dr. Douglas Powell’s popular Barfblog as the first food safety group to publicly identify the steak E. coli outbreak that is now officially associated with blade-tenderized steaks, is calling on National Steak and Poultry company to immediately pay medical bills and lost wages for steak E. coli outbreak victims in six states.
Firm Founder and President Fred Pritzker also called on the Oklahoma company to identify which restaurants received steaks potentially contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 that were packaged in October and shipped to restaurants nationwide. The National Steak and Poultry recall covers 248,000 pounds of beef products and at least one large national chain is believed to be a recipient of some of those steaks. The restaurants, too, should identify themselves.
The food safety team at Pritzker Olsen believes the public deserves to know all restaurant locations affected by the recall. The USDA regularly publishes a retail distribution list for all high-risk E. coli recalls, but the National Steak and Poultry outbreak is still active and there is no official listing of where the potentially contaminated steaks were delivered.
A wide variety of National Steak and Poultry steaks currently are associated with a cluster of E. coli O157:H7 illnesses in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota and Washington and the investigation is continuing. Several state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are involved. Health officials have not yet said how many individuals in each state have been sickened in this steak E. coli outbreak.
These health officials are advising people who have signs or symptoms of E. coli poisoning to contact a physician. E. coli O157:H7 causes extremely painful and often bloody diarrhea, which can be followed by the onset of life-threatening hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) (the leading cause of kidney failure in children) or thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP).
This outbreak could have been prevented. For legal information or to assist Pritzker Olsen with its ongoing investigation, contact our firm at 1-888-377-8900 (Toll Free) or complete our contact and information form on the side of this web page. An E. coli lawyer will provide you with a free case consultation. We are one of the few law firms in the country practicing extensively in the area of foodborne illness litigation and we have recovered tens of millions for our clients while also actively supporting many measures to prevent the spread of these diseases.
Click here to see the full list of steak sizes and varieties involved in the National Steak and Poultry recall.
The danger of this restaurant steak E. coli outbreak is that many customers like their steak cooked rare or medium rare. Those choices are safe when the steak is intact and unprocessed. But studies have shown that mechanical tenderizing of steak with blades and needles pushes surface E. coli into the meat, where it can be insulated from flames and heat that normally kill the pathogens.
This outbreak should teach the meat and restaurant industries to label tenderized, non-intact steaks as dangerous and inform all customers of the risk of undercooking these cuts of beef. The needle-tenderized and injected steaks should be handled more like ground beef, which is required to be cooked to 160 degrees throughout to kill E. coli O157:H7. This human pathogen can cause life-long damage and health consequences in a significant subset of patients.
