Our HUS lawyers took note this week when the Food and Drug Adminstration warned four companies that they must stop claiming that over-the-counter hand sanitizers and antiseptic gels will prevent dangerous bacterial infections. The statements are unproven, FDA said, and the letters mean the companies have 15 days to correct the claims or have the products seized.

One company claims that its hand sanitizing lotion prevents infection from E. coli and the H1N1 flu virus, while another claims its “patented formulation of essential plant oils” kills Salmonella. These claims are unproven and illegal, the FDA said.

“FDA has not approved any products claiming to prevent infection from MRSA, E. coli, Salmonella, or H1N1 flu, which a consumer can just walk into a store and buy,” said Deborah Autor, compliance director at FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

The FDA warnings concern the following products:

• Staphaseptic First Aid Antiseptic/Pain Relieving Gel, by Tec Laboratories.
• Safe4Hours Hand Sanitizing Lotion and Safe4Hours First Aid Antiseptic Skin Protectant, by JD Nelson and Associates.
• Dr. Tichenor’s Antiseptic Gel, by Dr. G.H. Tichenor Antiseptic Co.
• Clean Well All-Natural Hand Sanitizer, Clean Well All-Natural Hand Sanitizing Wipes, and Clean Well All-Natural Antibacterial Foaming Hand Soap, by Oh So Clean Inc., also known as CleanWell Company.

FDA said in a press release that the food safety and nutrition upgrade goes with a $4.3 billion overall request that reflects a 33 percent increase from the fiscal 2010 enacted budget. The agency said it will establish a prevention-focused food safety system and leverage the valuable work of FDA’s state and local food safety partners. “The result will be a stronger, more reliable food safety system to protect American consumers,” the FDA press release said.

The increase will help FDA begin to implement the landmark Food Safety Modernization Act signed by the president last month. Already the agency has taken steps to sharpen its role in detecting outbreaks of E. coli and other foodborne illness.

“We can prevent it. It should not be a fact of life that people will get sick from or die from the food they eat. American consumers should not expect, nor accept that,” Dr. Hagen told the conference.

She said USDA has been more focused on stopping E. coli O157:H7, the primary type of shiga toxin-producing E. coli. The agency’s most aggressive act to prevent E. coli O157:H7 was to ban it from ground beef after a 1993 hamburger outbreak resulted in four child deaths and sickened 400 other people. It is therefore considered an adulterant in ground beef and testing is required by manufacturers and by USDA inspectors on a sample basis.

Since then there has been a growing realization that non-O157 STECs are just as powerful and hazardous to human health.  The six most prevalent non-O157 STECs are O26, O103, O111, O121, O45, and O145. According to CDC, these pathogens cause an estimated 36,700 illnesses, 1,100 hospitalizations and 30 deaths in the U.S. each year. And currently, they’re not explicitly addressed by policies at USDA, the government regulator of meat and other foods.

“In order to be a truly prevention-based food safety system, we need to stay one step ahead of these threats,” Dr. Hagen said. ” We should not wait for a public health emergency to force our hand to address the range of E. coli threats in ground beef that exist in 2011.”

“We can’t wait for a historic outbreak, from these and other foodborne pathogens, before we take steps to improve our protection of public health. We’re striving to be a prevention-based system.”

She told the conference that prevention isn’t just one person or group’s responsibility; it’s a shared one. It’s shared among producers, government and the food service industry at large. Also, there are steps that consumers can take to supplement these systematic efforts to prevent foodborne illness and USDA already has programs in place for consumer food safety awareness. Click here for a copy of the undersecretary’s remarks on non-O157 STECs and antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

A recent study by USDA’s Agricultural Research Service showed that E coli O157:H7 grows at a rapid, temperature-dependent rate before the lettuce deteriorates. That means the visual quality of  bagged, fresh-cut lettuce is a poor indicator of the products’  food safety status.

Given the lack of visual cues, proper refrigeration is important to limit the growth of disease-causing microorganisms.

Results indicate that storage at 41 degrees, or  5 degrees Celsius, allowed the survival of E. coli O157:H7 on the packaged lettuce, but limited its growth.

All of the bagged products in the experiment were intentionally misted with E. coli bacteria in the lab and the bags were resealed. When they were stored at 54 degrees, or 12 degrees Celsius, the relative warmth led to a large increase in E. coli O157:H7 population on lettuce salads held for three days.

From 1990 to 2005, there were more than 700 foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States caused by contaminated produce. Many of those were lettuce E. coli outbreaks. The most recent major outbreak of E. coli in lettuce occurred earlier this year, sickening more than 20 people in six states.

Food safety law firm Pritzker Olsen has been retained by an E. coli HUS victim in connection with that particular E. coli O145 outbreak. The illnesses are associated with contaminated lettuce recalled  by Freshway Foods of Sidney, Ohio.

The client, a student at Daemen College in Amherst, New York, contracted an E. coli infection in April that developed into hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a life-threatening illness that can cause kidney failure, central nervous system damage, heart problems, pancreatitis, and other serious medical conditions. The student’s illness resulted in three separate hospitalizations

If you or a loved one have been sickened by E. coli or other human pathogen in leafy green vegetables, contact an attorney at Pritzker Olsen for a free case consultation. By phone, your free inquiry can be taken at 1-888-377-8900 (Toll Free) or you may contact us online with the form on side of this web page.

Our firm is one of the few in the country practicing extensively in the area of food borne illness litigation and we have recovered tens of millions of dollars for victims of food poisoning. Pritzker Olsen is dedicated to education and prevention of E. coli and other harmful bacteria found in our food. Our founder and president, Fred Pritzker, is a sought-after food safety expert who has long advocated strong food safety laws and more inspections of our food.

Dr. Divya Jaroni, a food microbiologist at Southern University Ag Center, will head the study in collaboration with scientists at Louisiana State University and Texas Tech University.

The team will study  the prevalence  of  E. coli under different herd, farm and environment conditions across several  farms. Guidelines for on-farm Best Management Practices  will be developed and the effectiveness of these practices in reducing E. coli O157:H7 on small-scale cow/calf operations will be validated.

The grant money comes from the USDA through its National Institute of Food and Agriculture – Agricultural and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program.

E. coli O157:H7 in ground beef and other beef products is a major food safety concern and one approach to reduce the threat of contamination in the slaughter process is to develop farming and ranching practices that reduce the load of the pathogen inside the animals before they are butchered.

These bacteria grow harmlessly inside the hind guts of cows and are expelled in feces. When the organisms contaminate cuts of meat at the packing plant, they become a danger to humans because they emit a powerful toxin once inside a person’s intestines. These Shiga toxins attack red blood cells in a process that often leads to clotting and kidney failure. Once in the bloodstream they can cause heart damage, central nervous system disorders, coma, paralysis and brain injury.

In 5 to 15 percent of cases, E. coli infections develop into life-threatening hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) or a related condition known as thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP.) Children under 5 years old are most susceptible to getting HUS.

• Inspections are just “snapshots in time;” what happens on just one day may or may not be indicative of restaurant cleanliness throughout the course of a year
• With so much riding on a sanitation score, the relationship between inspector and restaurant will become contentious and lead to much more administrative action
• Posting restaurant scores is punitive; it’s better to encourage (one inspector from a small town said their practice is to publicize good scores)
• Many low risk violations may lower a score even though there is no real threat to the public.

My reaction to the inspector’s comments is that those concerns can be address in a uniform and fair grading system. And the system can be fine-tuned over time. Overall, the public’s right to know trumps any perceived unfairness to restaurants. Transparency is rarely a bad thing.

Many people think foods–particularly ground beef or leafy greens–are the only sources of E. coli infections in humans, but that is untrue. Drinking water contaminated with E. coli can be just as deadly or life-changing as any other E. coli infection. In this case, the drinking water at a rural Iowa rental home was supplied by a well that was contaminated with the pathogen, and a toddler living at the home became seriously ill in 2007.

Early E. coli symptoms included severe abdominal pain and diarrhea, but soon developed into a serious kidney condition that attacks red blood cells and is called hemolytic uremic syndrome (E. coli HUS). The child was hospitalized for a month and put on kidney dialysis. Although her condition has improved she will have lifelong kidney damage and is at risk for needing a kidney transplant in the future.

Local authorities tested the home’s tap water and found E. coli in the water supply about a month after the child became sick. Pritzker Olsen attorneys hired a microbiologist, pediatric nephrologist and geohydrologist to serve as expert witnesses who could communicate to the defense attorneys that the conditions on the home’s property did, indeed, lead to the child’s illness, which seriously affected her life and the lives of her family members. It was found that the well water likely became contaminated with E. coli from manure that rainwater washed into the water supply from fields of cattle that grazed uphill from the well not far from the home.

We learned from a New York Times investigative story in October 2009 that much of the mainstream ground beef sold in the U.S. comes from grinding plants that blend raw product from various slaughter facilities.

It’s not uncommon for the grinding plants to accept the shipments without testing them for E. coli O157:H7, a potentially deadly pathogen. If a sample of the finished ground beef tests postive for E. coli, federal inspectors don’t even bother to look  for the responsible slaughterhouse — unless there is an outbreak of illness.

This practice  protects individual slaughter plants from being identified as a source of contaminated meat.

Those of us who care about the prevention of ground beef E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks are asking why the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) accepts this practice as the status quo.

As a recent column in the industry trade publication Meatingplace explained, FSIS inspectors only get 50 to 60 positive tests results for E. coli O157:H7 in any given year.

Each one of those positives is an opportunity to identify the source and prevent food borne tragedies. That’s because if one grinder purchased contaminated beef from a slaughter facility, there’s a very good chance another grinder purchased beef from the same lot.

As the Meatingplace column said, this seems like a very good place to increase our efforts at preventing food borne illnesses.

As we field questions from people throughout the United States regarding this outbreak and a Nestle lawsuit, additional information about the Nestle cookie dough E. coli outbreak is becoming available.

CONTACT OUR ATTORNEYS.  WE ARE REPRESENTING E. COLI VICTIMS NATIONWIDE.

Washington State health officials are now reporting that 5 of the 66 people confirmed sickened in the Nestle cookie dough E. coli outbreak were from Washington.  Two of the five required hospitalization.  The people sickened were from the following counties:

1)  May 6, Grays Harbor County woman
2)  May 12, Thurston County teenage girl, hospitalized
3)  May 15, Pierce County girl
4)  May 20, King County boy
5) May 21, King County girl, hospitalized.

Colorado has reported that 5 of the 66 people sickened in the Nestle cookie dough E. coli outbreak were from Colorado. According to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment:

Five cases have been reported in Colorado in the following counties: Denver, Douglas (2), Jefferson and Weld. Two of the people have been hospitalized, and one has developed a severe complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). Of the four people interviewed so far by the state health department, all had consumed the raw cookie dough during the week before they became ill.

The Minnesota Department of Health reports 6 people in Minnesota sickened in the outbreak:

State health officials are investigating six cases of E. coli O157:H7 infection in Minnesota residents associated with eating a popular brand of raw, commercially packaged cookie dough.

Routine monitoring by the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) found that the cases of illness were all caused by E. coli O157:H7 with the same DNA fingerprint. The individuals became ill between May 3 and June 11. All six reported eating raw cookie dough of the Nestle’s Toll House brand.

The cases range in age from 2 to 18 years of age; five (83 percent) are female. One was hospitalized. All have recovered.

Minnesota’s cases are linked by the same DNA fingerprint to cases of E. coli infection in at least 66 people in 28 states. In addition, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the vast majority of the people interviewed reported eating raw cookie dough of the same brand.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are warning consumers not to eat or use Nestle cookie dough products because of the risk that they are contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.

The announcement today coincided with a Nestle recall of its Toll House brand of refrigerated cookie dough – all varieties. A number of people sickened with the outbreak strain of E. coli reported eating raw Nestle cookie dough before they became ill.

Since March 2009, 66 cases have been confirmed in 28 states. The FDA and CDC said 25 victims were hospitalized, including seven who suffered severe complications of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which can lead to kidney failure.  As of this morning, no deaths had been reported.

The warning from federal health authorities included the advice for people not to use the dough for cooking. That’s because handling the uncooked product could possibly lead to an E. coli infection. The recall is effective immediately and it includes ALL varieties of Nestle Toll House refrigerated Cookie Bar Dough, Cookie Dough Tub; Cookie Dough Tube; Limited Edition Cookie Dough items; Seasonal Cookie Dough and Ultimates Cookie Bar Dough. Nestle has published a complete list of every package subject to the recall.

National food safety law firm Pritzker Olsen Attorneys is accepting cases from all states, including Minnesota, Colorado, Washington, Illinois, Iowa, North Dakota South Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, California, New York, Florida, Indiana, Idaho, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Vermont, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Virginia and West Virginia.

The firm has started its own investigation and is compiling Toll House lawsuit information. Pritzker Olsen has already been in touch with potential victims of the outbreak and currently represents E. coli O157:H7 clients from past outbreaks. The firm is one of the few in the nation that practices extensively in the area of foodborne illness litigation. It has collected millions for victims of food poisoning and has been a long-time advocate for reform in the American food safety system.

If you believe you or a loved one has contracted E. coli O157:H7 from eating Nestle cookie dough, E. coli lawyers at Pritzker Olsen are ready to assist you. There is no charge for consulting with our firm. If we agree to represent you, we are paid a percentage of the money we collect for you. If there is no recovery, you owe us nothing.

Please contact us toll-free at 1-888-377-8900 or write to our attorneys online for a free consultation.

Pritzker Olsen has a reputation for taking extreme care with food poisoning victims and it has considerable expertise and resources to handle cases where individuals have received complicated and expensive medical treatment for severe illnesses.

References:

1. 5 Suspected Cookie E. coli Cases in Washington, Associated Press, June 19, 2009.
2. http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/release/2009/061809.html
3. http://www.health.state.mn.us/news/pressrel/2009/ecoli061909.html

But late today, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment warned consumers not to eat Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough because of possible E. coli contamination. Colorado officials said 66 cases of E. coli O157:H7 in 28 states have been matched through molecular subtyping. The cases have been associated with Toll House Cookie Dough through epidemiological study, not direct evidence.

National food safety law firm Pritzker Olsen Attorney is accepting clients in this outbreak from all states, including Colorado and Minnesota.  The Minnesota Department of  Health is believed to be part of the multi-state investigation and more information will be forthcoming. In Colorado, there have been five confirmed illnesses, including two people hospitalized and one with severe complications.

E. coli 0157:H7 is a potentially deadly bacterium that can lead to severe complications, including Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS), which often involves renal failure. Symptoms of E. coli O157:H7 infection include diarrhea (often bloody), severe stomach cramps and nausea.

Pritzker Olsen is a premier food safety law firm involved in practically every major outbreak of foodborne illness. The firm has collected tens of millions of dollars for victims of food safety. Currently the firm’s clients include the families of  three women who died from Salmonella infection from contaminated peanut butter products.

If you believe you or a loved one has contracted E. coli O157:H7 from eating Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough, E. coli lawyers at the firm are ready to assist you. There is no charge for consulting with our firm. If we agree to represent you, we are paid a percentage of money we collect for you. If there is no recovery, you owe us nothing. Please contact us toll-free at 1-888-377-8900 or complete one of our online forms for a free consultation.