Just landed in Norway, and the first thing I read off the plane was Tom Gremillion’s new piece for the Consumer Federation of America, “Food Safety and Corruption.” Read the whole thing. Nobody in Washington connects the dots on food safety better than Tom, and nobody says it more plainly. Thank you, Tom — for the piece, […]
Frank Yiannas has been asking for a National Foodborne Outbreak Investigation Board, modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board, since he made the case in STAT last November. He came back to it in July in Food Safety News. I wrote about his idea in August, and again when De Ann Davis of Western Growerscalled it a strong idea […]
This afternoon I fly from Seattle to Oslo. On Wednesday and Thursday, September 23 and 24, I give two talks at the Aquatiq Food Forum 2026 at the Clarion Hotel Oslo: “Why It Is a Bad Idea to Poison Your Customers” and “The Criminalization of Food Safety Failures.” I wrote about both talks last week. This is a […]
We need a lawyer who can find the defendant and a paralegal who can find the one page that matters. Marler Clark has been suing the companies that poison people since 1993 — since a nine-year-old girl named Brianne Kiner nearly died from a hamburger. Sixteen years later it was Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance […]
Saturday, September 19, 2026 This is the eleventh Saturday column. Last Saturday’s edition ran under the headline CDC Closed the Largest Cyclospora Outbreak in American History at 12,883 Sick; its point was that closed is not the same as answered. This week the answers turned up in places nobody would think to look: FDA confirmed the sprout seed recall […]
A Salmonella outbreak linked to pet turtles has more than doubled in six weeks. In its September 18, 2026 update, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 20 sick people in 12 states, up from 8 children in 6 states when the outbreak was first announced on August 5. Five people have been hospitalized. No deaths have […]
Helena Bottemiller Evich’s Friday edition of Food Fix made an argument I have been making in pieces all summer, and she made it in one clean sweep: Congress has stopped doing its job. When she had me on her American Dish podcast on Sept. 2 to talk about the Cyclospora outbreak, I said much the same thing: the blame […]
On September 15, the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA) posted a white paper marking twenty years since the 2006 spinach outbreak that led to its creation. It is called “Twenty Years of Progress,” and its executive summary ends on a line I agree with: food safety is never finished. Four days earlier, CDC declared the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak […]
De Ann Davis, senior vice president of science at the Western Growers Association, published a piece on August 31 arguing that FDA outbreak communication is itself a food safety tool and needs to work better. I missed it when it came out. It deserves a reply, because I agree with most of it, and the places […]
I have spent more than 30 years representing people sickened by contaminated food. I do not often read a speech by an FDA official and find myself agreeing with nearly every line. This week I did. Dr. Donna Garren, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Produce Safety, spoke on Sept. 15 at […]
Woods Hill Table, the farm-to-table restaurant on Commonwealth Avenue in West Concord, Massachusetts, closed on September 16, 2026 while town and state health officials investigate a cluster of Salmonella infections. As of September 17, ten people had been reported ill, both customers and restaurant employees, according to Concord Public Health Director Melanie Dineen. She said she […]
The headlines about Shigella have taken a sharp turn. For most of my career the bug showed up in the news the way I knew it best — a daycare outbreak, a sick restaurant worker, a batch of contaminated produce. Lately the headlines read more like something out of an STI clinic: “sexually transmitted superbug,” “drug-resistant Shigella spreading among […]
Holding an FDA-only Listeria summit is not a structural necessity. It is a choice. And it is the wrong one. On July 8, the FDA announced a public meeting on August 18-19, 2026, at the Harvey W. Wiley Federal Building in College Park, Maryland, on the prevention of Listeria monocytogenes. It is billed as the first in […]
E. coli O145:H28 is a Shiga toxin–producing E. coli — a STEC, in the shorthand. The number-and-letter name is just how microbiologists fingerprint the bug: “O145” describes the sugar coat on the outside of the cell, and “H28” describes its flagella, the little whip it swims with. Put them together and you have one specific, […]
If there is one sentence every family kept taped to the freezer door, it is this: when in doubt, throw it out. I honestly do not know who coined the phrase. But whoever it was understood something a lot of companies still don’t: a bag of contaminated food is never worth a child’s kidneys. On July 3, […]
Over at USA TODAY health reporter Mary Walrath-Holdridge asked a simple, sensible question: which states have the most cases of the “explosive diarrhea” parasite going around this summer? It is exactly the question a worried parent, a restaurant owner, or a public-health nurse would type into a search bar. And it is a question the country’s official outbreak map […]