Last Friday, Target told a federal court that it had no duty to ask a single question about the infant formula it sold – even in the middle of a national infant botulism outbreak, and even after the FDA sent Target a warning letter about that outbreak. Target’s position is simple: not our job.

What we say Target owed these families

Target’s motion treats our case as if we were asking it to trace the supply chain of every item in the store. We are not. Here is what the amended complaint in Nam v. Nara Organics actually alleges.

Target does not passively receive what it sells. It decides which products to carry, negotiates with vendors, and runs vendor onboarding and assortment review. Target had been talking with Nara about this formula since 2022. It planned to launch in April 2026, then asked Nara to put the formula on its shelves in December 2025 instead – while the ByHeart outbreak was active and under federal investigation. On January 7, 2026, Target announced Nara as one of the “most trusted” brands in its wellness expansion.

Under Washington law, a product seller owes a duty of reasonable care to avoid the foreseeable harm of what it sells. We allege that duty was heightened here. The product was powdered infant formula, a category the FDA had identified to retailers as historically associated with C. botulinum. It is eaten only by infants. It was marketed as containing more organic whole milk than any other formula in the country – the very ingredient under investigation as the vehicle in an active national outbreak. And Target is a sophisticated national retailer with the resources and leverage to vet what it carries.

Target was on notice. The FDA’s March 2023 Call to Action was addressed to retailers of powdered infant formula and named C. botulinum. On December 12, 2025, the FDA sent a warning letter to Target about recalled ByHeart formula remaining on its shelves. By January 23, 2026, the FDA had publicly identified whole milk powder as a suspected vehicle, and on January 28 the Associated Press named Organic West and Dairy Farmers of America as the companies behind it.

Given all that, we allege reasonable care required, at a minimum, that Target:

  • Monitor and act on FDA communications directed to retailers of powdered infant formula;
  • Ask, before adding a new whole-milk-based formula during an active outbreak linked to whole milk powder, whether and how the manufacturer tested for C. botulinum in its finished product and dairy ingredients;
  • Ask who supplied the manufacturer’s dairy ingredients, and whether those suppliers were implicated in the ByHeart investigation;
  • Obtain and review certificates of analysis, testing protocols, and food safety documentation showing whether the manufacturer controlled for spore-forming pathogens in whole milk powder;
  • Apply its own food safety and supplier quality-assurance requirements, including any heightened requirements for infant products;
  • Hold off selling the formula until the root cause of the ByHeart outbreak was identified and the risk assessed; and
  • Apply the vetting Target publicly says it applies to the brands it adds to its shelves.

We allege Target did none of this with reasonable care. From January 28 on, one question to its own vendor would have revealed that the newest formula on its shelves was made with milk powder from the suppliers implicated in the ByHeart outbreak. Nearly four months later, on May 19, 2026, Target sold two cans from recalled Lot No. 709125280E14F2 to my clients in Lacey. Their son was hospitalized with infant botulism less than three weeks later.

Target’s answer is that none of that was its job.

If the retailer will not ask the questions, and the manufacturers did not test for the pathogen, somebody has to make sure the next baby is protected. That is what the last few weeks have been about, and WJLA’s I-Team has the latest.

The FDA declared formula safe – without testing for botulism

The I-Team’s earlier reporting found that while the FDA was investigating the ByHeart outbreak, it was also running what it promoted as its largest-ever study of infant formula safety. That study left out pathogens entirely – including C. botulinum, the organism that was putting babies in intensive care. The FDA then told the public the nation’s formula supply was safe.

People noticed. The story has drawn nearly a million views and thousands of comments from parents who are angry, and rightly so.

Across the ByHeart and Nara outbreaks, 52 babies were hospitalized. Some were paralyzed. Some were on breathing tubes. Katie Connolly, whose infant daughter recovered from paralysis during the outbreak, told WJLA what every parent assumes: that the FDA is there to protect babies. The FDA still says it does not know the root cause. And on the day the story aired, the agency again turned down WJLA’s request to expedite release of records on the outbreak supply chain, saying the station had not shown an urgent need.

Fifty-two hospitalized babies is not an urgent need?

Congress: 77 offices, one answer

Rep. Rosa DeLauro has introduced legislation (H.R. 7867) that would require formula makers to test for C. botulinum, impose strict environmental monitoring in manufacturing plants, and require that Congress be told when a pathogen is found. She told WJLA she is done with letters and voluntary guidance: “I’m tired of recommended guidelines and voluntary procedures.” So am I.

I have sent formal letters to the members of the committees that can move this bill, asking them to support it, to meet with the families of sickened babies, and to hold hearings that put the formula makers and the FDA on the record. I have not received a single response.

So we went to them. My daughter Sydney spent two days walking the halls of Congress, delivering baby-bottle-shaped T-shirts to all 77 members who have the power to move this legislation. Her point was simple: not every mother can breastfeed, formula has to be a safe option, and after two outbreaks in one year, that means testing it for botulism.

WJLA then contacted all 77 of those members with two questions: Will you support the bill requiring infant formula to be tested for pathogens, including botulism? Will you push for a hearing on the outbreaks? One member answered – Rep. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts. She supports the bill. Thank you, Congresswoman.

That leaves 76. The FDA did not respond either, including to the question of whether it would testify if called.

I understand why. Hearings are uncomfortable. Mandatory testing costs money. Asking a vendor where its milk powder comes from takes effort. These are exactly the hard things that industry and government would rather ignore – and exactly the things that create change.

What you can do

Rep. DeLauro said it best: the public needs to be on its feet. Call your representative and your senators. Ask them two questions – the same two WJLA asked: Will you support mandatory botulism testing of infant formula? Will you call for a hearing? You can find your members of Congress here.

Target says it had no responsibility. The FDA says the formula supply is safe while leaving botulism out of the test. Seventy-six members of Congress have said nothing. The babies in these outbreaks and their parents deserve better, and so does the next family that opens a can of formula.

We will keep pushing – in court, and on the Hill.

Amanda Vicari, a food and agriculture policy communicator, published a piece on LinkedIn today — “MAHA Moved Food Politics to the Right. Now the Right Has to Decide What to Do With It.” — that is worth your time.

Her argument, briefly: in remarkably little time, MAHA took questions that used to belong to progressive food activism — ultra-processed foods, chemical exposure, corporate influence over nutrition policy, regenerative agriculture — and moved them to the center of Republican politics. But winning the argument is not the same as settling the policy. The MAHA coalition contains people who want very different things. Some want transparency but oppose mandates. Some want ingredient regulation; others see that as exactly the administrative power conservatives spent decades trying to constrain. Some rally against glyphosate while the administration treats it as essential to food security. As she puts it, the right now has to decide: “Does healthier food require more federal regulation or less?”

It is a fair question, and on most of the issues she raises — dyes, seed oils, ultra-processed food definitions, dietary guidelines — reasonable people can and will disagree about the proper role of government.

But I have been litigating foodborne illness cases since 1993, when I represented Brianne Kiner, the most seriously injured survivor of the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak. And from where I sit, there is one corner of food policy where the ideological question Ms. Vicari poses has an easy answer. It is the corner where my clients live: pathogens.

No consumer “chooses” E. coli O157:H7 on romaine. No parent exercising personal responsibility can read a label hard enough to detect botulism in infant formula, Listeria in deli meat, or Salmonella in peanut butter. The free market cannot price a hazard the buyer cannot see, smell, or taste. That is not nanny-state theory. That is the oldest and least controversial justification for government there is: protecting people from harms they cannot protect themselves against. Inspections, surveillance, and enforcement are not the ceiling of food policy. They are the floor.

And here is the contradiction Ms. Vicari’s piece does not reach: while MAHA was winning the argument about how Americans should eat, the infrastructure that keeps acute hazards out of the food supply was being cut. Iasked publicly what Secretary Kennedy was doing when sweeping FDA cuts threatened federal outbreak prevention — and when the state grant programs that carry out roughly 90 percent of our produce inspections and 75 percent of our manufactured food inspections were told to expect steep reductions. I joined a coalition of consumer, industry, and public health groups urging the Secretary not to gut the FDA’s Human Foods Program — pointing out that an under-resourced food safety agency jeopardizes his own stated MAHA objectives. We learned this lesson the hard way in Sturgis, Michigan: when the FDA is unable to inspect, people die. And too often those people are the very children this movement says it exists to protect.

So here is my answer to the question the right is now asking itself. Whatever you decide about food dyes and seed oils, a movement that claims the mantle of children’s health cannot simultaneously starve the systems that find outbreaks — PulseNet, FoodNet, state and local health departments — and the inspectors who prevent them. Liberty means choosing what is for dinner. It does not mean your dinner giving your kid hemolytic uremic syndrome without your consent.

I have said for more than three decades that my goal is to be put out of business. I will work with anyone — left, right, MAHA, MAGA, or vegan — who is serious about that project. The measure of this movement will not be whether it produces a federal definition of ultra-processed food. It will be whether, a few years from now, fewer families are sitting in a hospital room next to a child on dialysis, wondering how a salad did this.

Ms. Vicari is right that MAHA moved food politics. My hope is that whoever ends up owning the issue remembers that bacteria are the one constituency that never changes sides.

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, t-shirts rolled into plastic baby bottles were hand-delivered to 77 congressional offices — all 54 members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and all 23 members of the Senate HELP Committee, two apiece, with every other office in Congress getting one. Unrolled, each shirt reads: For Babies’ Sake, Test for Botulism in Infant Formula, in support of H.R. 7867, the Infant Formula Safety Modernization Act of 2026. The timing was deliberate: both chambers walked back in from recess on Monday, September 14, and the shirts landed the same week. I said then that the aim was every office that can put this bill on a calendar.

That was the week of September 14. It is now September 22. This post is the accounting of what has come back, and the accounting is short: no markup has been scheduled, no oversight hearing has been noticed, and not one of the 77 offices has replied — not to the shirts, not to the letters that preceded them, and not to the fourteen families whose statements have been sitting in a committee file since June.

The paper trail, and what it has produced

I have now written each committee twice. Energy and Commerce got a letter on June 23 supporting H.R. 7867, with the statements and photographs of fourteen families attached as Appendix A, and a follow-up on August 28 after the government confirmed the genetic link between the two outbreaks. Senate HELP got a letter on June 29 and a follow-up on August 28. Four letters. I have also written Secretary Kennedy, and when Chairman Cassidy demanded answers from Nara and ByHeart I gave him full credit for it in public — a letter from a chairman matters, and his is still the only one. But as I wrote on Saturday, none of it has produced a markup, and none of the four letters has drawn a reply. The citizen petition asking FDA to require the testing by regulation, with 24 parents of hospitalized infants as co-petitioners, is being finalized now — because when Congress will not act, the agencies are the only door left open.

The families have been waiting since June 23

The shirts are a prop. The families are not. Fourteen of them wrote statements for Congress — in their own words, with photographs of their children in hospital beds, feeding tubes taped to their cheeks — and those statements have been attached to the Energy and Commerce Committee’s file for ninety-one days. The parents offered to do more than write. They offered to come to Washington and sit at a witness table and tell the members what “safe” turned out to mean. Not one of those families has received an acknowledgment. Not a form letter. Not a staffer’s email saying the statements arrived. Their children were paralyzed by a product the federal government has now confirmed — at the level of the genome — was contaminated, and the committees with jurisdiction over that product have not managed to say we got your letter.

What the record showed while nobody answered

On August 27, CDC closed the Nara Organics investigation without a hedge: four infants, all hospitalized, and a finding that the formula was contaminated with Clostridium botulinum and made infants sick. Whole genome sequencing linked a Nara patient sample to a patient sample, product samples and an ingredient sample from the 2025 ByHeart investigation — 48 infants in 17 states, the largest infant botulism outbreak in American history. One contamination, two brands, 52 hospitalized babies, many on ventilators, each treated with BabyBIG antitoxin at $69,300 a dose.

And the rule has not moved an inch. This morning, as every morning since these babies got sick, 21 C.F.R. § 106.55 requires finished-formula testing for exactly two organisms — Salmonella and Cronobacter — and says nothing about the one that put 52 infants in intensive care. The FDA named that organism itself, by genus and species, in a Call-to-Action letter to the entire industry on March 8, 2023 — three and a half years ago. Eight days ago Abbott agreed to pay $384,999,040 over the formula it sold WIC, and the rule still does not require the test.

The four asks, unchanged, because nothing has been done about them

Mark up H.R. 7867 and report it favorably — the Health Subcommittee held its hearing on April 29, and the next step has been procedural for 146 days. Hold the oversight hearing, with the FDA, Dairy Farmers of America, Organic West Milk, Nara Organics and ByHeart at the table, because there is now a laboratory result to ask about. Put the parents at the witness table — they have written already, and they are willing to say it in person. And put a written question to the FDA with a deadline: what has the root cause investigation found, and is a testing rule coming or not. If your representative or senator sits on either committee, the template letter, phone numbers and addresses are still on the blog — constituent mail is the one thing these offices cannot log and forget.

We have done this before

The Jack in the Box tragedy became a rule that made hamburger safer for a generation of children. Congress has stopped doing that part of its job, and this is what the stoppage looks like up close: told in June, told again in August, handed the genome in September, delivered the argument by hand in a week when every member was in the building — and silence. I said in July that a t-shirt in a plastic bottle would not produce a markup, and so far, I am right. But the shirts were never the point. They made the argument impossible to lose in a mail cart, and the silence around them is now its own entry in the record. When the next letter goes out — and there will be a next letter — it will have to say that too.

The families followed every instruction on the label. The least Congress can do is respond to theirs.

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, and for the work CFA does every day.

Tom was also kind enough to quote something I wrote recently: eighteen prosecutions in forty years — that is the entire history of food crime enforcement in America. And every food safety executive I have ever deposed has told me some version of the same thing: the budget requests get approved after somebody gets prosecuted, not after somebody gets sick.

Tom builds the case well. But after four decades of suing food companies and sitting across the table from their executives, I want to add a few arguments of my own — because his piece is even stronger than he lets on.

A civil check is a line item. A criminal charge is personal.

The $385 million Abbott settlement sounds enormous. It is not. It is paid by shareholders and priced by insurers, and it will be absorbed into the cost of doing business by a company with over $40 billion in annual revenue. What civil settlements have never done — in my experience, not once — is change behavior in the boardroom the way personal criminal exposure does. Stewart Parnell is serving 28 years for shipping Salmonella-laced peanut paste. Austin “Jack” DeCoster and his son went to jail over contaminated eggs. The Jensen brothers were prosecuted after their cantaloupe killed 33 people. Those cases echoed through every executive suite in the food industry. A civil check, however large, does not.

And the Abbott facts were tailor-made for prosecution. Under the Park doctrine, executives can be held criminally responsible for food safety failures even without proof of intent. Here, DOJ alleged Abbott “knowingly” failed to adopt safeguards against Cronobacter at Sturgis and withheld information from FDA about microorganisms in the facility. Knowing conduct plus concealment from the regulator is precisely the aggravated fact pattern that has historically turned Park misdemeanors into felony territory. That the government had those allegations in hand — and had opened a criminal investigation — and still settled civil-only tells you everything about the Executive Order declaring criminal enforcement of regulatory offenses “disfavored,” and the disbanding of the DOJ unit that brought these cases.

Congressional oversight is deterrence too — and it has collapsed.

In 2022, after four Cronobacter infections and two infant deaths, House and Senate panels hauled in the FDA Commissioner and Abbott executives and grilled them on national television. Today, more than 50 babies have been hospitalized with infant botulism linked to formula — same product category, a worse acute toll — and the 119th Congress has not held a single hearing. Executives prepare for oversight hearings the way they prepare for depositions: badly, and with fear. Take the hearings away and you have removed another reason to spend money on food safety before, rather than after, the outbreak.

You cannot deter what you cannot detect — and the numbers will lie about it.

Here is the part that should worry hopeful reformers most. Cutting FoodNet surveillance from eight tracked pathogens to two does not reduce foodborne illness by one case. It reduces the counting of foodborne illness. And that sets up a perverse feedback loop: fewer counted outbreaks will be trumpeted as proof the system is working, which will justify the next round of cuts. When the outbreak statistics improve over the next few years, ask what we stopped measuring, not what we started preventing.

The Taylor Farms cyclospora investigation shows what the detection side costs in real time. The company took roughly a week to hand FDA the grower location data that the final traceability rule — delayed by this Administration for two and a half years — would have required within 24 hours. A week, during an active outbreak, is not a paperwork delay. It is contaminated product staying on shelves and in refrigerators while investigators wait.

Lawyers like me are the backstop, not the substitute.

I have spent my career getting compensation for families after the fact. I am proud of that work, and civil discovery has repeatedly pried loose what companies knew and when they knew it. But let’s be honest about what civil litigation cannot do: it cannot put anyone in front of a grand jury, and it arrives only after the funerals. When the government steps back from criminal enforcement, it is not deregulating — it is outsourcing accountability to plaintiffs’ lawyers and grieving parents. That is a policy choice, and families are the ones who pay for it.

Deterrence and detection. Take away the credible threat of prosecution, blind the surveillance system, and slow-walk traceability, and you should expect exactly what we are seeing: more outbreaks, more sick kids, less accountability.

Thanks again, Tom, for saying it plainly. As he puts it: hopeful food reformers should take notice — and beware.

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 if we follow through.

This time I do not want to argue the concept. I want to apply it. Three federal files from the past three weeks each ended, or stalled, with the central answer either missing or sitting somewhere the public was never pointed to. A standing board would have had to open a docket on each one and put something on the record. Here is what those dockets would hold today, and what they would still have to answer.

Docket one: romaine lettuce, FDA reference #1382

On September 10, FDA closed its investigation of a fourteen-person E. coli O157:H7 outbreak and named the food for the first time: romaine lettuce. The file had sat on FDA’s investigations table since July 1 with the food listed as not yet identified. CDC had declared the outbreak over on July 29, and by the time investigators identified the lettuce it was past its shelf life, as I wrote the day the file closed.

The closed row shows traceback initiated. The columns for on-site inspection and for sampling are empty. There was no recall and no advisory. No grower, processor or brand is named.

It is not the first romaine file to close that way. Reference #1280, the 2024 romaine E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, sits further down the same page: 89 sick, with traceback, inspection and sampling all initiated, and no firm named. Two romaine outbreaks, 103 people, and not one grower on the public record.

A board docket would have to answer four things. Where did traceback lead: to one farm, several, or none? Why was there no inspection or sampling on #1382? What is the probable cause, or if it is undetermined, what would have made it determinable? And what is the recommendation, to whom is it addressed, and has anyone answered it? FDA’s table page already promises that when a cause or contributing factors are identified that could inform future prevention, the agency will provide a summary. That promise has no clock on it.

Docket two: the 2026 Cyclospora season

CDC closed the iceberg lettuce outbreak on September 11 at 12,883 illnesses in 21 states, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths, linked to Taylor Farms de Mexico. Four days later CDC’s national case data page counted 19,883 laboratory-confirmed cases acquired in the United States with onsets between May 1 and August 31, against 1,180 for the same months of 2025, and said it would stop updating weekly. The two pages carry different dates, but the gap between them is 7,000 confirmed cases with no food named.

FDA’s table still lists four more Cyclospora files with the food “Not Yet Identified”: #1392 at 234 cases, #1385 at 38, #1398 at 22 and #1384 at 18. On the lettuce outbreak itself, CDC’s final update says FDA continues to investigate how the product became contaminated, and FDA’s table still marks that investigation active.

The docket questions follow directly. What made the other 7,000 people sick, and are those four open files one source or several? How did the parasite reach lettuce from a Guanajuato facility that FDA investigators assessed during the 2013 outbreak, and what became of the recommendation they wrote then, which I laid out in August? An NTSB-style recommendations database would have carried that 2013 recommendation as open for thirteen years. Nothing did.

Docket three: alfalfa sprout seed

FDA’s advisory on the Everything Sprouts outbreak counts 55 sick in 15 states and four hospitalized, infected with several strains of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and with Salmonella Agona. On August 31 it said FDA had recommended that the common seed supplier recall the implicated lot, and that the supplier had not responded. On September 15 it said the supplier had agreed to recall. The seed went to growers and distributors in 16 states and Puerto Rico, and to Canada, Mexico, Tahiti and Venezuela. The advisory still does not name the supplier, the lot, or the additional grower FDA says used the same seed.

The name is public, just not on that page. FDA’s weekly Enforcement Report lists International Sprout Holdings, Inc., of Cookeville, Tennessee, recalling 43,799 pounds of alfalfa seed from lot SAL2-24JB, and puts the start of that recall at August 23, eight days before the advisory said the supplier had not responded. Phyllis Entis found it first, and I wrote about it on September 10; Food Safety News reported the same discrepancy. Two FDA records describe the same recall in ways that cannot both be complete.

FDA’s Enforcement Report data also lists six earlier Class I recalls by the same firm between 2014 and 2021: five of seed, for Salmonella, Listeria and possible E. coli, and one of mung bean sprouts for Listeria. A board docket would open with that history on page one. It would have to say how this lot became contaminated, why the recall record and the advisory disagree, which growers sprouted the seed, and whether anything recommended after the previous six recalls was ever done.

What the three have in common

None of this is a complaint about the people who work these cases. In each file investigators got somewhere: traceback reached romaine, traceback and genotyping reached a single processor in Mexico, and traceback reached one lot of seed. What is missing is everything downstream of that work: a required finding, an addressee for each recommendation, a clock, and a public record that stays open until somebody answers. That is the part Frank’s board would supply, and it is the part he tried to build from inside FDA with the Foodborne Outbreak Response Improvement Plan in 2021.

A board would not guarantee an answer in any of these. The NTSB sometimes concludes that a cause is undetermined. But it has to say so, explain why, and say what would have made the answer possible. “Undetermined, because no one inspected or sampled before the lettuce expired” is a finding. A blank column on a table is not.

There is one question I am not going to settle in a blog post. How a board’s findings relate to the claims of the people who were sickened is something any bill will have to answer, and the families should be at the table when it is written.

Until there is a board, somebody has to keep the docket. Every time a file closes without an answer, I intend to write down what a board would have had to put on the record. Consider this the first entry.

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 shorter note about the one thing that changed after I wrote it.

What happened on September 14

Last Monday the Justice Department announced that Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay $384,999,040 to resolve allegations that it caused false claims to be submitted to federal and state programs for powdered infant formula and nutritional therapy products made at its Sturgis, Michigan, and Casa Grande, Arizona, plants between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2022. Of that, $348,700,868 goes to the United States and $36,298,172 to states for Medicaid and WIC claims. Three Abbott employees who brought the whistleblower case will share $69 million.

The government’s complaint, filed in November 2025, described a roof at Sturgis that leaked water over equipment, temporary measures to divert the leaks, and what the Justice Department called “a culture of concealment.” Those are allegations. The settlement is not a finding of liability, and Abbott denies wrongdoing. Abbott has also said, according to Reuters, that the related criminal investigation has been closed.

When the settlement came down, I said it bought $385 million worth of accountability for how formula was made between 2018 and 2022, and that every dollar of it was backward-looking. Not one dollar requires anyone to run a single additional test tomorrow. I still think that.

Why it belongs in a talk about criminal law

My second talk in Oslo asks who goes to prison when food makes people sick. The honest American answer, this month, is: a company pays, a whistleblower is rewarded, and no individual is charged. That is not an accident. Executive Order 14294, signed in May 2025, calls criminal enforcement of strict liability regulatory offenses generally disfavored and tells prosecutors to treat it as a last resort. The Park doctrine, which lets a responsible corporate officer be convicted without proof of intent, is still good law. It is simply not being used.

Europe is moving the other way. In France, Nestlé France and its subsidiary were placed under formal investigation in July 2024 for involuntary manslaughter over Buitoni frozen pizzas that left 48 people, almost all of them young children, with hemolytic uremic syndrome and killed two children. Lactalis and its Craon subsidiary were placed under formal investigation in 2023, in part for failing to carry out withdrawal and recall measures. Neither case has been decided. The direction is still clear.

Why Norway should care

Norway sits on the European side of that line. Article 19 of Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 requires a food business that has reason to believe its product is unsafe to withdraw it immediately and inform the authorities. Norway took that regulation into the EEA Agreement in 2007, and Mattilsynet enforces it under the Food Act. A duty framed as immediate is a duty a prosecutor can measure in hours.

That is the message I am carrying to a room that will include Mattilsynet, producers, retailers and some of the largest food companies in the world. It is the same message I have carried for thirty-three years: it is cheaper to be safe. The difference now is that on one side of the Atlantic, the price of not being safe is starting to include a courtroom with a defendant’s name on the docket, not just a company’s.

I will write up what the audience asks, and what I learn from it, when I get home. If you are in Oslo on the 23rd and 24th, come find me.

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 instructor paralyzed by a hamburger, whose case put the grinding of American beef on the front page of The New York Times and won Michael Moss a Pulitzer Prize. More than thirty years on, we are still the only law firm in the country that does nothing but foodborne illness — E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Cyclospora, Vibrioand botulism, tens of thousands of clients and over $850 million recovered. The names on the other side are ones you already know: Jack in the Box, Cargill, Dole, Nestlé, Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Yum Brands, and this year Taylor Farms and Boar’s Head. There is more work than there are people to do it, and we are hiring two of them.

Where the work stands. As I write this, on September 19, 2026, CDC has closed the iceberg lettuce Cyclospora outbreak tied to Taylor Farms at 12,883 sick in 21 states. Its own national count is 19,883 confirmed cases. That leaves 7,000 confirmed cases nobody has tied to a food, and this fall we will be working with epidemiologists to find where they came from. Salmonella Javiana in jalapeños grown in Sinaloa has sickened 431 people in 32 states; the grower still has not been named, the recall has spread to more than 160 grocery products, and we filed the first lawsuit in August. Salmonella from a Ramona, California deli and the egg farm that supplied it, with three complaints on file. Two sprout outbreaks at once. Infant botulism against ByHeart and Nara Organics. Listeria from Boar’s Head. E. coli from raw goat milk, raw milk cheese, romaine and frozen blueberries. Every one of those numbers is a person with a chart, a bill, a lien and a phone number. Clients in need find us; that has never been the hard part.

Finding the defendant is. Nobody hands you one in a foodborne case. The lawyers here read FDA inspection reports and environmental assessments, USDA establishment records, whole genome sequencing and PulseNet clusters, epidemic curves built by state health departments and, this summer, the sanitation and rainfall records of the Mexican municipality where the lettuce was grown. The paralegals get those records in the first place: public records requests to state and county health departments, FOIA to FDA, CDC and USDA, and some of it in Spanish, a real plus. You will also have the Outbreak Database, which this office built and still maintains — decades of outbreaks, searchable, and no other firm in the country has it.

The other half of the office is not litigation at all. E. coli O157:H7 became an adulterant in American beef in 1994; six more strains followed because we petitioned USDA to make them so. That file had to be built by somebody. This month: citizen petitions to FDA, now being drafted, for a warning label on raw sprouts and for botulism testing in powdered infant formula, the second with twenty-four parents of hospitalized babies; comment letters on the traceability rule Congress delayed to 2028; and a standing demand that CDC keep counting Cyclospora, which it stopped updating weekly on September 15. I publish Food Safety News, have written over 6,000 posts here since 2004, and teach at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. People here get their names on that work. Lawyers write here under their own names, where reporters read it, and anyone who wants to speak or write about the work is pushed forward, not held back. Cases fix one company; the rest fixes the industry.

What you will not do here. No billable hours, no timesheets and no origination credit to chase — the clients find us, and the firm carries the cost of every case out of its own pocket until it resolves. No committee, and no layer between you and the person who decides; when you need an answer you walk down the hall and get one. And no volume. We turn down cases every week that we could not do right, because a file nobody has time for is worse than no file at all.

Where you will do it. Our office is on Bainbridge Island, and we want you living here, not commuting here. We are a few minutes’ walk up from the ferry terminal, thirty-five minutes across the water from downtown Seattle, in a town where you can walk to work, walk to lunch and walk home. But the right person matters more to us than the right zip code: if you are elsewhere in Puget Sound, or willing to relocate, and can be here most days, we should talk, and we will help you get here.

The associate attorney: at least five years of litigation experience — personal injury, product liability, med-mal or complex tort — and ready to run cases, not just paper. We are a handful of lawyers, not a floor of them; you carry your own docket from the start. You will file in federal and state courts across the country; write the settlement demand letters that resolve most of our cases, with the medical chronology, the liability analysis and the damages model all yours; take and defend depositions of plant managers and epidemiologists; work up hemolytic uremic syndrome, Listeria meningitis and Salmonella reactive arthritis with the best experts in the field; sit with families in hospital rooms; and try cases. You will be on airplanes. You need a license in good standing somewhere and admissibility pro hac vice everywhere else (Washington admission is not required), real deposition experience, the writing to draft a complaint reporters quote, and the stomach for what an outbreak does to a child. A science background is a bonus; we will teach you the microbiology.

The paralegal: at least ten years in plaintiffs’ personal injury or complex litigation. Ten years, because you already know what a lien is, what a hospital billing department will and will not send you, and how to keep sixty clients straight without losing one — and because nobody here will look over your shoulder. You will run your own files: intakes with families who are frightened and exhausted, medical records chased and chronologized, the damages and lien files that become the settlement demand, e-discovery and document productions, calendaring and cite-checking, coordination with experts and health departments, FDA and USDA dockets tracked and comments filed on deadline, and travel with us when a case goes to trial. You need mastery of medical records and chronologies, e-discovery platform experience, absurd organizational instincts, and genuine kindness on the phone: the person calling you may have just buried someone.

The children’s cases belong to both jobs. Many of our clients are children, and the last step on their cases is the hardest. A child’s settlement has to be approved by a judge, cleared of Medicaid, Medicare, ERISA and sometimes federal military liens, and structured — now and then into a special needs trust — so the money is still there decades later, when the kidney an outbreak took finally has to be replaced. If you have never done a minor’s compromise, you will.

What we offer. Competitive salary depending on experience, plus bonus; medical, dental and vision; 401(k) with match; paid vacation and holidays; bar dues and CLE for the associate; and cases that end up in The New York Times, in front of Congress, and in Poisoned, Jeff Benedict’s book about this work and the Netflix documentary that followed. Read the book and watch the documentary before you apply.

One last thing, and it is the whole thing. Nobody here treats this as a practice area or a file-management job. A client wrote to us that I came to the hospital while their son was there, and that somebody from this office was in touch every step after. Being that somebody is the job, for the lawyer and the paralegal both. The people who last here can still name the child a year after the case settles, and they are still angry that any of it happened. I am not looking for someone who wants a job. I am looking for someone who cannot look away from it.

How to apply. Both jobs are open now. Send a resume and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com. Associates, add a writing sample, and in the note pick any case or outbreak off marlerblog.com and tell me what you would do with it first. Paralegals, tell me about the hardest lien you ever cleared or the record you had to fight hardest to get. marlerclark.com and billmarler.com if you want to know more before you write. No recruiters. Equal opportunity employer.

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 and left the supplier’s name in the Enforcement Report, Washington counted 27 sick in the broccoli sprout outbreak while CDC’s page says 22, FDA posted five closure summaries with a name blacked out, CDC said it will stop counting Cyclospora weekly, Abbott agreed to pay $385 million while admitting nothing, and a fourteenth congressional letter went out with no hearing behind it. The record exists. It is just not on the page where people look.

On Tuesday FDA said the seed supplier agreed to recall the alfalfa seed lot, and the advisory still does not say who the supplier is. FDA’s sprouts advisory, stamped September 15, says the seed supplier of Everything Sprouts, LLC agreed to recall the seed lot, sold to sprout growers and wholesale distributors in Puerto Rico and the United States and shipped to Canada, Mexico, Tahiti and Venezuela. The count is unchanged since September 1 at 55 sick, four hospitalized and no deaths in fifteen states, 46 E. coli, seven Salmonella Agona and two with both. The page names no supplier and no lot. Both have been public since September 10, when Phyllis Entis found them in FDA’s Enforcement Report: International Sprout Holdings Inc. of Cookeville, Tennessee, lot SAL2-24JB, 43,799 pounds, recall initiated August 23. I wrote about it that day; Food Safety News reported Wednesday that FDA has identified at least one more sprout grower that received the lot and has not named it either. On Tuesday Todd’s Seeds, an online sprouting-seed seller, recalled its alfalfa seed and mixes packed between January and May, named International Specialty Supply as the source, and cited a positive E. coli result on spent irrigation water tied to the lot. The name went to the record, not to the page the public reads.

Washington counted 27 people in the broccoli sprout outbreak on Thursday, and the federal pages still say 22. Washington’s Department of Health updated its page September 17 to 21 Washington cases, two hospitalized, in nine counties (King and Whatcom five each, Spokane three, Clark and Skagit two each, one each in Island, Snohomish, Walla Walla and Yakima), up from 16 on September 9, and says the outbreak now includes 27 people from four states. CDC’s page was last updated September 11 at 22 sick in Idaho, Montana, Utah and Washington; FDA’s advisory has not moved since September 9. Evergreen Fresh Sprouts of Moyie Springs, Idaho, recalled the sprouts September 4, the notice reached FDA’s page September 10, and the last use-by date was Wednesday. The two sprout outbreaks together stand at 82 sick by the states’ counts, and CDC says they do not appear to be related. I wrote about the broccoli outbreak the day it went federal and about both together two days later, when the number was 77.

Utah’s Bear River Health Department ruled the sprouts out and still has no source for 21 cases.The department’s September 1 release has not been updated; the Box Elder News Journal reported Wednesday that whole genome sequencing shows the Cache and Box Elder strain is not the Evergreen strain. Twenty-one cases in a district of about 200,000 people, three weeks without a date range, a serotype or a suspected food, and on Thursday I listed the twelve questions the department should answer in public.

The Happy Hens recall is eleven days old, the egg test results are five days overdue, and the count is 23. The California Department of Public Health’s September 11 release put the recall date at September 8 and the count at 23 sick and seven hospitalized, unchanged since September 4; nothing has been published since by the County, the state or FDA. The farm said August 31 that 4,000 eggs would be tested over two weeks, which ran out Monday; as of this morning the farm’s website carries no recall notice and no results, and the shop is taking egg orders for pickup in Ramona. I published the state’s list of 41 San Diego County locations that received the eggs. Vermont’s Leaping Bear Farm outbreak sits at 14. The UK Health Security Agency counted 586 confirmed Salmonella Enteritidis cases as of September 15 in three clusters likely linked to imported eggs, per Phyllis Entis’s Thursday ledger; I added up the American and European egg outbreaks on Thursday at more than 750 sick and two dead.

CDC will stop counting weekly at 19,883, and the fourteenth letter went to USDA. CDC’s case-data page, as of September 15, lists 19,883 confirmed domestic cases, 1,064 hospitalizations and two deaths in 49 states and the District of Columbia, with 9,765 still being sorted between domestic and travel and CDC aware of at least 6,594 more, and says CDC will stop updating it weekly because recent infections have significantly declined. Against the outbreak CDC closed at 12,883, that leaves exactly 7,000 confirmed cases with no food named. I laid out what each number counts last Saturday, from the states’ 33,548 and CDC’s 19,595 that day down to the one percent of infections any count catches. On Monday Representative Debbie Dingell and nine House colleagues wrote to Secretary Rollins asking why two of the Agricultural Research Service’s three Cyclospora research projects were shelved and the third is moving from Beltsville, Maryland to Iowa, with a two-week deadline. That is the fourteenth congressional letter of this outbreak; none has a published answer, and there is still no hearing. Helena Bottemiller Evich wrote Friday that Congress has stopped doing its job on food safety; the letters are the proof.

The produce industry spent the week talking about the outbreak, and I answered each piece separately. The California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement marked twenty years since the 2006 spinach outbreak on September 15; the International Fresh Produce Association closed its outbreak page September 14 saying the findings rested on epidemiology and traceback rather than a positive laboratory test, which Taylor Farms and its 2,000 negative samples should read next to FDA’s 2020 warning letter to Fresh Express; Donna Garren of FDA’s Office of Produce Safety said in Portland, Maine on Tuesday never to let a good crisis go to waste; and De Ann Davis at Western Growers wants FDA to say exactly which food is unsafe, where I agree and wrote out where we differ.

FDA’s files with no food named grew by six, and its five new closure summaries include one with the name blacked out. FDA’s CORE table, stamped September 16, moved the Salmonella Newport file from 109 to 111, the largest anonymous Cyclospora file from 231 to 234, and the Listeria file from nine to ten; the eight rows with no food named now carry 575 sick, up from the 569 I counted Wednesday, and CDC’s dashboard lists 38 active multistate investigations, up from 37. On Thursday FDA posted executive summaries for five closed 2026 files: cantaloupe names Ayco Farms of Pompano Beach, Florida, and the Guatemalan farms behind 70 cases in 25 states; requesón names Clover Hill Dairy of Mechanicsville, Maryland, behind 15 cases and one death, and a suspended Maryland permit; moringa says a supplier refused FDA access and redacts its name. I went through all five on Food Poison Journal; Food Safety News has the cantaloupe and requesón detail.

The recall ledger, kept as every week by Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert. No FSIS recall or public health alert could be found for the week. Gias Foods recalled bettergoods Lemon Alfredo Fettuccine sold nationwide at Walmart on Tuesday after Washington and Florida state sampling found Listeria monocytogenes in two lots; no illnesses are reported. A Markys Caviar recall of Mon Sire brie for Listeria, distributed in Florida, appears only in the Enforcement Report. Danone recalled So Delicious salted caramel frozen dessert for small stones, Saratoga Potato Chips recalled J. Higgs bacon and cheddar chips for undeclared soy at Save A Lot stores in five states, GF Blends recalled gluten-free flour and mixes over 20 parts per million of gluten, and in Canada Alasko frozen raspberries were recalled for norovirus with illnesses reported across seven provinces. CDC touched two pages Thursday: hepatitis A in frozen black clams, still 37 sick and 30 hospitalized in four states, and pet turtles, now 20 sick in twelve states, half under five; I wrote about the turtles this morning. The frozen blueberry E. coli O145 file holds at 17 sick in Florida and Georgia while Publix’s recall page says there are no Publix recalls at this time.

Two agencies published rules, one company paid $385 million, and 77 congressional offices got a t-shirt. FDA released the 2026 Food Code Thursday, the biennial model behind more than a million restaurants and stores; written employee illness policies are now required. On Wednesday FDA published its survey of 438 grocery delis: 84 percent slipped on holding food safely and 62 percent on handwashing. USDA opened a $50 million Stand-Up program Wednesday for state meat and poultry inspection programs; thirty states run one now. On Monday the Justice Department announced that Abbott will pay $384,999,040 to settle False Claims Act allegations about its Sturgis, Michigan and Casa Grande, Arizona formula plants from 2018 through 2022, $348.7 million federal, $36.3 million to the states and $69 million to three whistleblowers, with the claims called allegations only. The rule still does not require the test. On Wednesday and Thursday t-shirts rolled into baby bottles went to 77 House and Senate committee offices with four unanswered letters asking for Clostridium botulinum testing in powdered infant formula; 52 babies were hospitalized in the ByHeart and Nara outbreaks. Firm business, briefly: three jobs are still open, an associate attorney with five or more years, a paralegal with ten or more years and a law student or LL.M. candidate, paid and remote, to cite-check four citizen petitions, resume and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com, no recruiters; in the Caruso case in Ohio we moved September 10 to drop Taco Bell and proceed against Taylor Farms alone; and Wednesday and Thursday I will be in Oslo giving two talks at the Aquatiq Food Forum.

That’s the week — a seed supplier named everywhere except on the advisory, a broccoli sprout count that is 27 in Olympia and 22 in Atlanta, an egg farm with a recall on the state’s page and none on its own, seven thousand confirmed Cyclospora cases with no food, and a fourteenth letter waiting on an answer. The record is there. Check back next Saturday.

About Bill Marler

William “Bill” Marler has spent more than thirty years as a food safety lawyer and advocate—work that began with the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak and has never really stopped since. In the years that followed, he has represented victims in nearly every major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States. That case, and the movement it launched, is the subject of the book “Poisoned” and the Emmy Award–winning Netflix documentary of the same name. Bill’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker (“A Bug in the System”), the Seattle Times (“30 years after the deadly E. coli outbreak, a Seattle attorney still fights for food safety”), the Washington Post (“He helped make burgers safer. Now he’s fighting food poisoning again”), and many others.

Dozens of times a year, Bill speaks to industry, regulators, and universities across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, China, and Australia about a simple idea: outbreaks are preventable. He has testified before Congress on the Food Safety Modernization Act and teaches food safety at institutions including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He writes regularly about food litigation and food safety at Marler Blog, and in 2009 he founded Food Safety News, which he continues to publish.

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 been reported. Half of the people who got sick are children younger than 5.

The outbreak strain is Salmonella Paratyphi B variant L(+) tartrate+. CDC says any turtle can carry Salmonella, but turtles with shells less than 4 inches long are a known source of illness. Selling those turtles as pets has been against federal law since 1975.

The numbers as of September 18

CDC’s updated outbreak page lists 20 cases (12 new), 5 hospitalizations (2 new), no deaths, and 12 states (6 new). CDC notes that the true number of sick people is likely higher, because many people recover without seeing a doctor and are never tested, and because it usually takes three to four weeks to confirm that a new illness is part of an outbreak.

CDC’s case data, current as of September 17, place the sick people in Florida (6), Texas (4), and one each in Iowa, Kentucky, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and Wisconsin. Florida and Texas together account for half the cases. Illnesses began between June 6 and August 22, 2026, with the two most recent both starting on August 22. The outbreak did not end with the July cases CDC first reported; twelve of the twenty people got sick after July 4.

What investigators found in August

CDC’s first investigation notice described 8 children, counted as of July 27, who got sick between June 6 and July 4, 2026. They ranged in age from under 1 to 7 years, with a median age of 4, and a quarter of them were a year old or younger. Three of the six children with information available were hospitalized.

Parents of six of the children were interviewed, and five of them (83%) reported that their child had contact with a pet turtle before getting sick. Four parents knew the size of the turtle, and three of those four said its shell was less than 4 inches long. Parents of three children said the turtle came from a pet store, and one child received the turtle as a gift. CDC had not identified a common turtle supplier. As of this writing, CDC’s investigation-detail page still carries those August figures, so it does not yet say how many of the new patients reported turtle contact, how old they are, or where their turtles came from.

A 1975 rule that worked

On May 23, 1975, the Food and Drug Administration banned the sale and distribution of viable turtle eggs and live turtles with a shell length of less than 4 inches. The rule sits at 21 CFR 1240.62 and says those turtles “shall not be sold, held for sale, or offered” for commercial or public distribution.

The problem it addressed was enormous. According to a 2016 paper in CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, by the early 1970s about 15 million turtle hatchlings were sold in the United States every year, 4% of households owned a pet turtle, and 14% of human salmonellosis cases were attributed to small pet turtles. The Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists has noted that voluntary education efforts failed to fix the problem before FDA acted.

The rule worked. CDC has estimated that the ban prevents about 100,000 cases of salmonellosis among children each year.

I have seen the same thing in my own practice. I used to be in the beef business with E. coli O157:H7. Once the government set a clear rule for ground beef and enforced it, those cases largely disappeared from my firm. Clear rules, enforced, protect children. The turtle ban is proof of that from fifty years ago.

Why children are still getting sick

The rule has exceptions. It does not apply to sales for bona fide scientific, educational or exhibition purposes other than use as pets, to distribution “not in connection with a business,” or to turtles labeled for export only. In 2013, FDA also removed the procedures in the rule that called for routine destruction of turtles found held for sale, saying routine destruction was not necessary to achieve the rule’s purpose.

The larger gap is enforcement. CDC says on its outbreak page that small turtles are still sold illegally online, in stores, at flea markets and at roadside stands. The 2016 Emerging Infectious Diseases paper reached the same conclusion: despite the long-standing ban, small turtles can be readily acquired through multiple venues and remain the main source of turtle-associated salmonellosis in children. CDC keeps a menu of state turtle laws, which shows how much of the job has been left to the states.

What should happen now

The rule does not need rewriting. It needs to be enforced where the turtles are actually sold today, which increasingly means online listings, marketplaces and shipping. FDA and CDC should also tell the public where these turtles came from once a supplier is found. Parents cannot avoid a seller no one will name.

There is a larger point here too. The turtle rule was issued under Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act, the communicable-disease authority codified in 21 CFR Part 1240. That same authority is what I rely on in a citizen petition I have drafted asking FDA to sample at animal feeding operations implicated in produce outbreaks. FDA has used Part 1240 to regulate an animal at its source when that animal was making children sick. The turtle ban shows it can work.

What parents should do

CDC advises families not to buy turtles with shells less than 4 inches long, and to buy larger turtles only from a reputable pet store. Pet turtles are not recommended for children younger than 5, adults 65 and older, or people with weakened immune systems. Wash hands with soap and water right after touching a turtle or anything in its habitat, do not kiss or snuggle turtles, keep turtles and their supplies out of the kitchen, and do not let turtles roam where young children crawl and play. If a turtle is not right for your family, do not release it outdoors; call a reptile rescue, an animal shelter or a pet store about rehoming it.

Questions parents ask about turtles and Salmonella

Can a healthy-looking turtle make my child sick? Yes. CDC says turtles of any size can carry Salmonellain their droppings even when they look healthy and clean, and the germs spread easily to their bodies, their tank water and anything they touch. State epidemiologists have noted that turtles can shed the bacteria intermittently and that antibiotic treatment of turtles has not eliminated it.

Is it legal to buy a turtle with a shell under 4 inches? Not as a pet from a business. Federal law has barred that since 1975, with narrow exceptions for bona fide scientific, educational and exhibition uses, non-business distribution and export. FDA administers the rule.

When should I call a doctor? CDC says to call a health care provider right away for diarrhea with a fever higher than 102°F, diarrhea for more than two days that is not improving, bloody diarrhea, vomiting so severe that liquids cannot be kept down, or signs of dehydration. Symptoms usually start 6 hours to 6 days after exposure, and young children are among those most likely to become seriously ill.

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 for our food safety troubles rests less with any one administration than with Congress’s decades-long unwillingness to stay on top of food safety policy and to pay for it. She called what we are watching “the slow rot of what was supposed to be our most important branch.” I agree. After more than thirty years of watching Congress respond, or fail to respond, to outbreaks, I want to add what that rot looks like from where I sit.

A 12-to-11 farm bill

On Wednesday the Senate Agriculture Committee advanced the farm bill 12 to 11 on a party-line vote, and it took the return of Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, back after more than three months away following a fall, to get there. Most of the coverage focused on McConnell. Helena focused on the more important point: that his vote was needed at all.

The contrast with 2018 is stark. That year the Senate committee cleared its farm bill 20 to 1, and the full Senate passed it 86 to 11, the most votes a Senate farm bill had ever received. The farm bill is supposed to be rewritten every five years. The 2018 law expired in 2023 and has been kept alive by extensions ever since, and the current extension runs out Sept. 30. Child nutrition programs, which cover school meals, have not had a full reauthorization since the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

The largest outbreak in three decades, and no hearing

This summer’s Cyclospora outbreak is the one I know best. As of Sept. 15, CDC counted 19,883 lab-confirmed, domestically acquired cases with onsets from May 1 through Aug. 31, including 1,064 hospitalizations and two deaths, in 49 states and the District of Columbia. CDC says it is aware of more than 36,000 cases in all. The same months in 2025 produced 1,180. When CDC declared the outbreak over on Sept. 11, it tied 12,883 illnesses to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico, which leaves exactly 7,000 confirmed cases with no food named.

Members of Congress noticed. Thirteen letters had gone to FDA, CDC, HHS and Taylor Farms by the end of August. Rep. Debbie Dingell and nine House colleagues sent a fourteenth, to USDA, on Sept. 14. On Sept. 17, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and 23 other members sent a fifteenth, the first from both chambers, asking USDA to stop closing the Beltsville lab where its Cyclospora research is done. Eight of the fifteen set dated deadlines, and all eight passed without a published answer, as I wrote this week. No committee has held a hearing.

There is a structural reason for that, and it is not a partisan complaint. Every one of those letters came from members of the minority party; the newest carries 25 signatures, and none of them belongs to someone who holds a gavel. A member in the minority can write a letter. Only the majority, through its committee chairs, can call a hearing, issue a subpoena and put a witness under oath. When the gavel stays on the table, the letters are all there is, and agencies and companies have learned that letters can go unanswered.

Fifty-two babies, and no oversight hearing

Helena also pointed to the infant formula botulism outbreaks. By CDC’s count, 48 infants in 17 states were hospitalized in the ByHeart outbreak, the largest infant botulism outbreak in American history, and four more in the Nara Organics outbreak. That is 52 babies. I represent families in both. In late August, whole genome sequencing linked the two outbreaks through a shared dairy ingredient. There has not been a single oversight hearing on either one.

Compare 2022. When the Abbott plant in Sturgis, Michigan, shut down and the formula shortage hit, the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee brought formula company executives in to testify in May, and the FDA commissioner went before the Senate HELP Committee the next day. Compare 2009, when the same House oversight panel called Peanut Corporation of America’s Stewart Parnell to testify within weeks of the recall, and he took the Fifth. Compare July 1998, when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on Cyclospora in imported raspberries. That was Congress doing its job.

There is a bill. H.R. 7867 would put C. botulinum on the list of organisms formula makers must test for. The House Health Subcommittee held a legislative hearing on it April 29, and it has waited since for a markup nobody has scheduled. I have written Energy and Commerce and Senate HELP twice each, in June and again in August, and none of the four letters has drawn a reply. HELP Chairman Bill Cassidy did demand answers from Nara and ByHeart, and he deserves credit for it, but a letter is not a markup. This week t-shirts are being hand-delivered to all 77 members of those two committees. I have also turned to a citizen petition asking FDA to require the testing by regulation, with 24 parents of hospitalized infants as co-petitioners. When Congress will not act, the agencies are the only door left open.

When Congress does act, it acts quietly

The most consequential thing Congress did on food safety in the past year it did by rider. Section 780 of the continuing resolution that ended last fall’s shutdown, P.L. 119-37, bars FDA from spending money to administer or enforce the food traceability rule before July 20, 2028. That is the rule built to speed tracing of high-risk foods, leafy greens among them. The Senate Appropriations Committee had written the opposite, language telling FDA not to delay enforcement past July 2028. The House version won. There was no hearing on that choice either, and the lobbying behind it became public only because the Guardian went and read the disclosure filings.

The agencies are paying for it, too

Helena’s reading list makes the rest of the case. STAT reports that the FDA is trying to hire more than 2,000 people after losing about 3,500 in the April 2025 cuts, and that the hiring is stuck in the same administrative bottlenecks the cuts created. Civil Eats reports a GAO finding that the government spent about $9.5 billion in 2025 paying employees on administrative leave, most of it through the deferred resignation program, and that USDA cut about 20 percent of its staff and HHS about 18 percent. Whatever anyone thinks of those decisions, this is exactly what oversight hearings exist for: asking whether the agencies that inspect our food have the people to do it.

What would help

I have no interest in stirring the political pot, and Helena was careful to say the decline has held no matter which party is in power. The fixes are not partisan either.

First, hold the hearings. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Senate HELP Committee and the agriculture appropriations subcommittees in both chambers have jurisdiction over this summer’s outbreak and the formula outbreaks. Call CDC, FDA and the companies. Ask where the other 7,000 Cyclospora cases came from, why fifteen letters have no published answer, and why powdered infant formula is still not tested for C. botulinum. If witnesses will not come, subpoena them.

Second, do the routine work. Pass a farm bill instead of a fourth extension. Reauthorize child nutrition programs for the first time since 2010. Fund the FDA on time, so the agency is not planning around the next shutdown.

Third, give the next Congress a to-do list it can act on. I have been circulating a food safety agenda, Project 2027, among consumer and public health groups for comment, and a signed version goes to the new Congress in January. It names specific problems and specific fixes.

Helena asked what disaster it would take to get Congress’s attention. More than 36,000 Cyclospora cases, fifteen letters without a published answer and 52 babies hospitalized with botulism should have been enough. If they were not, the problem is not the size of the disaster. It is an institution that has forgotten one of its core jobs, and the rest of us need to remind it.