CDC announced today that a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Telelkebir infections has been traced to raw oysters harvested by the Little Wicomico Oyster Company of Heathsville, Virginia, from the Little Wicomico River, a small tributary of the Potomac on Virginia’s Northern Neck. As of October 19, 27 people in 12 statesare confirmed sick, five of the 21 with information available (24%) have been hospitalized, and no one has died. Illnesses began between May 29 and September 14, 2026. The company has recalled oysters harvested from September 18 through October 8, Virginia closed the river to shellfish harvesting on October 9, and the advice from CDC, FDA and Virginia is the same: do not eat, sell or serve recalled oysters from Little Wicomico Oyster Company (dealer certification VA-1421-SP).

What the agencies know, and how they know it

Of the 27 sick people, 13 have been interviewed, and 10 of them (77%) reported eating raw oysters, against a 1.6% background rate in CDC’s FoodNet Population Survey. Traceback was possible for seven of the ten; their oysters came from several harvest areas, and Little Wicomico River oysters from Little Wicomico Oyster Company were the only ones all seven had in common. Pennsylvania officials also sampled oysters at a distributor that supplied the restaurants where sick people ate; one sample harvested by the company from the Little Wicomico River was positive for Salmonella. Whole genome sequencing to determine whether it matches the outbreak strain is pending.

Where the sick people live: Pennsylvania 8, New York 4, Virginia 3, Colorado 2, Indiana 2, Maryland 2, and one each in Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky and New Jersey. When they got sick, by month of onset: one in May, one in June, 13 in July, eight in August and four in September, the last on September 14. Patients range in age from 1 to 86, with a median age of 41.

The recall and the closure

The Virginia Department of Health’s Division of Shellfish Safety and Waterborne Hazards issued a recall alerton October 9 for shellstock oysters harvested from the Little Wicomico River and Little Wicomico River Lower from September 18 through October 8. The recall was triggered by an outbreak declared by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture after patients were epidemiologically linked to the company’s oysters. Virginia lists distribution to Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia; FDA adds California and notes the oysters may have been further distributed. The same day, Virginia issued Emergency Condemnation 010A, closing the downstream portion of the river to all shellfish harvesting through November 7, which Food Safety News noted was eight days into Virginia’s fall oyster season. Oysters from other Virginia growing areas are not part of the recall.

What the dates tell us

First, every one of the 27 reported illnesses began before the recall window opened. The last reported onset is September 14; the first recalled harvest date is September 18. Salmonella symptoms begin six hours to six days after exposure, so none of the 27 could have eaten a recalled oyster. The oysters that made them sick were harvested in summer, sold and eaten months before anyone connected the cases to a river. The recall protects whoever would have eaten the next bag; it cannot do anything for the 27. Later illnesses may still surface, since linking a new case to an outbreak takes three to four weeks, and if any fall inside the window the recall will have earned its keep. None of this is a criticism of Virginia or of the company, which acted within a day of the Pennsylvania finding. It is a description of the system we have: the outbreak is over, or nearly so, before the recall exists.

Second, three of the twelve states with sick people, Indiana, Iowa and Kentucky, are not on the distribution list for the recalled oysters. Those patients may have traveled, the company’s summer customers may differ from its fall customers, or the oysters were further distributed, which FDA says may have happened. CDC and FDA have not said which. The consignee list, the distributors, restaurants and retailers that received these oysters, is what I have been pressing FDA to require in every recall. It has not been published here.

Third, the first public word of this outbreak was not a consumer notice. It was Virginia’s October 9 recall alert, written for receiving states and shellfish regulators. Food Safety News reported it on October 12. CDC’s and FDA’s consumer notices arrived today, October 19, almost five months after the first person got sick on May 29.

The second Telelkebir oyster outbreak in a year

Last December I wrote about a Salmonella Telelkebir outbreak linked to raw oysters that CDC closed on February 24, 2026: 80 sick in 23 states, 34 of 68 hospitalized (50%), with illnesses from June 21 to December 22, 2025. Traceback was done for 19 patients, no single common source was found and nothing was recalled. The map of that outbreak also had Pennsylvania (10), New York (7), Virginia (6) and New Jersey (6) at the top. CDC’s notice today does not say whether this year’s strain is related to last year’s. If the same uncommon serotype is back for a second summer in the same part of the country, the first question is where it lives between seasons.

Salmonella in an oyster is not Vibrio in an oyster

Vibrio is a natural resident of warm coastal water. Salmonella is not. It lives in the intestines of people, livestock, birds and wildlife, and it reaches an oyster bed in sewage, septic drainage, farm runoff and droppings. Under the National Shellfish Sanitation Program, growing waters are classified by sanitary survey and fecal coliform standards. A 2005 study in Applied and Environmental Microbiology tested 1,296 market oysters from 36 bays on all three U.S. coasts, all harvested from approved waters, and found Salmonella in 7.4% of them, concentrated in particular bays and far more common in summer than in winter. It found no relationship between fecal coliform levels and the presence of Salmonella, and it concluded that oyster meat should be tested for Salmonella regularly, in every bay open for harvest, rather than relying on coliforms. Twenty-one years later, growing areas are still classified by the indicator, not by testing for the pathogen. Virginia said when it closed the river that it was testing shellfish from the implicated area. Those results, the sanitary survey of the Little Wicomico and the pollution source it points to should be published before the river reopens on November 7, along with FDA’s sequencing result on the Pennsylvania sample.

If you ate raw oysters

If you have eaten raw oysters since mid-September and have diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps, see a doctor and ask for a stool culture; a culture is what connects a patient to an outbreak. Restaurants and retailers should check with their distributors for Little Wicomico Oyster Company (VA-1421-SP) oysters harvested September 18 through October 8 and dispose of them.

Salmonella

Salmonella sickens more than a million Americans every year and is the leading cause of hospitalizations and deaths among foodborne bacteria. Its reach is remarkable—it turns up in produce, poultry, pantry staples, and pet food alike. Marler Clark, The Food Safety Law Firm, is the nation’s leading firm representing victims of Salmonella outbreaks. Our Salmonella lawyers have represented thousands of victims in the only U.S. law practice devoted exclusively to foodborne illness, which has recovered more than $850 million for victims and families nationwide. We have tied Salmonella outbreaks to cantaloupe, tomatoes, ground turkey, salami, sprouts, cereal, peanut butter, and restaurant meals, and we have brought cases against Cargill, ConAgra, Peanut Corporation of America, Sheetz, Taco Bell, Subway, and Wal-Mart. The Peanut Corporation of America outbreak ended in federal criminal convictions, with the company’s owner sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison. We are also pressing the federal government to treat Salmonella as an adulterant on raw chicken, so that contaminated poultry can be kept off store shelves the way dangerous E. coli already is.

If you or a family member became ill with a Salmonella infection—including lasting complications such as reactive arthritis or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)—after eating contaminated food, contact the Marler Clark Salmonella attorneys for a free case evaluation.

FAQ

What is Salmonella?

Salmonella is a group of bacteria behind one of the most common—and most deadly—foodborne infections in the United States, sickening more than a million people a year. Symptoms usually begin between 6 hours and 6 days after eating contaminated food and include diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps that last four to seven days.

What foods cause Salmonella outbreaks?

Poultry, eggs, ground beef, produce, peanut butter, flour, and even pet food have all caused outbreaks. Salmonella can survive for months in dry, low-moisture foods.

Can a Salmonella infection cause long-term problems?

Yes. Some victims develop reactive arthritis—joint pain and swelling that can persist for months—or irritable bowel syndrome after the initial illness resolves.

Who is most at risk?

Young children, adults over 65, and people with weakened immune systems are the most likely to be hospitalized or to suffer severe, invasive infection.

Can I sue for a Salmonella infection?

If your illness is linked to a contaminated product or a recognized outbreak, you may have a claim against those in the chain of distribution. A stool culture matching the outbreak strain is powerful evidence.

Additional Resources:

First, a shout-out to Jerry Hagstrom, who has been covering farm and food policy in Washington longer than just about anyone, for his piece in The Fence Post on the International Fresh Produce Association’s push to get members to sign up for its Advocacy Action Network. Jerry reads the fine print so the rest of us don’t have to.

According to Jerry, IFPA’s new chair, Elyse Lipman of Lipman Family Farms, told members in Orlando that surveys show 88% of consumers lost confidence in fruits and vegetables after this year’s Cyclospora outbreak. Her pitch: join the network so the industry can be mobilized quickly to contact Washington on everything from the farm bill to tariffs to programs that increase consumption. “We need to advocate for fresh with one voice,” she said.

I agree. I have spent more than three decades cleaning up after foodborne illness outbreaks, and I want Americans eating more fruits and vegetables, not fewer. My firm represents many of the people sickened in this year’s Cyclospora outbreak, and I can tell you none of them want to be afraid of a salad.

But one line in the story stopped me. The framing was that the industry’s Cyclospora problem was more with consumers and social media than with government. With respect, the problem was with a parasite that made people sick. Consumers did not lose confidence because of TikTok. They lost it because they, or someone they knew, got sick, and because they were too often left guessing which product, which company and which store. IFPA hired a global crisis communications firm and stood up a Cyclospora Rapid Response Task Force. Fine. But you cannot message your way out of a food safety problem.

So, if IFPA is building one voice, here is what I would like to hear it say:

Bring back the Microbiological Data Program. This one should be first on the list, and IFPA is uniquely positioned to make it happen, because IFPA’s predecessors helped kill it.

A little history. In 2001, USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service launched the Microbiological Data Program (MDP) to collect data on harmful bacteria in fresh produce. State agriculture labs tested fruits and vegetables pulled from more than 600 distribution sites for Salmonella, Listeria, Shigella and pathogenic E. coli. Sampling ran through 11 states representing roughly half the U.S. population, and MDP supplied close to 90 percent of all available bacterial pathogen data on produce and fed CDC’s PulseNet. It cost about $5 million a year.

It worked. MDP testing prompted at least 19 produce recalls in two years, and it helped pinpoint outbreak sources, including Salmonella Javiana in green onions in 2009. That was the problem, at least for some in the industry. United Fresh and other trade groups lobbied for years to eliminate the program, arguing it cost growers millions in recalls and unfairly targeted farmers. The FY2013 budget zeroed it out, and MDP shut down in December 2012, which, by Food Safety News’ analysis, eliminated more than 80 percent of public pathogen testing of produce. FDA never filled the gap. I called for MDP’s return in 2024, and I am calling for it again.

United Fresh and PMA are now IFPA. If the industry wants to tell consumers it is serious about safety, there is no more credible message than asking Congress to restore and fully fund the surveillance program it once lobbied to end, and to expand it to cover parasites like Cyclospora, which MDP never tested for. Independent, random testing is how you find problems before people get sick and how you show the public the produce aisle has nothing to hide.

Traceability, on time. IFPA says it is pushing for implementation of traceability requirements. Good. Say it loudly, and mean the FSMA 204 Food Traceability Rule, with no more delays. The faster an outbreak is traced, the shorter the hit to the entire category.

Transparency, not secrecy. Nothing kills consumer confidence like a public health notice about an “unnamed” product. I am finalizing citizen petitions asking FDA to stop treating the identity of outbreak-implicated firms as confidential and to require retail consignee lists in Class I recalls. If consumers know exactly what to avoid, they don’t have to avoid everything. I would welcome IFPA’s comments and support.

Fund the people who solve outbreaks. CDC, FDA and state and local public health labs are the industry’s best friends when something goes wrong. Cutting them is a false economy that the produce aisle pays for.

Prevention on the farm. Clean water, clean hands, and audits that actually mean something. The cheapest outbreak is the one that never happens.

The fastest way to win back that 88% is to make sure there is not a next time, and when there is, to tell people quickly and specifically what to throw out. If the Advocacy Action Network wants to carry that message to Washington, sign me up. My number has not changed.

Most of the email that lands in my inbox about E. coli O157:H7 is not funny. It is a mother describing her child on dialysis. It is a health department records request coming back half redacted. It is a defense lawyer explaining that the hamburger was cooked just fine.

This morning was different.

The email came from Ashleigh Diehl, Director of Marketing at GIANTmicrobes in Stamford, Connecticut. It opened with “Hi William” – a name used mostly by my mother and opposing counsel – and said she had just read my recent post, FDA Has Seventeen Open Outbreak Investigations, 14,197 Sick and Two Dead. Ten Name No Food. To her credit, she got the point. Seventeen open FDA files, ten with no food named, an egg investigation FDA calls complete on its own advisory while its table still lists it as active, and USDA’s first active investigation of 2026 being the joint E. coli file. She called it “a snapshot of how murky the attribution still is.” That is about right.

Then came the pitch. GIANTmicrobes makes an E. coli plush, and she thought it might be a fun, visual add to a future story – “or just make you laugh.”

It did.

So, who are these folks?

GIANTmicrobes makes stuffed toys of microbes – and these days cells, organs and other health-related things. The company was founded in 2002 by Drew Oliver, who, according to a 2020 profile by the National Medical Library of the Czech Republic’s museum, began designing plush germs in 2001 while he was a student at the University of Chicago Law School. So a law student who went into microbes. I went the other direction.

Oliver told Nature Microbiology in 2016 that part of the idea came from Richard Feynman’s description of watching a microscopic organism struggle to survive in an evaporating drop of water, and part from a P.J. O’Rourke piece lamenting that he had no way to explain to his daughter what was going on during a stomach ache. Scholastic tells it more simply: he made a stuffed common cold to teach his kids why to wash their hands.

Andrew Klein has been the company’s president since 2015. He has talked to Infection Control Today about infection preventionists using the plush to educate staff and patients, and in her email Ms. Diehl offered him up to talk about why humor helps health education and how plushies can help with vaccination rates.

Per the company, it has sold more than 15 million of these in over 30 countries, in museums, hospitals, bookshops, toy stores, Amazon and Target, and has shown up on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, CNN and Fox News, and in The Atlantic and Wired. They also launched a plush SARS-CoV-2 on March 19, 2020, which not everyone found charming.

And E. coli is hardly lonely. The company says it offers more than 150 different microbes and cells, in sizes from three-inch keychains to two-foot “Gigantics.” For those of us in the foodborne illness business, the lineup reads like my case list: there is a Salmonella (“Which came first: the chicken or the egg or the Salmonella?”), a Listeria, a Norovirus pitched as a cruise-ship stowaway, and a C. diff. They even sell a Germs Deluxe 10-packthat bundles E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and Norovirus with Ebola, measles, flu, the common cold and a sore throat. Beyond the germs there are cells, organs, MRSA and, per their own blog, a leprosy plush that once won something called March Microbe Madness.

Why I don’t mind a cuddly E. coli

I have spent more than thirty years trying to get people to understand something they cannot see. The kids I have represented with hemolytic uremic syndrome did not get sick from a cartoon with big eyes. E. coliO157:H7 does not smile; it produces Shiga toxin and goes after the kidneys.

But if a plush bacterium gets a seven-year-old to wash her hands, or gets a parent to ask why ground beef needs to hit 160°F, or why raw milk and sprouts are a bad bet, I am for it. Fear does not teach people much. Understanding does. And you cannot understand something you can’t picture.

My only suggestion for the product line: a plush for the food that FDA has not named. Ten of the seventeen open investigations would need one. And since Cyclospora accounts for 13,195 of the 14,197 sick on FDA’s table, if they ever make a Cyclospora, I will take that too.

Ashleigh, send the E. coli. It can sit on my desk next to the outbreak tables. It will be the only thing on that desk that makes me laugh.

A tip of the pen to Dr. Kalmia Kniel of the University of Delaware, whose editorial in ASM Food Microbiology, “The 2026 Cyclospora outbreaks: a wake-up call for food safety, surveillance, and prevention,” was published October 12. It is a scientist’s account of this summer: the strange biology of the parasite, why fresh produce stays vulnerable, and why finding the source takes so long. It is open access, and it should be required reading for every regulator, grower, processor and buyer of leafy greens before the 2027 season.

Dr. Kniel ends with five questions. How did a human parasite reach a lettuce field? What safeguards failed? How do we get better traceback? How do we strengthen surveillance? How can industry stop contamination before it happens? I have been trying to answer those questions since July. Here is where I have landed, question by question. But first, the numbers, because they are what make the questions urgent.

The numbers

Dr. Kniel wrote with the late-August figures. The count kept climbing. When CDC stopped updating its case data page weekly on September 15, it had recorded 19,883 laboratory-confirmed, domestically acquired cases with onset between May 1 and August 31, 1,064 hospitalizations and two deaths, in 49 states and the District of Columbia. In the same stretch of 2025, there were 1,180. That is nearly seventeen times as many.

That is only the confirmed domestic count. CDC listed another 9,765 laboratory-confirmed cases still waiting to be sorted into domestic or travel-related, and at least 6,594 more that were not lab-confirmed or were pending interview. Put those together and CDC knew of more than 36,000 cases in some form, on top of 2,078 people who picked up the parasite abroad.

The multistate outbreak tied to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico closed at 12,883 illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths across twenty-one states. Subtract that from the season and roughly 7,000 confirmed domestic cases have no food named beside them. Dr. Kniel is right that this was almost certainly several outbreaks at once, and the clusters that remain on FDA’s table deserve answers too.

And all that undercounts. CDC has a number for how much. In 2011, Elaine Scallan and colleagues published “Foodborne Illness Acquired in the United States—Major Pathogens” in CDC’s own journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases (vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 7–15). It is the study behind the federal estimates of how many Americans get foodborne illness each year. For each pathogen, the authors calculated how many illnesses never get counted because people do not see a doctor, are not asked for a stool sample, or are not tested for the right bug. For Cyclospora cayetanensis, the underdiagnosis multiplier is 83.1, with an underreporting multiplier of 1.0. In plain terms: for every laboratory-confirmed case, about 83 people are sick.

Here is the math. All 19,883 confirmed domestic cases this season, times 83.1, is about 1.65 million infections. The 12,883 tied to the Taylor Farms de Mexico lettuce, times 83.1, is about 1.07 million. The roughly 7,000 confirmed cases with no food named, times 83.1, is about 582,000.

For perspective, Scallan’s team started from 239 laboratory-confirmed cases a year and estimated about 19,808 total Cyclospora illnesses annually in the United States. This summer the confirmed count alone, 19,883, passed that estimate of everyone who gets sick in a typical year.

Treat the multiplied figures as orders of magnitude, not counts. The multiplier was built before multiplex stool panels made Cyclospora testing more common, and testing this summer was unusually aggressive, so 83.1 probably runs high today. Cut it in half and the season is still about 826,000 infections. Cut it to a quarter and it is about 413,000. However, you slice it, hundreds of thousands of Americans were sickened, and almost none of them will appear in any government table.

1. How did a human parasite reach a lettuce field?

Dr. Kniel explains the biology better than I can. Cyclospora lives only in people. Infected people shed oocysts that are not yet infectious; they have to mature in the environment first. That is why person-to-person spread is so unlikely, and why investigators look at agricultural water, worker sanitation, septic leaks, sewage and irrigation systems.

When FDA closed its investigation on October 2, it said where it found the parasite: in a tank of wastewater leaving the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant that shredded the lettuce, and in a drainage ditch at a grower that supplied it. That is the same plant at Doctor Mora, Guanajuato, tied to the 2013 salad mix outbreak, when Taylor Farms said it was testing the water. (A disclosure: my firm represents people sickened this summer and has filed cases naming Taylor Farms entities.)

My answer: treat human waste as the hazard it is. Verify toilets, handwashing and worker health on every leafy greens farm supplying U.S. buyers, using auditors who are not paid to pass. Keep processor wastewater away from any water that touches a crop, test it for parasites, and publish the results. And bring back enforceable numeric standards for pre-harvest water on leafy greens, with parasite testing in the growing regions where outbreaks keep happening.

2. What safeguards failed?

The rules are on the books. The Produce Safety Rule covers agricultural water, worker hygiene and sanitation. The preventive controls rule requires supplier programs. The Foreign Supplier Verification Program is supposed to make imported produce meet U.S. standards. In September FDA sent a letter to industryreminding everyone of all three.

What failed is enforcement and the absence of a backstop. Section 780 of the November 2025 appropriations law restricts FDA’s money to enforce the Produce Safety Rule and its pre-harvest water requirements, and bars spending to enforce the traceability rule before July 2028. And there is no validated kill step for Cyclospora on ready-to-eat produce. Dr. Kniel says the same thing in plainer terms: rinsing cannot reliably remove the oocysts, and cooking is what works. Nobody cooks the lettuce on a taco.

My answer: lift the spending restrictions. Hold imported greens to exactly the same standard as greens grown in California and Arizona, backed by on-site FDA inspections. And because there is no kill step, limit how much product from different fields is commingled on one line, keep lots small, and hold and test finished product by lot using FDA’s validated method before it ships.

3. How do we get better traceback?

Dr. Kniel predicts greater investment in digital traceability. I hope she is right, because Congress has gone the other way. FDA’s Food Traceability Rule covers leafy greens and was supposed to take effect in January 2026; compliance was pushed to July 2028. FSMA ordered FDA in 2011 to build a system to receive traceability data, and a Congressional Research Service report says it still does not exist.

My answer: rescind the delay, as the Safe Food Coalition has asked, and in the meantime every company handling leafy greens should comply now. Agree on a standing protocol among growers, processors, chains and grocers to hand sourcing and shipping data to FDA and CDC within hours. And tell the public what investigators know: my FDA citizen petitions ask the agency to stop treating the names of outbreak-implicated firms as confidential and to publish retail consignee lists in Class I recalls, as USDA has done for meat and poultry since 2008.

4. How do we strengthen surveillance?

Dr. Kniel credits the surveillance system with spotting the rise, and it deserves credit. But we entered the worst Cyclospora year on record with less of it. On July 1, 2025, CDC made FoodNet reporting optional for Cyclospora and five other pathogens. It still takes about six weeks to know whether a sick person belongs to an outbreak, which is why the recall came after most people had already eaten the lettuce. And USDA’s Microbiological Data Program, which sampled produce in commerce, was killed in 2012 to save about $5 million.

My answer: put Cyclospora back on the mandatory FoodNet list. Fund the state and local labs and the epidemiologists who interview the sick. Make Cyclospora genotyping routine and push it to state labs, since it is the one tool that does not depend on someone remembering a June salad. Set a public target for shrinking the six-week lag. And rebuild MDP, this time with a parasite on the panel.

5. How can industry prevent contamination before it happens?

Dr. Kniel points out that there is still no cell culture or animal model for Cyclospora, and she calls for academic, government and industry scientists to work together on the gaps. Yet Congress did not fund two federal Cyclospora research projects in the FY2026 agriculture bill, and a third is being moved away from the scientists running it, as reported in August.

My answer: restore that research money. Fund and validate a detection method growers can actually run on irrigation water, sediment and soil at commercial speed, because no one can manage a hazard they cannot measure. And fund the search for a treatment step that kills parasites on lettuce without destroying it.

What FDA has promised

On October 2, FDA announced ten activities it plans before the 2027 season, including an Outbreak Investigation Report, more surveillance of commodities historically linked to Cyclospora, grower outreach and an update to its Cyclospora Prevention, Response and Research Action Plan. That is welcome. It needs dates, dollars and a commitment to publish what investigators did not find as well as what they did. The Action Plan existed before this summer, and so did the outbreak.

I laid out a longer list in September, ten things FDA should do before next May, and last week a list focused on leafy greens. None of it requires new science to start. It requires money and will.

Congress wrote. Nobody answered.

Dr. Kniel’s editorial stands out partly because so many have moved on. Members of the House and Senate sent at least fifteen letters about this outbreak to HHS, FDA, CDC, USDA and Taylor Farms, asking about the source, the staffing, the surveillance cuts and the research money. The deadlines came and went. What answers there were showed up in press statements and on a company FAQ page, not in any published reply. There has been no hearing. Fiscal 2027 began October 1, and Congress can restore the Cyclospora research and lift the traceability delay in the final funding bill without writing another letter. The people who got sick deserve a hearing on the record before the next crop comes up.

The next one

Dr. Kniel writes that “prevention, rather than reaction, remains the cornerstone of food safety,” and that the goal is not to solve the last outbreak but to prevent the next one. I could not agree more. The next growing season in central Mexico is already under way. Nearly 20,000 confirmed illnesses, more than a thousand hospitalizations and two deaths are the price of reacting. Her five questions are the right ones. The people who can answer them have about six months.

As of October 18, 2026, the FDA’s table of active outbreak investigations still lists 50 people sick with E. coli O157:H7 in the outbreak tied to ready-to-eat, multi-ingredient chicken wraps, FDA reference #1421 and FSIS 2026-04. The row has not changed since October 15. The product column still reads “Multi-ingredient wrap with chicken (suspect).” There is still no recall, no brand, no manufacturer, no list of states and no hospitalization or HUS count. And FSIS, the agency with jurisdiction over a product made with chicken, still has no outbreak page of its own, only a link back to the FDA’s table.

The supply chain, however, is talking. It just isn’t talking to the public. My client in Pembroke, North Carolina, one of the two women in the first lawsuit filed in this outbreak, was contacted by the quality systems coordinator of a New Jersey fresh-food manufacturer whose product line includes prepared wraps and sandwiches. She bought Tarragon Chicken Salad Wraps at a Trader Joe’s in Myrtle Beach, was hospitalized with E. coli O157:H7, and was classified by her state health department as a confirmed case in this multistate outbreak. A manufacturer’s quality department does not go looking for someone like her without a reason.

The government knows where these wraps were made

The FDA’s table shows that traceback, on-site inspection and sampling have all been initiated. Chicken wraps made under federal inspection carry an establishment number inside the USDA mark of inspection. A traceback from a sick person’s wrap ends at that number, and an on-site inspection happens at a specific plant. The agencies are not withholding the manufacturer’s name because they don’t know it. They are withholding it because, in their view, the wraps were pulled from the market before the outbreak link was confirmed and are past their shelf life, so there is nothing for consumers to do.

The name is getting out anyway, just not from the agencies

The first brand on the record, Trader Joe’s, came from a federal complaint and from the plaintiffs’ own health department records, not from the FDA or FSIS. Since we filed on October 15, the name has spread through Patch, WPDE, Hoodline and Yahoo. Patch noted that the FDA’s public listing does not identify Trader Joe’s or any brand, and Hoodline reported that Trader Joe’s did not immediately respond to the suit. Now a manufacturer’s quality staff is reaching out to the people who got sick.

That is backwards. Lawyers, reporters and a company’s own quality department are filling a gap the public health agencies chose to leave open. The information is arriving piecemeal and unverified, and without the facts only the agencies can supply: production dates, lots, distribution, and whether anything else was made with the same ingredients. As I wrote in Saturday’s Weekend Wrap-Up, the first brand name came from a courthouse. The second may come from a manufacturer reaching out to a patient.

Why the manufacturer matters more than the retailer

Retailers like Trader Joe’s rarely make their own prepared foods. Co-packers do, and a co-packer that makes wraps for one retailer often makes salads, sandwiches and wraps for several others, sometimes on the same lines and with the same ingredients. The agencies say they are looking at possible ingredient-level contamination, and Food Safety News reports that USDA is trying to determine whether the chicken went into other products. If the problem was the chicken, the tarragon chicken salad, or something else handled at that plant, the question is not just which wrap made people sick. It is what else came off that line, under that establishment number, and where it went.

When FSIS announces a recall, it names the establishment, prints the establishment number, and posts a retail distribution list. A product that is “proactively removed” before a link is confirmed gets none of that. The establishment number stays in an agency file, and the public is left to piece it together from lawsuits and news stories.

This is what my petitions are about

My two draft citizen petitions, one on disclosing the firms implicated in outbreak investigations and one on publishing consignee lists that show where product went, are still being edited and remain open for comment. I laid out how this outbreak bears on both in an earlier post. This week’s development makes the point more sharply. The identity of the firm is not a secret inside the industry. Trader Joe’s knows who made its wraps. The manufacturer knows who it sold them to. The agencies know both. The only people who don’t know are the 50 confirmed patients, the many more who were never tested, and the doctors treating them.

What should happen now

FSIS should name the establishment and its number, say whether any other products were made with the same chicken or the same chicken salad, and publish the states, the hospitalizations and the HUS count. Trader Joe’s should tell its customers who made the Tarragon Chicken Salad Wraps and which stores sold them. And if the New Jersey company that reached out to Ms. Gottlieb made these wraps, it should say so publicly instead of contacting the sick one person at a time.

Marler Clark represents Ms. Gottlieb and Meaghan Egan Bright of Somerville, Massachusetts, and is investigating other illnesses in this outbreak. If you ate a prepared chicken wrap in August or September and developed diarrhea, especially bloody diarrhea, see a doctor, ask for a stool test for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, and report the illness to your local health department.

A tip of the pen to Gina Shaw, whose piece in the October issue of Infectious Disease Special Edition, “Invaders From Planet Lettuce,” asks the right question: how did produce become the vehicle that makes so many of us sick? It is the clearest explanation I have read of why this summer’s Cyclospora season was the largest ever recorded in the United States, and it is written for the doctors who must diagnose it. It deserves a wider audience, especially among the people who can do something about it.

Shaw lays out the scale. By CDC’s early September update, more than 18,000 laboratory-confirmed cases had been acquired in the U.S. since May 1, with thousands more awaiting confirmation, against 1,180 in all of 2025. Most trace to the outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico, which FDA closed at 12,883 illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths. Michigan alone reported more than 14,000 cases, in a state that saw 50 the year before.

Her sources, Dr. David Freedman of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Dr. Craig Hedberg of the University of Minnesota, explain why this one got so big. Cyclospora used to ride in on raspberries, basil and cilantro, foods most people eat rarely or in small amounts. This time it rode in on lettuce, which about 80 percent of Americans eat in any given week, served through a fast-food chain. As Dr. Freedman put it, “Now the lettuce is bringing it to us.” Industrial processing then does the rest: millions of heads mixed in one plant, so a few bad ones contaminate thousands of bags. And the parasite survives for weeks in soil and water and shrugs off chlorine washes.

Then Shaw describes a system under strain. The outbreak hit a year after CDC made FoodNet surveillance optional for Cyclospora and five other pathogens. Case reports piled up faster than short-staffed health departments could interview patients, which slowed the search for sources. Michigan pulled people from other programs to keep up. And unlike Salmonella or E. coli, there is no real-time genetic fingerprinting for Cyclospora, so investigators could not always tell whether a patient belonged to the big outbreak or one of the smaller clusters. Her table of open FDA investigations as of late September is sobering on its own: sprouts, raw milk cheese, jalapeños, eggs, infant formula and a long run of outbreaks with the food listed as unknown.

Shaw ends with Dr. Freedman’s warning that preventing a repeat in 2027 will take more inspection and mitigation of at-risk produce, and more people to do it, than we have now. I agree. So here is my list, focused on the food that made so many of us sick this summer: leafy greens.

What needs to be done about leafy greens

  1. Unwind the traceability delay. FDA’s Food Traceability Rule covers lettuce, spinach and other leafy greens, and it was supposed to take effect in January 2026. Compliance was pushed to July 2028, and Congress wrote the delay into law. The Safe Food Coalition has asked Congress to rescind it. It should. In the meantime, every grower, processor, distributor and restaurant chain handling leafy greens should comply now. This summer, perfectly good lettuce was plowed under because nobody could say quickly where the bad lettuce went.
  2. Fix the water in the fields and the plants. In 2024 FDA replaced numeric water testing with “systems-based” assessments. For a crop grown close to the ground and eaten raw, that is not enough. We need enforceable numeric standards and routine testing for pre-harvest water on leafy greens; parasite testing in irrigation and wash water in the growing regions where outbreaks have occurred; processor wastewater controls (FDA found Cyclospora in a Taylor Farms de Mexico wastewater tank, and Taylor Farms promised water testing there in 2013); and research money for a wash or treatment step that actually kills parasites on lettuce without destroying it.
  3. Break up the batches and test before it ships. Shaw’s sources explain how a single plant mixing millions of heads lets a few bad ones contaminate thousands of bags. Processors should limit how much product from different fields and growers is commingled on one line or shift, keep lots small enough to trace and recall precisely, and test finished product by lot, holding each lot until results come back negative, using FDA’s validated methods for the pathogens of concern, including Cyclospora. Testing will not catch every contaminated bag, but small, held lots shrink an outbreak when one gets through and give investigators a lot number instead of a guess.
  4. Keep cattle away from lettuce. Setbacks between animal feeding operations and leafy greens fields, and the canals that irrigate them, should be required by rule, not left to buyer guidance. The 2018 Yuma romaine outbreak traced back to irrigation canal water near a large feedlot, and the Salinas Valley outbreaks that followed pointed to cattle on adjacent land. We keep finding the same source and keep acting surprised.
  5. Hold imported greens to the same standard. Lettuce grown in Mexico for U.S. buyers should meet the same water, setback and sanitation requirements as lettuce grown in California and Arizona, enforced through the Foreign Supplier Verification Program and backed by on-site FDA inspections.
  6. Verify sanitation on the farm. Toilets, handwashing, worker health and water at leafy greens farms supplying U.S. buyers should be checked by auditors who are not paid to pass. Training is not verification.
  7. Rebuild the trip wire. USDA’s Microbiological Data Program sampled lettuce, spinach and other produce in commerce for about $5 million a year and triggered dozens of recalls before it was killed in 2012. Bring it back, with leafy greens at the top of the list. It is the cheapest insurance the produce industry will ever be offered.
  8. Count the sick again. In July 2025, CDC made FoodNet reporting optional for Cyclospora and several other pathogens. The largest Cyclospora outbreak in history arrived a year later, on a food 80 percent of us eat every week. When the vehicle is that common, every day of delay means more people sick. Restore full FoodNet surveillance, fund the state and local labs and epidemiologists who interview the sick and find the source, and pay for real-time Cyclospora genotyping so investigators know which cases belong to which outbreak.
  9. Agree on data sharing before the next outbreak. A standing protocol, worked out now among leafy greens growers, processors, fast-food chains and grocers, for handing shipping, sourcing and test data to CDC and FDA within hours, not days.
  10. Publish root cause analyses and solve the unsolved. FDA has promised a report on the lettuce outbreak. Every leafy greens outbreak should get one, published promptly and in full, and the four other Cyclospora outbreaks this year that still list the source as “not yet identified” deserve an explanation of why.
  11. Stop rolling back FSMA. The Produce Safety Rule is the floor for every leafy greens farm in the country. Every “burden” removed in the name of deregulation was a tool someone needed this summer.
  12. Name the firms, publish the consignee lists and let FDA sample where the evidence points. I have drafted three FDA citizen petitions that go straight at how leafy greens outbreaks are handled: one asking FDA to stop treating the identity of outbreak-implicated firms as confidential, so people know which lettuce to throw out; one asking it to publish retail consignee lists in Class I recalls, as USDA has done for meat and poultry since 2008, so people know which stores sold it; and one asking it to use its communicable disease authority to require sampling at animal feeding operations implicated in multistate outbreaks, so investigators can finally test the cattle next to the field.

The cheapest outbreak

Gina Shaw’s headline calls it the rise of foodborne illness. It does not have to keep rising. None of the items on my list requires new science. Most require money, will and the willingness to make the people who grow, process and sell our leafy greens do things differently. Dr. Freedman is right that whether we can get it done before next summer is the big question. The 2027 growing season is about six months away. The cheapest outbreak is the one that never happens.

Saturday, October 17, 2026

Last Saturday’s edition closed on a seed lot with no named supplier, a chicken wrap outbreak with no brand, and 619 sick on FDA’s files with no food named. This week the wrap file reached 50 and the first brand on the record came from a federal complaint, not an agency page; Oregon told its doctors about a multistate Salmonella Enteritidis outbreak and no one else; FDA explained three closed outbreaks six weeks to nine months late; the ledger rose to 626; and a 99-person Salmonella Oranienburg outbreak ended with no food named. The through-line of this fifteenth column: the information exists. It reached the public through the wrong door, or not at all.

The chicken wrap file reached 50 sick on Thursday, and the first brand name on the public record came from a courthouse. FDA’s outbreak table, re-stamped October 15, moved reference 1421 — the E. coli O157:H7 file shared with USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service as 2026-04 — from 38 to 50; it was 25 on September 23. Product: multi-ingredient wrap with chicken, suspect; traceback, inspection and sampling checked; recall blank; no FDA advisory, no CDC notice; USDA checking whether the chicken went into other products. The same Thursday, Marler Clark filed Gottlieb and Bright v. Trader Joe’s Company, No. 2:26-cv-12017, Central District of California, the first lawsuit in the outbreak, for two women — Gayle Gottlieb of Pembroke, North Carolina, and Meaghan Egan Bright of Somerville, Massachusetts — hospitalized after eating Trader Joe’s Tarragon Chicken Salad Wraps bought August 23 and 24; the complaint alleges Trader Joe’s pulled the wraps before the link was confirmed, and as of Friday the company had not answered the reporters who asked. Why the name still matters, and what the two pending petitions would have done about it, is Friday’s post.

Oregon told its doctors about a multistate outbreak and told no one else. Deschutes County, with the Oregon Health Authority, sent a Health Alert Network advisory to clinicians in three Central Oregon counties about a multistate Salmonella Enteritidis outbreak — exposure histories wanted on eggs, raw milk, animal contact and restaurants; reflex cultures after every positive PCR — with no case count, no food, no other states, no onset dates, and no public notice from the county, the state, CDC or FDA as of Friday. The public learned of it from Food Poison Journal Sunday and Food Safety News Monday. CDC’s current outbreaks page, updated Wednesday, counts fifteen active multistate Salmonella investigations, seven E. coli, six Listeria and two Campylobacter — thirty in all. Monday’s post is here.

FDA explained three closed outbreaks this week, and every explanation arrived long after the file closed. Thursday’s table moved the egg, moringa and infant formula files to Closed 2026 with an Executive Incident Summary Abstract each. The egg abstract — 134 sick in 18 states, 34 hospitalized, 1,589,577 dozen eggs recalled — closes on a Form 483 with three Egg Rule observations at Midwest Poultry Services, the plainest that a henhouse which tested positive during the prior flock was not cleaned and disinfected before new hens went in; Food Poison Journal has the detail. The moringa abstract: a file opened in January, 131 sick in 38 states, 36 hospitalized, four Salmonella strains, three recalling brands, a Form 483 with thirteen observations, a contract manufacturer and foreign supplier redacted even now. The infant formula abstract: the three infants sickened since April after eating Nara Organics powdered formula got lots made with fluid milk from Organic West Milk, spray-dried by Dairy Farmers of America; the ingredient suppliers overlapped with the November 2025 ByHeart outbreak; the Washington infant’s isolate sits five SNPs from six ByHeart isolates; not enough evidence to confirm sources and routes of contamination. That is the record behind the draft petition for Clostridium botulinum testing of powdered formula and its dairy ingredients, open through October 30, and Friday’s two questions on every ingredient and every tanker of raw milk.

The no-food ledger rose to 626, and a 99-person outbreak ended with no food ever named. Nine rows on FDA’s active table carry a case count and no product: Listeria 1415 at 11 and 1417 at 46, up two; Salmonella Newport 1403 at 116; Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- 1402 at 43; Cyclospora 1398 at 22, 1392 at 240, adjusted up five, and 1385 at 38; Listeria 1379 at 11; and Salmonella Oranienburg 1387 at 99, opened July 8, traceback, inspection and sampling run, now simply ended. Five of the nine read Ended with no food named, 442 sick among them. Listeria 1415 has started sample collection. Last Saturday the nine rows summed to 619.

The sourced outbreaks did not move, except for one line about Korea. Evergreen Fresh Sprouts broccoli sprouts stand where CDC left them September 24: 32 sick, three hospitalized, six states, 24 in Washington. FDA’s advisory, current to October 9, lists all three retail recalls of seed lot W4105 — EAK Distribution, Eden Brothers and Gardeners Basics — and not the supplier. Alfalfa sprouts hold at 76 sick in 16 states, six hospitalized, 27 in Wisconsin, unchanged since October 1. Graziers raw milk cheese holds at 13 sick, eight hospitalized, three with HUS, nine states, more than half five or younger; the October 9 re-stamp of FDA’s advisory added one undated section — the recalled cheeses were also shipped to the Republic of Korea — and FDA is now collecting samples. Pet turtles: 20 sick in 12 states since September 18. Comments on the draft raw sprout and raw milk cheese warning petitions closed Thursday; the last call is here.

Three state clusters are running on local reporting alone, and a fourth got its final report.Virginia closed the Little Wicomico River in Northumberland County to shellfish harvest from October 9 through November 7 after Pennsylvania traced at least five Salmonella cases to its oysters and clams; the closure order cites FDA’s recommendation and names no harvester, Pennsylvania has issued nothing, and Food Poison Journal has what is public. In Lebanon, Tennessee, the state calls the illness that sent 19 Walmart fulfillment-center workers to hospitals October 11 a possible foodborne outbreak associated with a meal; 911 recordings point at homemade rice, no pathogen is named, and Food Poison Journal followed it. Monongalia County, West Virginia, which reported 16 lab-confirmed Salmonella cases in two weeks at the start of the month, has posted nothing since. Maricopa County’s final report on the 2025 Arizona State Fair outbreak — 18 sick, 11 hospitalized, six with hemolytic uremic syndrome, a petting zoo odds ratio of 190, and 73 percent of the animal-area visitors using hand sanitizer — is in Monday’s post.

Six food warning letters posted Tuesday, and the one from Bakersfield describes five years of positive swabs. FDA’s September 29 letter to Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, the Froneri plant in Bakersfield: the company’s own environmental monitoring from 2021 through February 5, 2026 showed ongoing findings of Listeria monocytogenes — 19 Listeria positives and eight confirmed L. monocytogenes in the first five weeks of 2026 alone — the Round Top Drumsticks hazard analysis did not treat environmental Listeria as a hazard needing a preventive control, and the ready-to-eat cones, sandwiches and fruit pops are adulterated; no recall, no illness, no finished-product result. The August 5 letter to Lewis Sausage Company of Burgaw, North Carolina — Phyllis Entis identifies it as the contract manufacturer FDA redacted from Viva Raw’s letter — rests on the August 2025 state samples that found Salmonella Enteritidis and Listeria monocytogenes in raw pet food.

The recalls ledger, with the standing credit to Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert. Family Farmstead Dairy of Worcester, New York, recalled its 8-ounce Raw Mild Cheddar, lot and best-by 7/22/27, on Thursday; the first version named E. coli O157:H7 and grocers in New York and New Jersey, and the corrected notice posted the same day names O26:H11 and O45:H2 — two strains, from two samples at a Maryland laboratory in FDA’s state sampling program — and seven states; no illnesses; Thursday’s note and Food Safety News carry the detail. Krasnyi Oktyabr of Brooklyn, a week after its Starfish Seafood trio, recalled Starfish cold-smoked Norwegian salmon Friday — lot D080-148, best before November 27, 2027, six states — after New York agriculture sampling found Listeria monocytogenes; no illnesses. Entis’s October 10, 11–12, 13, 14 and 15–16ledgers carried the foreign items — Canadian and Québec cheeses for Listeria and Shiga toxin E. coli, and the United Kingdom’s second egg strain, 36 cases traced by sampling to a Ukrainian packer while the main imported-egg outbreak passes 650 sick. No FSIS recall or alert surfaced in any named outlet; FSIS’s pages would not load from here.

The lettuce outbreak’s after-action moved to the people writing about it, and the argument is published separately. Consumer Reports’ Paris Martineau wrote the clearest outside account of the outbreak and its four gaps, and Tuesday’s post adds to each; IFPA’s Cathy Burns gave the industry’s State of the Industry version in Orlando; FAO’s fact sheet says washing and chlorine do not reliably remove the parasite, which Wednesday’s post takes upstream to Guanajuato; the counts as of October 15 are unchanged at 12,883 in the outbreak and 19,883 in CDC’s season; and what the beef industry did after 2002 and what Salinas said in 2007 are linked, not repeated.

The policy week was short, and the one durable item came from FSIS. Food Safety News reports FSIS will take its Listeria environmental swabbing program nationwide between January and March 2027 — four swabs, two on food-contact surfaces and two off, every time an inspector samples ready-to-eat product at a federally inspected plant, whole genome sequencing on every Listeria monocytogenes positive — after a pilot in the Alameda, Chicago and Raleigh districts whose results have not been published. Judge Vince Chhabria on Tuesday stayed USDA’s reorganization indefinitely; FSIS is not among the components listed. The Senate is out until November 9, so Heidi Overton’s FDA nomination waits; FDA’s virtual lot-level traceability meeting is November 6, speaker registration closing October 26. Friday’s Publisher’s Platform puts all seven petitions — formula botulism testing, raw milk cheese and sprout warnings, Salmonella as an adulterant in poultry, sampling at animal feeding operations, naming implicated firms, and consignee lists — in one place, formula-petition comments open through October 30.

That’s the week — 50 sick from a chicken wrap whose name is in a federal complaint and not on a federal page; an Oregon advisory the public was not meant to see; three outbreaks explained after they closed; 626 sick on nine files with no food; a 99-person outbreak that ended with no answer; and a raw cheddar whose serotype changed between the morning and the afternoon. 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.

Last week I posted a draft citizen petition asking FDA to add botulinum neurotoxin-producing clostridia to the short list of organisms that powdered infant formula must be tested for before it ships, and to require that the dairy ingredients formula is made from be tested before they are used. Comments are due by Friday, October 30, 2026. Thank you to everyone who has already written. Two of the comments raise questions I do not think I should answer alone, so I am putting them to all of you.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/10/C.-botulinum-Petition-10.15.26-WDM-1.pdf

The petition will not change on these points for now. It asks FDA for what the record from the ByHeart and Nara outbreaks supports, and I want to keep it that way. But that record was built after fifty-two babies were hospitalized, and the next outbreak will not wait for a better one. If there is a case for reaching further upstream, I want to hear it before I file, not after.

Question one: should testing reach every ingredient, not only dairy?

The draft requires lot-by-lot testing of dairy-based ingredients that have not been through a validated spore-reduction step: whole milk powder, nonfat dry milk, milk protein concentrate, whey and its concentrates and hydrolysates. That is where the evidence points. FDA’s inspections found the organism in a lot of organic whole milk powder at the dryer, and when the agency went looking in powdered milk this February, it found a spore-former carrying a botulinum toxin B1 gene in two of 48 samples on the first pass.

But spores live in soil, not only in milk. Plant proteins, starches and carbohydrate powders can carry them too, and a rule that says “dairy-based” invites arguments about what counts. On the other side, ByHeart’s own testing of its non-dairy ingredients, reported to the July roundtable, came back negative, and requiring a 200-gram test of every lot of a vitamin premix that makes up a fraction of a percent of the can is a lot of cost for little protection. One middle path would presume that every ingredient needs testing unless the manufacturer documents in writing why a particular one does not and keep those records available to FDA.

So: which non-dairy ingredients, if any, belong in a testing requirement? Is a written-justification approach workable, or does it hand the decision right back to the companies that made it before?

Question two: should the milk be tested before it is ever dried?

One commenter argued that the draft does not go far enough upstream. In that reader’s view, any company drying milk into whole milk powder or other dairy powders for infant formula should test every incoming tanker of raw milk for botulinum neurotoxin-producing clostridia, on the theory that the smaller and more targeted the haystack, the better the odds of finding the needle.

The idea has real force. A tanker comes from a handful of farms on one route. Once it is pumped into a silo and dried with dozens of other loads, a contaminated delivery is diluted across a large powder lot, and the link back to the farm is gone. Reporters found that FDA traced the milk in these outbreaks to 22 dairies that have never been publicly named. Testing at the tanker would tie any positive to a small set of farms, keep that milk out of infant formula, and generate the farm-level data that nobody has today.

It also raises hard questions, and I would rather hear them answered by people who run dryers and labs than guess at them myself:

Timing. The confirmed methods for this organism take days. Raw milk cannot sit in a tanker for days waiting on a result. Does tanker testing work as a gate, or only to hold and trace the powder made from that milk until results come back?

Sensitivity. Drying concentrates whatever is in the milk, so a gram of powder represents several grams of milk. Is a sample from a tanker more likely, or less likely, to find low-level, unevenly spread spores than a sample from the powder?

Who is responsible. FDA’s infant formula rules govern formula manufacturers, not the dryers that supply them. Should the requirement sit with the dryer directly, or with the formula maker, as a condition its suppliers must meet before their powder is used?

Cost and volume. How many tankers a day does a dryer serving infant formula receive, and what would testing each one cost against what one outbreak costs?

How to weigh in

Send comments to me at bmarler@marlerclark.com, by Friday, October 30, 2026. If you work at a dryer, a formula plant or a testing lab, tell me so; that experience is exactly what these questions need. With your permission, I may quote you, with or without your name, in the petition docket or in a follow-up post. FDA has said, in its July 13 letter, that it wants to work with industry on best practices. Here is a place to start.

As of October 15, 2026, the FDA’s table of active outbreak investigations lists 50 people sick with E. coli O157:H7 in the outbreak it is investigating with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, FDA reference #1421 and FSIS 2026-04. That is double the 25 on the table when the file opened on September 23. The product column still reads “Multi-ingredient wrap with chicken (suspect).” The recall column is still blank. Neither agency has named the manufacturer, the brand, the retailer or a single state where someone got sick.

The public now has a name anyway, and it did not come from the government. On October 15, Marler Clark filed the first lawsuit in the outbreak, alleging that a North Carolina woman and a Massachusetts woman were hospitalized after eating Trader Joe’s Tarragon Chicken Salad Wraps bought in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Allston, Massachusetts, and that their own health departments tied them to this outbreak. A federal complaint should not be how a sick person, her doctor or a county health department interviewer learns which food is under investigation.

I have two draft citizen petitions to the FDA, both dated October 8 and both still being edited before I file them. One asks the FDA to establish that the identity of a firm implicated in an outbreak is not confidential. The other asks it to publish retail consignee lists in Class I recalls. When I wrote about this outbreak on October 8, the count was 38 and I used it as the example in both drafts. A week later the count is 50, and the example has only gotten stronger.

What has changed since October 8

Twelve more people have been added to the count. Food Safety News reports that the USDA is now working to determine whether the chicken in the wraps was used in other products, and that the FDA has started traceback, on-site inspection and sampling without saying what is being traced, where the inspection is or what is being tested. The FDA is still not reporting the patients’ ages or where they live. FSIS, which has jurisdiction because the wraps contain chicken, has posted nothing of its own beyond a link back to the FDA’s table. As far as I can find, the CDC has not posted an investigation notice.

So, the agencies are now asking the right question, where else did this ingredient go, and still declining to tell the public the one fact that would let anyone else help answer it.

The disclosure petition: a name should not depend on which agency regulates the wrap

The draft outbreak firm disclosure petition asks the FDA to establish by rule that the name and location of a firm implicated by epidemiologic, traceback, laboratory or whole genome sequencing evidence is not confidential commercial information; to reach the whole supply chain, not just the brand on the label; and to use the authority it already holds under section 705(b) of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to name implicated firms now, with or without a recall. It also asks that, in joint investigations with FSIS, the FDA publish the FDA-regulated ingredients under investigation and coordinate so that the public record of a single outbreak does not depend on which agency regulates the finished food.

That last request was written for exactly this file. A chicken wrap is chicken, which belongs to FSIS, wrapped around lettuce, dressing and a tortilla, which belong to the FDA. If the problem is the chicken, FSIS’s own long-standing practice when product is no longer available is to issue a public health alert that names the establishment. It did that as recently as May 2026, when it named The Kebab Shop restaurants and the producer of the beef in an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak tied to beef kofta made four months earlier and long gone from commerce. If the problem is an FDA-regulated ingredient, the FDA has named farms, processors and brands after the product was gone at least eight times since 2006. Either way, somebody holds the authority to name the firm. Three weeks in, nobody has used it.

The consignee petition: “proactively removed” is a recall by another name

Since 2008, FSIS has published the names and locations of retail consignees in Class I meat and poultry recalls by rule, 9 CFR 390.10. That is the model my draft consignee petition asks the FDA to adopt. The weakness in both agencies’ systems is that the obligation attaches to the word “recall.” The FDA says these wraps “were proactively removed from the market before the link to the outbreak was confirmed.” Because nobody called it a recall, nothing was classified, no consignee list was published, and the public was never told which stores sold the wraps.

The draft closes that gap. It asks that any removal of a food identified as the suspected vehicle of an outbreak, whether the firm calls it a recall, a market withdrawal, a stock recovery or a proactive removal, be treated as a recall for purposes of classification and the consignee list, and that the list be published whether or not the product is past its shelf life. The USDA’s new question makes the point for me: if the chicken did go into other products, the public will not know where those went either, unless someone uses the word.

Why this matters when the wraps are gone

Fifty is the number of people whose illnesses have been confirmed and matched by laboratory testing. Food Safety News notes the CDC’s estimate that for every confirmed patient in an E. coli outbreak, 26 go undetected. People who ate a wrap in late August or September are still working their way through emergency rooms, labs and state health departments. A store list is not only about pulling food off a shelf. It tells a patient, a physician and a health department interviewer whether the store where that patient shopped received the suspect food. That is diagnosis and case finding, and neither expires with a shelf-life date.

What should happen now

The FDA and FSIS should name the product, the maker and the retailer, and publish the states, the hospitalizations and the HUS count. FSIS should issue a public health alert on its own 2026-04 investigation and say whether the chicken went into other products and where. And once these petitions are filed, the FDA should grant them, so that the next outbreak does not depend on a lawsuit to tell the public what the government already knows.

The drafts are still open for comment

Neither petition has been filed. I have been asking for help with them for weeks: in Twenty Years After Spinach, where I asked the produce industry to join them; in my open letter to Bruce Taylor, where I asked Taylor Farms and the leafy greens industry to read, improve and support both drafts before I file; and in Put Me Out of the Leafy Green Business, Please, where I asked IFPA, Western Growers, the California and Arizona LGMAs, FMI and NGA to sign them. The chicken wrap outbreak is a reminder that these petitions are not only about lettuce. They reach every food the FDA regulates and every joint file it shares with FSIS.

There is still time to comment. If you are a grower, processor, retailer, public health official, physician, consumer or a family that has lived through an outbreak nobody would name, tell me what is wrong with the drafts and what is missing. Send comments to bmarler@marlerclark.com. I would rather hear it from you now than from the FDA later.

If you ate a chicken wrap in August or September and developed diarrhea, especially bloody diarrhea, see a doctor, ask for a stool test for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, and report the illness to your local health department.

As of October 15, 2026, the FDA’s table of active outbreak investigations counts 50 people sick with E. coliO157:H7 in an outbreak the FDA and the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service have tied to ready-to-eat, multi-ingredient chicken wraps. That is up from 38 a week ago and double the 25 the FDA posted when it opened the file on September 23. Three weeks in, neither agency has named the brand, the manufacturer, the retailer or the states where people got sick, and no recall appears on the table. On October 15, Marler Clark filed the first lawsuit in the outbreak, in federal court in Los Angeles, against Trader Joe’s Company on behalf of a North Carolina woman and a Massachusetts woman who were hospitalized after eating Trader Joe’s Tarragon Chicken Salad Wraps bought in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Allston, Massachusetts.

What changed on the FDA’s table today

One number moved. The case count for FDA reference 1421, which also carries USDA-FSIS number 2026-04 because the product contains chicken, went from 38 to 50. Nothing else on the row changed. The product column still reads “Multi-ingredient wrap with chicken (suspect).” The outbreak is still listed as ongoing. Traceback, on-site inspection and sampling are all checked, with no word on what is being traced, where the inspection is or what is being tested. The recall column is still blank because, in the FDA’s words, the wraps were “proactively removed from the market before the link to the outbreak was confirmed” and are past their shelf life. The agencies say they are looking at possible contamination at the ingredient level, and Food Safety News reports that USDA is working to determine whether the chicken in the wraps went into other products. There is no hospitalization count, no HUS count, no ages and no states, and as far as I can find, the CDC has not posted an investigation notice.

Fifty is the number of people whose stool samples were cultured, sequenced and matched to the outbreak strain. The CDC’s own estimate is that for every reported E. coli O157 case, about 26 go unreported. The wraps are gone, but the count keeps rising because people who ate them in late August and September are still working their way through doctors, labs and state health departments.

What the first lawsuit says

The complaint is Gottlieb and Bright v. Trader Joe’s Company, No. 2:26-cv-12017, filed October 15, 2026, in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division, where Trader Joe’s has its headquarters. The plaintiffs are Gayle Gottlieb of Pembroke, North Carolina, and Meaghan Egan Bright of Somerville, Massachusetts. They are represented by Frederic L. Gordon of Pasadena and by Ilana Korchia and me.

According to the complaint, Ms. Gottlieb bought three Tarragon Chicken Salad Wraps at the Trader Joe’s at 115 Sayebrook Parkway in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on August 23 and ate the first one for lunch on August 27. By August 30 she had bloody diarrhea and was in the emergency department at UNC Southeastern Hospital in Lumberton, North Carolina; on September 2 she was hospitalized at Scotland Memorial Hospital in Laurinburg. Her stool tested positive for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli O157, and the North Carolina State Laboratory of Public Health confirmed E. coli O157 and Shiga toxin 2. The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services classified her as a confirmed case in a multistate outbreak, assigned her CDC cluster code 2609MLEXH-2, and recorded the source of her illness in its own food-exposure record as a “wrap from Trader Joe’s.”

Ms. Bright bought a Tarragon Chicken Salad Wrap at the Trader Joe’s at 199 North Harvard Street in Allston, Massachusetts, on August 24 and ate it that day. She fell ill on August 27, began passing bloody diarrhea on August 30, went by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital and was hospitalized from August 31 through September 6. Her stool tested positive for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, and the Somerville Board of Health and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health told her she was part of a cluster of STEC infections.

The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that Trader Joe’s is the company that pulled the wraps from sale before the link to the outbreak was confirmed, and that it did so because it had reason to believe the product was a food-safety risk. It pleads strict product liability, negligence, negligence per se and breach of implied warranty under California law. Two women in two states bought the same named product within a day of each other, got sick on the same schedule and were tied by their own health departments to the same outbreak. That is what a common-source exposure looks like.

Why the brand still matters when the product is already gone

The agencies’ position is that because the wraps are off the shelves and past their shelf life, there is nothing for consumers to do and therefore nothing to announce. I disagree, for four reasons.

First, doctors. A STEC infection that started in late August can still be in a hospital in October, and a child who ate a wrap can develop HUS a week after the diarrhea begins. Clinicians who know a specific product is involved ask the right question and order the right test.

Second, the sick. Fifty people have been told they are part of a multistate outbreak linked to an unnamed food. Our clients learned what they ate from their own receipts and their own health departments, not from the FDA or USDA. Everyone else who ate a chicken wrap and got sick in August or September deserves the same information.

Third, the ingredients. The FDA says it is looking at contamination at the ingredient level, and USDA is checking whether the chicken went into other products. The chicken, the lettuce, the dressing and the tortilla in a wrap come from different suppliers, and a contaminated ingredient does not stop at one product line. Naming the wrap is how the public learns what else that ingredient touched.

Fourth, the rules. When FSIS announces a recall, it names the establishment and posts a retail distribution list. A product that is “proactively removed” before a link is confirmed never becomes a recall, never gets a retail list and never gets a name. STOP Foodborne Illness has had a citizen petition pending at the FDA since February asking the agency to name firms implicated in outbreaks (Docket FDA-2026-P-1448); the FDA gave it an interim answer in July. I have a companion petition in draft. This outbreak is the argument for both.

We have been here before

In November 2013, FSIS and the FDA investigated an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak traced to ready-to-eat chicken salads and wraps made by Glass Onion Catering of Richmond, California, and sold at Trader Joe’s, Walgreens, Whole Foods and other stores in eight western states. The agencies named the maker and listed every product within four days of linking the illnesses to the food, published a retail list, and the count ended at 33 sick in four states. Marler Clark represented eleven of those people and named Trader Joe’s as a defendant in every case where the salad or wrap was bought at one of its stores. I said then that retailers need to be held accountable for what they sell. In 2015, Costco pulled its rotisserie chicken salad from every store while the investigation was still underway, and the CDC named the product and the store anyway, reporting 19 sick in seven states, two with HUS. Removal from the market was never a reason to keep the name quiet. It is now.

What should happen now

The FDA and FSIS should name the product and the retailer, publish the states, the hospitalizations and the HUS count, and say when the wraps were removed, by whom and why. The CDC should post an investigation notice; a 50-person O157:H7 outbreak with its own cluster code is not too small for one. FSIS should post its own 2026-04 page instead of a link back to the FDA’s table and say what it has learned about the chicken and where else it went. None of that requires a recall. It requires a decision that the public’s right to know does not expire with a shelf-life date.

Marler Clark represents Ms. Gottlieb and Ms. Bright and is investigating other illnesses in this outbreak. If you ate a chicken wrap in August or September and developed diarrhea, especially bloody diarrhea, see a doctor, ask for a stool test for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, and report the illness to your local health department.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/10/Gottlieb-Bright-Complaint.pdf