https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/10/Listeria-Peaches-2025.pdf

If you want to know what is really going on in food safety, read eFoodAlert. Phyllis Entis, the FoodBugLady, did it again today – this time pulling an FDA CORE investigation report through FOIA and then doing the detective work the government should have done for the public in the first place.

Here is what she found. In 2025, eight people were sickened by Listeria monocytogenes in an undisclosed number of states. The suspected vehicle: California peaches. Only two of the ill could be traced back, but both tracebacks led to the same distributor and packer. FDA inspected that packer, issued a Form 4056 on October 9, 2025 citing equipment and sanitation recordkeeping problems, and found Listeria in water, environmental, and produce samples – though none matched the outbreak strain.

The company’s own root cause work then turned up presumptive positives on a set of brushes. That led to the October 29, 2025 Moonlight Packing recall of yellow and white peaches shipped to more than 30 states, Canada and Mexico, followed by peach salsa recalls from Supreme Produce and JFE Franchising sold at Kroger stores. Phyllis’s working theory – that the brushes replaced in September may have carried the outbreak strain – is the simplest explanation. As she puts it, “we’ll never know.”

This is not new. In 2023, CDC linked 11 Listeria illnesses in 7 states – ten hospitalized, one death – to HMC Farms peaches, plums and nectarines. To its credit, HMC Farms published a 109-page list of every retail store that received the recalled fruit. That is what real transparency looks like.

Which brings me to the best part of Phyllis’s piece. FDA redacted the food, the states, the packer, and the retail chain from the report – information that was, for the most part, already public if you knew where to look. Phyllis knew where to look. She followed the unredacted crumbs (the recall date, the 2016 prior inspection) straight to Moonlight Packing.

Her bottom line is mine too: excessive redactions waste time and protect no one. That is exactly why I have asked FDA, through citizen petitions, to name the firms tied to outbreaks and to publish recall consignee lists. Consumers should not need a microbiologist with a FOIA habit to learn what made people sick – but thank goodness we have one.

Thanks, Phyllis. Read the whole post here.

On October 7, 2026, FDA’s outbreak investigation table named the vehicle in the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak it shares with USDA, FDA #1421 and FSIS 2026-04: “ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps.” Thirty-eight people are sick. FDA said the wraps “were proactively removed from the market before the link to the outbreak was confirmed,” are past shelf life, and that the agencies are now looking at “possible ingredient level contamination.” FSIS’s outbreak table says it is working “to identify the contaminated ingredient and whether it was used in other products.” Food Safety News confirmed today that neither agency has disclosed the brand or the location.

I wrote earlier about what the agencies have and have not said. This post is about why it keeps happening, and about the two citizen petitions I have written to FDA to stop it.

There are two separate holes in the federal record, and this outbreak fell through both.

The first hole is the name. FDA treats the identity of a company linked to an outbreak as confidential commercial information unless a recall attaches to it. No recall, no name. The second hole is the store list. Even when there is a recall of an FDA-regulated food, publishing the stores that received it is a matter of agency discretion under a 2020 guidance, not a rule. And because these wraps were “proactively removed” rather than recalled, there is no recall to classify and no consignee list to publish under either agency’s practice. A family that ate a chicken wrap in September cannot learn whose it was or where it was sold.

The first petition: the name of a company whose food made people sick is not a trade secret.

The outbreak firm disclosure petition asks FDA to amend its disclosure regulations, 21 CFR part 20, to say plainly that the name and location of a firm implicated in an outbreak by epidemiologic, traceback, laboratory or genomic evidence is not confidential commercial information. It asks that the rule be written with the exception closed, so that a firm that wants its name withheld has to prove, on the record, why. It reaches the whole supply chain, the grower, the processor, the manufacturer, the distributor and the retailer, because in a produce outbreak there is often no brand to name at all. It asks FDA to publish what it knows while an investigation is open: the suspect food, the states, the hospitalizations, the cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome, and in a multi-ingredient product like this one, the ingredient under investigation. And it asks FDA, in a joint file like #1421, to coordinate with FSIS so that what the public learns about one outbreak does not depend on which agency regulates the finished food.

FDA does not need new legislation to do any of this. Section 705(b) of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act lets the agency disseminate information about food in situations involving imminent danger to health, and its last sentence says that nothing in it prohibits the Secretary from “collecting, reporting, and illustrating the results of the investigations of the Department.” That clause has no imminent-danger trigger. It reaches the results of an outbreak investigation after the product is gone, which is exactly when FDA has been saying it has nothing to report.

FSIS used to be the agency that named names. Not this time.

FSIS’s longstanding practice, when meat or poultry is implicated and no longer for sale, is to issue a public health alert that names the establishment. It did that as recently as May. When E. coli O157:H7 was linked to beef kofta served at The Kebab Shop, FSIS issued a public health alert naming the restaurant chain and the producer of beef that had been made in January and was no longer available. California alone reported nine cases, five hospitalizations and two cases of HUS.

The chicken wraps are FSIS-regulated. They are no longer for sale. Thirty-eight people are sick and an inspection is underway. There is no alert. When the agency whose routine is to name falls silent in a joint file with FDA, the problem is no longer one agency’s habit. It is the absence of a written standard that binds both.

The second petition: tell people which stores got the food, and close the “proactive removal” loophole.

USDA settled the consignee question by rule eighteen years ago. Under 9 CFR 390.10, when meat or poultry is recalled in a Class I recall, FSIS publishes the names and locations of the retail stores that received it. In 2011, Congress told FDA in the Food Safety Modernization Act to consult that policy and consider adopting it. FDA consulted it and, in November 2020, issued guidance saying it intends to publish store lists mainly when a food cannot easily be identified from its packaging and is still likely to be available for consumption. Guidance binds no one. And the second criterion, still available for consumption, means that a food already past shelf life, like these wraps, may never get a list even when it is recalled.

The recall consignee petition asks FDA to write the USDA approach into its own recall regulations: publish the store list in every Class I food recall, at the time the recall is announced, and extend it to restaurants, schools, hospitals and other institutions. It asks FDA to classify every recall within ten days and publish the interval. And, because of what happened this month, it now asks for one more thing.

FDA’s own recall regulation, 21 CFR 7.3, defines a “market withdrawal” as a removal involving a minor violation that would not be subject to legal action, or no violation at all. A ready-to-eat food that has made thirty-eight people sick is neither. The petition asks FDA to provide by rule that when a food has been identified as the suspected vehicle of an outbreak, its removal is a recall for purposes of classification and the store list, whatever the firm calls it and whether or not the product is still within its shelf life. A consignee requirement that attaches only to the word “recall” can be avoided by not using the word.

“Past shelf life” answers the wrong question.

FDA’s reason for saying nothing is that no one can buy the wraps now. That protects the next customer. It does nothing for the thirty-eight people already sick, or for the people who have not yet been counted, because E. coli cases take three to four weeks to show up on a federal table. A parent whose child ate a chicken wrap in September and now has bloody diarrhea needs to know the brand and the store, and needs to tell the emergency room, so the child is not given antibiotics or anti-diarrheals that raise the risk of HUS. A health department interviewing a patient needs to know which store to ask about. And if the contaminated ingredient went into other products, which is what both agencies now say they are investigating, the people eating those products need to know more than a category.

This is not new, and it is not just about wraps.

FDA closed a fourteen-person romaine E. coli outbreak, #1382, on September 10 and named no grower and no processor because the lettuce was past shelf life. It closed an eighty-nine-person romaine outbreak in late 2024 that hospitalized thirty-six people and killed one, and named no one; the traceback, it turned out, had converged on a single processor and a single grower the whole time. And FDA has named farms, processors and brands in exactly those circumstances at least eight times since 2006. What is missing is not authority. It is a rule.

FDA’s own 2026 record makes the point. In the Salmonella Newport outbreak linked to Guatemalan cantaloupe, seventy people in twenty-five states, FDA said the fruit was likely past shelf life. The importer, Ayco Farms, recalled a lot anyway, FDA put two growers on import alert, and all three were named. Four months later, romaine past shelf life got no recall and no name. The difference was not shelf life. It was whether a recall happened to attach. Even then, FDA’s executive summary of the cantaloupe outbreak redacts the states, and the closed-table row leaves the recall column blank.

And the chicken wraps are not the only open file without a name. As of October 7, nine of the fifteen active investigations on FDA’s table name no food at all. Those nine account for 619 sick people, and five of them are outbreaks the table still lists as ongoing.

Both petitions also support the citizen petition Stop Foodborne Illness filed in February asking FDA to stop treating company names as confidential. FDA told Stop in July that it had not been able to reach a decision. Thirty-eight more people are now waiting with them.

The produce industry should want this as much as consumers do.

When the government names a commodity and stops, consumers walk away from the whole category. In July, during the Cyclospora outbreak, Numerator data showed 6.5 million households stopped buying salad mixes and kits. Every grower and processor paid for that, including the ones who did nothing wrong. A firm-specific disclosure is the only thing that separates them. Today, “ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps” puts every maker of chicken wraps in the country, and every supplier of whatever ingredient turns out to be the problem, under the same cloud.

Why hasn’t FDA or USDA named the company that made the chicken wraps?

As of October 8, 2026, neither agency has said. FDA says the wraps were removed from the market before the outbreak link was confirmed and are past shelf life, so there is no recall and no advisory. FSIS, which regulates the wraps, has not issued a public health alert.

What would the two petitions change?

The disclosure petition would make the name of a firm implicated in an outbreak public by rule, whether or not there is a recall, and would require FDA to publish the suspect food, states, hospitalizations and HUS cases while an investigation is open. The consignee petition would require FDA to publish the list of stores and institutions that received a Class I recalled food, and would treat the removal of an outbreak-implicated food as a recall even when the company calls it something else.

As of October 7, 2026, FDA’s outbreak investigation table says the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak it has been working with USDA since September, FDA reference #1421 and FSIS 2026-04, has a vehicle: ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps. Thirty-eight people are sick. FDA has not disclosed hospitalizations, deaths, kidney failures, the states involved, who made the wraps or who sold them. There is no recall and no consumer advisory, because FDA says the wraps left the market before the link was confirmed.

The product line changed from “Not Yet Identified” to “Multi-ingredient wrap with chicken (suspect)” on October 7.

The table was republished Wednesday afternoon. The What’s New entry reads, in full: “For the outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 (ref #1421), the vehicle has been identified as ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps. These USDA-regulated wraps were proactively removed from the market before the link to the outbreak was confirmed and they are no longer available for sale and past shelf-life. FDA, in coordination with USDA, CDC, and state and local partners are continuing to investigate the source of the outbreak including possible ingredient level contamination. If it is determined that there is still an ongoing risk to the public and actions can be taken to protect consumers, the agencies will issue an advisory.” A second entry says FDA has initiated an inspection. The row now shows traceback, on-site inspection and sampling checked, and the recall column blank.

That is everything FDA has told the public. The case count is the same 38 it was on September 30. FSIS’s outbreak table now carries the same product line for 2026-04, “Ready-To-Eat Multi-ingredient wrap with chicken (suspect),” with one sentence of its own: “The wrap identified through the investigation at this point is past shelf-life and no longer available for purchase. FSIS is working with FDA to identify the contaminated ingredient and whether it was used in other products.” CDC’s current outbreaks page, updated the same day, counts eight active multistate E. coli investigations and names none of them.

The two people who called me in late September described exactly this product.

On September 29 I wrote about two calls that came in twenty-four hours apart. Both callers had culture-confirmed E. coli. Both had been told by their health departments that they were part of a multistate outbreak linked to a food that had not been named. Both had bought a meat-and-vegetable sandwich wrap at the same chain, in different states. I said then that two interviews are not an epidemiologic study, and they are not. But a ready-to-eat wrap with chicken in it is the product they described, and the fact that it sits under two reference numbers is the reason I guessed it was a wrap in the first place: FSIS treats a wrap that contains meat or poultry as its product, while the lettuce, the tomatoes and the tortilla inside it belong to FDA. Two agencies, two tracebacks, one sandwich.

My epidemiologists have requested the health department, CDC, FDA and FSIS records on both callers. When those arrive I will say what they show.

“Ingredient level contamination” means the investigation has moved from the wrap to what went into it.

Read the second half of FDA’s sentence again. The agencies are “continuing to investigate the source of the outbreak including possible ingredient level contamination.” A chicken wrap is chicken, a tortilla, and usually lettuce or other greens, cheese, and a sauce. If the chicken were the problem, the file would belong to FSIS alone. FDA opening an inspection and collecting samples tells you the agencies think the contamination may have arrived in an ingredient that goes into other products too, and that is the only reading under which a wrap that is already past its shelf life still justifies a federal investigation with three actions checked. FSIS says it plainly: it is working “to identify the contaminated ingredient and whether it was used in other products.” If a produce ingredient carried E. coli O157:H7 into these wraps, the question is where else that ingredient went, and both agencies have now said in writing that they are asking it.

The count grew 52 percent in a week and has not moved since, which is what the reporting lag predicts.

FDA table stampSickProduct columnActions checkedChange
Sept 23, 2026 (row posted)25Not Yet IdentifiedTracebackFirst public listing
Sept 30, 202638Not Yet IdentifiedTraceback, sampling+13 sick (52%)
Oct 7, 202638Multi-ingredient wrap with chicken (suspect)Traceback, inspection, sampling+0 sick; vehicle named

Source: FDA CORE Outbreak Investigation Table, stamps of Sept 25, Sept 30 and Oct 7, 2026, read on each date. Check: 25 + 13 = 38; 13 ÷ 25 = 0.52.

CDC says it typically takes three to four weeks from the day someone gets sick to the day their isolate is sequenced and matched to an outbreak. The 38 people on the table were infected in late August and September. People who ate a wrap in the last week it was on sale may not appear on the table until late October. The number is a floor, as I wrote when it was 25 and again when it was 38.

“Past shelf-life” protects the next customer and does nothing for the people already sick.

FDA’s logic for not issuing an advisory is that no one can buy the wraps now. That is true and it is beside the point for the families in this outbreak. E. coli O157:H7 causes bloody diarrhea and severe cramps three to four days after exposure, and in five to ten percent of cases, most of them children, it progresses to hemolytic uremic syndrome, kidney failure that can be permanent and can kill. A parent whose child ate a chicken wrap in September and now has bloody diarrhea needs to know that wrap is a suspect, and needs to tell the emergency room so the child is not given antibiotics or anti-diarrheals, both of which raise the risk of HUS. That information is useful today whether or not the wraps are still for sale. It is useful to the health departments interviewing patients. It is useful to the retailer’s other customers, who have loyalty-card records that would show whether they bought one. None of them can act on “ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps” without a brand.

The agencies have named products mid-investigation before, on this same table.

FSIS’s own table shows how unusual this silence is. Every other joint FDA–FSIS file on it carries a public notice that names the food and the company: the 2025 Fresh & Ready Foods Listeria file (FDA #1305, USDA 2025-06, ten sick, all hospitalized, one dead), the 2025 FreshRealm chicken fettuccine alfredo Listeria file (FDA #1290, USDA 2025-05) with a public health alert and a recall, and the October 2024 McDonald’s Quarter Pounder E. coli O157:H7 file (USDA 2025-01), where CDC, FDA and FSIS named the restaurant while the onions were still being traced. FSIS’s two other 2026 files got the same treatment: the May beef kofta E. coli O157:H7 outbreak at The Kebab Shop got a public health alert naming the chain, and the May headcheese Listeria outbreak got one naming the product. File 2026-04 is the only active row on the table and the only one of those six with no notice at all. The agencies have a product, 38 sick, samples in the lab and an inspector on site, and have published a category.

What FDA and FSIS should post now.

The brand and the retailer. The states, so local health departments and physicians know to look. The onset dates. How many of the 38 were hospitalized and how many developed HUS. Which ingredient each agency is tracing, since FDA’s own sentence says that is where the investigation is. And whether any of the ingredients in these wraps were sold in other products that are not past their shelf life. If the answer to that last question is yes, the advisory FDA is holding in reserve is already overdue.

What food caused the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak FDA #1421?

FDA’s outbreak table, updated October 7, 2026, says the vehicle is ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps regulated by USDA. FDA has not named the brand, the manufacturer or the stores that sold them, and is still investigating whether a single ingredient was the source.

Were the chicken wraps recalled?

No. FDA says the wraps were removed from the market before the outbreak link was confirmed and are past their shelf life, so there is no recall and no consumer advisory. Thirty-eight people are sick as of October 7, 2026.

I ate a ready-to-eat chicken wrap in September and got sick. What should I do?

See a doctor and ask for a stool culture that tests for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. Do not take antibiotics or anti-diarrheal medicine unless a physician who knows it may be E. coli tells you to. Keep receipts, loyalty-card records and any packaging, write down the date and the store, and tell your local health department.

On October 2, FDA closed its investigation into the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history: 12,883 confirmed illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths in 21 states, linked to shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. Inspectors found the parasite in a wastewater tank at the processing plant and in a drainage ditch at a grower. As of September 15, CDC had counted 19,883 laboratory-confirmed cyclosporiasis cases in the United States this year. That is not a bad season. That is a public health failure.

The same day, FDA posted its post-outbreak response plan: ten things it says it will do before the 2027 growing and harvesting season. I read it twice. Most of it is good. Some of it is overdue. And a great deal of what would prevent the next outbreak is not there. Here is FDA’s list, followed by mine.

What FDA says it will do

Paraphrasing FDA’s ten commitments, with a word or two from me on each:

  1. Publish an Outbreak Investigation Report on how Cyclospora got onto imported shredded iceberg lettuce, with recommendations. Good. But there is no date. It needs to be out well before the 2027 season, and it needs to include the water data.
  2. Increase surveillance of commodities historically associated with Cyclospora. Good, if it means sampling and publishing results, not just more meetings.
  3. Do more outreach at home and abroad on the Produce Safety Rule, the Preventive Controls Rule and the Food Traceability Rule. Outreach on a traceability rule that Congress has barred FDA from enforcing until 2028 is a curious use of time. More on that below.
  4. Build laboratory capacity in Mexico so samples can be analyzed in-country, faster. Yes.
  5. Use weather and environmental data to spot conditions that spread Cyclospora. Sensible, and cheap.
  6. Expand training with Mexico’s agriculture ministry, COFEPRIS and SENASICA. Training is fine. Verification is better.
  7. Convene expert panels on worker health and hygiene, water and wastewater monitoring, and gaps in growing and processing practices. This goes straight at the problem. These panels should meet in public and include consumer and public health voices, not only industry.
  8. Align Cyclospora genotyping with CDC into a single standard for government, partner nations and industry. This is the most important item on the list for tracing outbreaks, and it needs real money behind it.
  9. Expand Foreign Supplier Verification Program inspections so importers consider Cyclospora in their hazard analysis. Good. Publish what the inspections find.
  10. Update the Cyclospora Prevention, Response and Research Action Plan with lessons learned. Fine, but an action plan is only as good as what it requires.

FDA also sent a letter to industry asking for collaboration. I am glad it did. But notice what all ten items have in common: they are surveillance, studies, training and panels. None of them requires anyone who grows, packs or imports produce to do anything differently next summer.

What FDA left out

Some of what follows FDA can do on its own. Some needs Congress. Some the produce industry could do tomorrow if it chose to. I have written about most of it before, here and in Reap What You Sow. It belongs in one place.

1. Unwind the traceability delay. FDA’s Food Traceability Rule was supposed to take effect January 20, 2026. FDA pushed compliance to July 20, 2028, and Congress then wrote the delay into the November 2025 appropriations act. The Safe Food Coalition asked Congress in August to rescind it. Congress should, and FDA should say publicly that it wants the authority back before the 2027 season. In the meantime, everyone who grows, packs or buys leafy greens and the other foods on the Food Traceability List should comply now. This summer, millions of heads of California lettuce that had nothing to do with the outbreak were plowed underbecause nobody could say quickly enough where the bad lettuce went. The innocent paid for the guilty.

2. Treat Cyclospora as the water problem it is. Both of FDA’s positive samples from Mexico were water. Yet in 2024 FDA replaced numeric water testing with “systems-based” assessments, and today no law requiresa farm to test its irrigation water or its produce for Cyclospora. The washes the industry relies on are validated against generic E. coli, not a parasite that chlorine does not kill. What is needed:

  1. Enforceable, numeric microbial standards and routine testing for pre-harvest water used on high-risk produce eaten raw.
  2. Cyclospora and other parasites added to testing of growing and processing water at operations producing Food Traceability List commodities, starting in regions with an outbreak history.
  3. Processor wastewater controls that keep outgoing water away from fields, canals and product. FDA found the parasite in a Taylor Farms de Mexico wastewater tank. In 2013, after an earlier Cyclosporaoutbreak, Taylor Farms said it was testing water at that operation and FDA let it reopen on that promise. I have never found a public result.
  4. Research funding for a validated kill step or water treatment that works against parasites.
  5. Enforceable setbacks and watershed monitoring for animal feeding operations near produce fields and irrigation sources.
  6. The same standards for imports, enforced through FSVP, with results made public.

3. Count the sick again. On July 1, 2025, CDC dropped Cyclospora from FoodNet surveillance. When the biggest outbreak in history arrived, nobody was counting in the system built to count. Restore it, along with the other dropped pathogens, and fund the state and local labs that find outbreaks.

4. Rebuild the trip wire. The USDA’s Microbiological Data Program sampled produce in commerce for pathogens for about $5 million a year and triggered dozens of recalls before it was zeroed out in 2012. Rebuild it. It is the cheapest insurance policy the produce industry will ever be offered.

5. Finish the job on the other outbreaks. FDA’s list is about the lettuce outbreak. But this season FDA also opened four other Cyclospora investigations that sickened at least 313 people, and every one of them still lists the source as “not yet identified.” The Outbreak Investigation Report should explain why, and what it would have taken to solve them.

6. Agree on data sharing before the next outbreak. A standing protocol, worked out now, for industry to hand shipping, sourcing and test data to CDC and FDA within hours, so nobody is arguing with epidemiologists in the middle of an outbreak.

7. Verify sanitation at the farms that feed us. Cyclospora comes from human feces. Toilets, handwashing, worker health and water at farms supplying U.S. buyers should be checked by auditors who are not paid to pass. Training, which is what FDA proposes, is not verification.

8. Publish root cause analyses, all of them. FDA has promised one report. Taylor Farms should publish its own water results, from this year and from 2013. After every traced outbreak, the whole supply chain should get to learn what went wrong and what changed.

9. Stop rolling back FSMA. Every “burden” removed in the name of deregulation this decade was a tool someone needed this summer.

Three petitions

I have also drafted three citizen petitions to FDA that grow out of what went wrong this summer and, in the outbreaks, before it. I have not filed them yet, because I want the produce industry’s input, and ideally its signatures, first.

Name the firms. FDA named Taylor Farms de Mexico this time. Too often it does not, and an outbreak with no named firm becomes an outbreak blamed on an entire commodity. The first petition asks FDA to stop treating the identity of a firm implicated in an outbreak as confidential.

Publish the consignee lists. The recalled lettuce went to restaurants, institutions and stores across dozens of states, and consumers had almost no way of knowing whether the salad they ate came from one of them. USDA has published retail consignee lists for meat and poultry recalls since 2008. The second petition asks FDA to do the same in Class I recalls.

Let FDA sample where the evidence points. The third petition asks FDA to use its communicable disease authority under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act to require entry and sampling at an animal feeding operation once the agency has determined it is implicated in a multistate outbreak. That petition is aimed at E. coli and the leafy greens outbreaks of the past decade, not Cyclospora, which comes from people, not cattle. But the principle is the same one running through this whole post: FDA cannot fix what it is not allowed to look at.

Anyone who wants the drafts can have them. My email is bmarler@marlerclark.com.

Before the 2027 season

FDA has given itself until the 2027 growing season. That is about seven months. Its ten points will make the next investigation faster and smarter. They will not, by themselves, keep the parasite off the lettuce. That takes water standards, traceability that is enforced, verification on the farm, and a surveillance system that counts the sick. I would be happy to sit down with FDA and the industry and work on any of it. The cheapest outbreak is the one that never happens.

On October 5, 2026, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a policy statement in Pediatrics calling for a ban on the sale and distribution of raw milk and raw milk products, including raw milk cheeses, and telling pregnant people and children to consume only pasteurized dairy. It arrived while 13 people in nine states, more than half of them five years old or younger, are sick with E. coli O26:H11 from Graziers raw milk cheese made by Sierra Nevada Cheese Company of Willows, California. Eight are hospitalized. Three have hemolytic uremic syndrome. CDC last updated that count on September 25.

The pediatricians renewed a position they first took in 2014 and added bird flu to the list.

The statement, written by Adam J. Ratner, Anne Sardi and Mark R. Corkins for the Academy’s Committee on Infectious Diseases and Committee on Nutrition, replaces the January 2014 policy statement of the same two committees, which the Academy reaffirmed as recently as June 2025. The core has not moved in twelve years: unpasteurized milk and milk products from cows, goats and sheep continue to be a source of Listeria monocytogenes, E. coli O157, Salmonella, Campylobacter and Brucella infections, pasteurization greatly reduces that risk, and the claimed health benefits of raw milk lack evidence. What is new is H5N1. As News-Medical summarized the statement, the Academy notes that during the 2024 dairy cattle outbreak the virus turned up in close to a quarter of raw milk samples tested in affected areas and can stay detectable in refrigerated raw milk for weeks, though no human infection from drinking it has been confirmed. The same summary carries the two numbers that matter most to a parent: nearly half of raw dairy illnesses occur in people under 20, with a significant share in children under five, and listeriosis runs roughly 12 to 14 times more common in pregnancy than in the general population. I could not reach the full text through the journal’s site this morning, so the statistics above rest on the published abstract and on that report rather than on my own reading of every table.

Every risk the pediatricians describe has a name in this year’s outbreak files.

The Academy writes in the language of relative risk. The outbreak pages write in children. In the Graziers outbreak the median age is five, nine of nine people interviewed ate the cheese, and the company recalled every Graziers raw milk product in late September without lot codes because it could not say which batch was contaminated. Three of the thirteen developed HUS, the kidney failure that follows some Shiga toxin infections and that I wrote about on September 26 when the outbreak was announced. Last week ProPublica told the story of two little girls with HUS after raw goat milk from an unlicensed Riverside County dairy. The Academy’s statement does not mention either case. It does not need to. The children it is written for are the same ones.

Four outbreaks in thirty-one months came from cheese that followed the sixty-day rule.

Federal law has allowed raw milk cheese in interstate commerce since 1949 on one condition, found at 21 CFR 1240.61: the cheese must be aged at least sixty days. The Graziers labels read “Aged at least 60 days.” The table below is the record of the last four Shiga toxin E. coli outbreaks in cheese that met that rule, built from the agency pages linked in each row.

OutbreakCheeseSickHospitalizedHUS
Raw Farm, February 2024Raw cheddar, E. coliO157:H71152
Twin Sisters Creamery, October 2025Aged raw milk cheese, E. coli O103 and O261010
Raw Farm, March 2026Raw cheddar, E. coliO157:H7931
Sierra Nevada Graziers, September 2026Raw milk cheddar and jack, E. coli O26:H111383
Total 43176

Table 1. Shiga toxin-producing E. coli outbreaks in raw milk cheese aged sixty days or more, February 2024 to September 2026. Sources: FDA and CDC outbreak pages and Washington State Department of Health, as linked, read October 6, 2026. Check: 11 + 10 + 9 + 13 = 43 sick; 5 + 1 + 3 + 8 = 17 hospitalized; 2 + 0 + 1 + 3 = 6 HUS.

Forty-three sick, seventeen in the hospital and six with kidney failure is what sixty days of aging bought. FDA knew this was coming. In 2013 it published, with Health Canada, a quantitative risk assessment that put the per-serving listeriosis risk from raw milk soft-ripened cheese at 50 to 160 times that of the pasteurized version, and in August 2015 it opened a docket to reconsider the sixty-day rule. Eleven years later the rule is unchanged and the docket is quiet.

Twenty-seven states allow the sale, and the package says nothing.

The Academy counts at least 27 states that permit raw milk sales in some form. Whatever a state decides about milk, the cheese travels. Graziers went to retailers nationwide and online. FDA’s labeling rule at 21 CFR 101.17requires a warning statement on unpasteurized juice and a safe-handling statement on shell eggs. It requires nothing on cheese made from unpasteurized milk. California’s warning rule exempts cheese aged sixty days, and Washington’s covers milk only. A parent standing at a cheese counter is given the age of the cheese and not the reason the age exists.

A ban and a warning label are not competing answers.

The pediatricians ask legislators for a prohibition. I am asking FDA for a sentence. The citizen petition I published on September 27 asks the agency to require a prescribed warning statement on cheese made from unpasteurized milk, including cut-to-order, imported and online sales, and to finish the sixty-day reevaluation it announced in 2015. The draft petition is online, and because so many of you wrote in, I extended the comment period to October 15 and will file shortly after. The Academy’s statement will go into the record as support, because the two asks rest on the same facts and differ only in who is being asked. Congress and twenty-seven legislatures can debate a ban for years. FDA can put a warning on a label under authority it already uses for juice. A choice made without the material fact is not really a choice, and a label puts the fact where the decision is made.

Here is what a parent can do today without waiting for either of us.

Do not give raw milk or raw milk cheese to a child under five, to anyone who is pregnant, or to anyone with a weakened immune system; that is CDC’s standing advice and now the Academy’s. Treat “aged 60 days” as a legal minimum, not a safety claim. If you have any Graziers raw milk cheese, the recall covers every product in every size with no lot codes, so throw it out. If a child has diarrhea that turns bloody, see a doctor the same day and ask for a stool culture; do not give antidiarrheal medicine, and let the doctor decide about antibiotics, which can raise the risk of HUS in Shiga toxin infections. I have been doing this since 1993, and the family I now represent in the Graziers outbreak did not get that paragraph on the package. The pediatricians and I would both like it there before the next one.

The FDA has released its CORE+EP 2025 Annual Report, the yearly summary of foodborne outbreak and adverse event investigations handled by the Office of Coordinated Outbreak Response, Evaluation, & Emergency Preparedness. CORE works with CDC and state and local health departments to “find, stop, and aid in the prevention” of outbreaks linked to FDA-regulated food. Since October 2024 the office has also picked up food defense, traceability, and supply chain duties – hence the “+EP.”

The numbers

In 2025, CORE’s Signals and Surveillance Team evaluated 69 incidents – potential outbreaks, confirmed outbreaks, and certain adverse events. Of those, 26 were transferred to one of four Response Teams because the outbreak appeared to be caused by an FDA-regulated food. FDA issued 11 public health advisories.

Do the math: 26 responses, 11 advisories. FDA explains that most responses without an advisory are ones where a vehicle was never identified while the outbreak was ongoing, or there was no specific advice to give the public.

The 11 outbreaks that got advisories

According to the report, FDA advisories in 2025 covered: Salmonella Enteritidis and mini pastries (recall, Import Alert 99-19); Listeria monocytogenes and frozen shakes (recall); Listeria and ready-to-eat foods (recall, warning letter); Salmonella Montevideo and cucumbers (recall, warning letter); two separate Salmonella Enteritidis outbreaks linked to eggs (recalls); Salmonella Oranienburg and pistachio cream (recall, Import Alert 99-43); Listeria and prepared pasta meals (recall); Salmonella Anatum and Deep-brand frozen sprouted beans (recall, expanded recall, Import Alert 99-43); Salmonella Richmond and moringa powder (recall); and infant botulism and powdered infant formula.

The Director, Dr. Stic Harris, singled out three: the “historical” Salmonella cucumber outbreak, a Listeria outbreak tied to prepared meals that “challenged investigators,” and the “novel” outbreak of infant botulism linked to a single powdered infant formula brand.

Infant botulism and formula

The infant formula entry stands out in the report’s action table. Beyond the advisory, the recall, and an expanded recall, FDA lists a continued investigation, a letter to industry, and warning letters to Target, Albertsons, Kroger, and Walmart. Warning letters to four of the largest grocery retailers in the country, arising from an infant formula outbreak, is not something you see in a typical year.

As many of you know, we represent families whose babies were sickened in this outbreak. The investigation is not over, and neither is the work of figuring out how a product fed to the most vulnerable consumers we have ended up contaminated with Clostridium botulinum.

The ones the public did not hear about

Here is the part of the report I would read twice. In a footnote, FDA lists responses where a product was linked to illnesses but no advisory was issued: mangoes, cilantro, parsley, spring mix, and sprouts. FDA says this “is typically due to a lack of sufficient information about what is causing illnesses during the time of ongoing public health risk,” and that confirmed vehicles are reported on the CORE Investigation Table.

So in five outbreaks FDA knew the food, but the public got a line in a weekly table rather than a warning – and, in most cases, no brand, no grower, no retailer. That is precisely why I have asked FDA, through citizen petitions, to disclose the firms tied to outbreaks and to make recall consignee lists public. Consumers cannot protect themselves from “spring mix.” They can protect themselves from a named product sold at a named store.

And sprouts – again. Sprouts show up on this year’s list, and sprouted beans drove one of the advisories. Sprouts have been linked to outbreak after outbreak for decades, which is why I have petitioned FDA for a warning label on raw sprouts.

The rest of the report

The report also notes that CORE+EP launched Executive Incident Summary (EIS) Abstracts – redacted, high-level summaries of each Response Team investigation – and two Foodborne Outbreak Overview of Data (FOOD) Reports on food-pathogen pairs that keep causing outbreaks. Both are steps toward transparency, and both are welcome. On the food defense side, the office provided input on 66 domestic and one foreign food defense inspections and fielded more than 300 inquiries on the Food Traceability Rule.

The Director also opens by noting that the work continued “through organizational changes to the FDA in 2025.” That is a polite way of describing a hard year at the agency. The people doing this work deserve credit for getting it done.

But an annual report is a look backward. The question going forward is simple: when FDA knows what food is making people sick, will it tell the public – with names – while it still matters?

You can read the full CORE+EP 2025 Annual Report here.

Lisa Fletcher, Andrea Nejman and Nathan Aaron at Spotlight on America have kept digging on the ByHeart and Nara infant formula botulism outbreaks long after most of the press moved on. Their latest piece asks the question that matters most. Fifty babies were hospitalized and two brands were implicated, so where did the toxin come from?

The answer, three years after the first infection, is that nobody knows. According to the reporting, internal FDA documents show the agency traced the milk back to 22 dairies but never publicly identified them. Spotlight found no evidence that FDA sent investigators to those farms, even though a recent WHO panel identified the farm as the place where botulism risk begins. ByHeart told the reporters it had no visibility into which farms its supplier used, and Nara did not answer questions about its milk sources.

Barbara Kowalcyk, who lost her son Kevin to E. coli in 2001 and now directs GW’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security, called the traceability system broken. She had a pointed suggestion for manufacturers who can’t trace their own ingredients: “please go sell T-shirts instead.”

I’d add two things.

First, if you never go to the farm, and you never tell the public which farms were involved, you never find the root cause. If you never find the root cause, you get the next outbreak.

Second, testing for C. botulinum in infant formula is still not required. H.R. 7867 would change that. Congress got baby bottles and T-shirts from us last month as a reminder. It’s time to pass it.

Kudos to Spotlight on America for staying on this story.

Marler Clark has been retained by one of the Washington residents sickened in the Salmonella Bovismorbificans outbreak linked to broccoli sprouts grown by Evergreen Fresh Sprouts, LLC of Moyie Springs, Idaho. A disclosure, as always: the firm sued Evergreen on behalf of four people in its 2014 E. coli outbreak, and I have represented people sickened by raw sprouts since the early 2000s. Read accordingly.

Thirty-two sick in six states, and the federal pages have not moved since September 24

CDC’s outbreak page and FDA’s advisory were last updated September 24. They count 32 people infected with the outbreak strain in six states: 24 in Washington, four in Montana, and one each in Idaho, Minnesota, Oregon and Utah. Three have been hospitalized. No one has died. Illnesses began between July 7 and September 3, 2026. Patients range in age from 2 to 87, with a median of 52. Of the 27 people interviewed, 26 reported eating sprouts or microgreens; 22 named broccoli sprouts, and one a microgreen mix containing broccoli microgreens. CDC measures that against the 8.7 percent of people in its FoodNet Population Survey who report eating any sprouts, and concludes that broccoli sprouts are what made these people sick.

CDC also says the true number is likely much higher, because most people with Salmonella are never tested and because it takes three to four weeks to tie a new illness to an outbreak. Eleven days have passed without a federal update. CDC’s page still reads “Investigation status: Open.”

The Washington State Department of Health updated the same day: 24 cases in nine counties and two hospitalizations.

CountyCases
King7
Whatcom5
Spokane4
Clark2
Skagit2
Island1
Snohomish1
Walla Walla1
Yakima1
Total24

Washington cases by county of residence as of September 24, 2026 (7 + 5 + 4 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 24). Source: Washington State Department of Health.

This outbreak is separate from the alfalfa sprout outbreak traced to Everything Sprouts of Minnesota, which CDC put at 76 sick in 16 states on October 1. Between the two, 108 people have been sickened by raw sprouts this summer.

How the sprouts were tied to the illnesses

Whole genome sequencing showed the bacteria from the 32 patients are closely related, which is how PulseNet found the cluster. Then the product matched, three times. Montana investigators collected an unopened package of Evergreen broccoli sprouts from a sick person’s home, and sequencing showed it carried the outbreak strain. Washington investigators collected two more samples, one leftover from a patient and one from a retail location, and both carried it. FDA’s and the states’ traceback identified Evergreen Fresh Sprouts as the grower. In the company’s three outbreaks since 2011, this is the first time a product sample has matched the people.

Thirty of the 32 patient isolates and two food samples showed no predicted antimicrobial resistance. Two patient isolates were predicted resistant to streptomycin, sulfisoxazole and tetracycline, which CDC says is unlikely to affect the antibiotics used to treat most patients.

The recall came after the illnesses

FDA says Evergreen initiated a recall on September 4, the day it stopped producing broccoli sprouts, after the Montana sample tested positive. The company’s notice reached FDA’s recall page on September 10. It covers 215 cases, six four-ounce bags to a case, delivered to three Washington distributors between August 24 and September 2, with use-by dates of September 7, 9, 11, 14 and 16 and UPC 8 38796 00105 1. FDA says the sprouts were sold to grocery stores, restaurants and food service customers in Idaho, Montana and Washington and may have been distributed further. Minnesota, Oregon and Utah each have a patient, and none of the three is on the distribution map.

Set the recall against the illnesses. The first people got sick on July 7. As I wrote on September 24, 25 of the 32 onsets fall on or before August 23, the day before the first recalled bag was delivered. The recall could have reached, at most, the last seven illnesses. For the other 25, the sprouts were eaten and gone weeks before anyone said the product had a name. That is the ordinary shape of a sprout outbreak, and it is why a recall is a public health tool and not a measure of who was hurt.

Salmonella has been found in a broccoli seed lot, and FDA’s outbreak pages do not mention it

On October 2, FDA posted a recall by EAK Distribution LLC of Casper, Wyoming, of HOME GROWN Green Sprouting Calabrese Broccoli Seeds sold on Amazon to customers nationwide between August 20 and September 18, lot code AUG172026, UPC 850056627443. EAK says its seed supplier told it on September 16 that bulk broccoli seed lot W4105, the lot EAK had packaged, had been “identified as being used by a sprout grower whose finished product were part of an FDA investigation” into a multistate outbreak; that the supplier recalled the bulk lot; and that on September 28 the supplier reported FDA had collected and analyzed a sample of the seed and detected Salmonella.

The notice names neither the supplier, the grower nor the outbreak, and it does not have to. FDA has two sprout outbreaks open. One is alfalfa, traced to a Tennessee seed lot. The other is broccoli sprouts grown by Evergreen. A broccoli seed lot used by a sprout grower whose product is in a multistate outbreak investigation, with Salmonella in the seed, describes this outbreak. FDA has not said so. Its Evergreen advisory still says the agency is working “to determine the source of contamination,” and its outbreak table records that sampling has begun and reports no result. The supplier’s recall of the bulk lot, which EAK says happened by September 16, is not on FDA’s recall page. I wrote about the notice in detail on Friday.

Seed does not expire the way sprouts do; a pouch bought in August will be in a pantry next spring. It is the second time in six weeks that the seed behind a sprout outbreak has reached home sprouters. In the alfalfa outbreak the implicated lot was sold by Todd’s Seeds and by Berlin Seeds, into 44 states.

The third Evergreen outbreak since 2011

I set out the company’s record on September 3. In 2011, CDC linked 25 Salmonella Enteritidis illnesses in five states to alfalfa and spicy sprouts sold under the Evergreen Produce label; the company declined FDA’s request for a recall until the agency warned the public directly, then recalled on July 1. In 2014, 19 people in six states were infected with E. coli O121 from Evergreen’s raw clover sprouts and seven were hospitalized; there was no recall, and FDA’s inspection report described condensate and irrigation water dripping from rusty valves and a corroded pitchfork used to move sprouts. Marler Clark filed four lawsuits on behalf of people sickened in that outbreak. With this year’s 32, the company’s three outbreaks account for 76 illnesses.

What the law says for the people who got sick

Washington’s Product Liability Act makes a manufacturer strictly liable for harm caused by a product that was not reasonably safe in construction. The claimant does not have to prove negligence. Fresh sprouts carrying Salmonella are a product that was not reasonably safe when it left the grower, and, depending on the facts, the stores and restaurants that sold or served them may be liable as well. The proof is the proof the health departments already assembled: a laboratory-confirmed infection, a whole genome sequencing match to the outbreak strain, and evidence of what was eaten: a receipt, a loyalty card record, a restaurant order or the health department’s own interview. Damages include medical bills, lost wages and the cost of recovery, and Salmonella leaves some people with reactive arthritis or irritable bowel syndrome that does not resolve.

If you were sickened in this outbreak, keep the package or a photograph of it and any receipt, report your illness to your health department (Washington’s online form is here), and ask that your stool isolate be preserved. Isolates are routinely discarded, and sequencing is what ties an illness to the outbreak.

A label before the next one

FDA has told children, older adults, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems not to eat raw sprouts since 1998, and that advice has never appeared on a package of sprouts or a pouch of sprouting seed. The draft citizen petition asking FDA to require a warning statement on both is open for comment through October 15; the revised draft is here. Read it and tell me what I got wrong before I file it.

Marler Clark represents a Washington resident sickened in this outbreak and continues to investigate it. The firm’s outbreak page is here. Call 1-800-884-9840 or email bmarler@marlerclark.com.

On October 2, 2026, FDA closed its investigation of the largest multistate Cyclospora outbreak on record. FDA said the two positive environmental samples – one from a tank of outgoing wastewater at the Taylor Farms de Mexico processing plant, one from a drainage ditch at a grower in the traceback – add to the strong epidemiological data and traceback convergence supporting the link to the recalled iceberg lettuce.

No lettuce tested positive. Taylor Farms has made that its point. Its Cyclospora information hub stresses the absence of a positive product sample, even as it says it stands behind the decision to recall.

That argument has surface appeal. It borrows the vocabulary of laboratory proof. And it asks for a standard that no public health agency in this country uses.

What an outbreak link is built on

Investigators use three kinds of evidence: epidemiology, traceback, and food or environmental testing. CDC’s published investigation steps say that when food eaten by several sick people shares a common point in the supply chain, that convergence can confirm the food is the source. Finding the strain in a food can “also” confirm it. Also – not only.

CDC goes further. Officials can act on strong epidemiological evidence alone and do not have to wait on a laboratory to find the outbreak strain in the food. And CDC says the reverse is true too: finding the strain in a food cannot by itself confirm the source unless interviews show sick people ate it.

CDC’s Field Epidemiology Manual puts it in training terms. Investigators generally identify the likely source when two of the three lines of evidence are clear and convincing. For short shelf-life foods – the manual uses leafy greens as its example – testing may be impossible, so investigators rely on the other two. And a negative result does not rule a food out.

USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service defines an implicated product the same way: strong evidence from two of the three sources. The CIFOR guidelines, written by the state epidemiologists, local health departments and public health labs with CDC, FDA and USDA, tell investigators to pull a food when exposure data link it to illness even if the pathogen has not been isolated from the food.

Why the lettuce is never there to test

The lettuce that made people sick was eaten three or four weeks before anyone knew there was an outbreak. That is CDC’s own reporting lag. What gets tested is what is left – which is, by definition, other lettuce.

And contamination is sparse and uneven. Do the arithmetic. If one head in a hundred is contaminated and you test sixty with a perfect test, every result comes back negative 55 percent of the time. At one in a thousand, 94 percent. For Cyclospora, which cannot be cultured and is hard to detect on produce at all, the test is far from perfect.

In FDA’s fall 2019 romaine investigation, teams took 406 sub-samples across Salinas Valley farms. One matched. The only product positives came from two intact packages sitting in sick people’s refrigerators. That is how product positives happen – luck, not systematic testing.

The industry has said this itself

Here is where the defense runs into its own allies. Western Growers told growers this July that testing for Cyclospora is not recommended because of sampling and technological limits that may give a false sense of security. The California and Arizona Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements opened their 2026 webinar with “Testing is not the answer.”

The International Fresh Produce Association’s own 2026 outbreak FAQ says the recall and the outbreak findings rested on epidemiology and traceback, not on a positive lab test, and that the absence of a positive sample did not mean those findings were wrong.

In November 2018, with no grower, processor or brand identified and no romaine positive, the produce industry urged a halt to all romaine shipments. That was the industry acting on epidemiology alone. It was right to.

The record

The 2018 Yuma romaine outbreak – 210 sick, five dead – was solved without a single positive head of romaine; the strain turned up in canal water. In 2013, Nebraska and Iowa traced a Cyclospora outbreak to salad mix from Taylor Farms de Mexico on interviews and records, with no product positive. Taylor Farms suspended production on that evidence. Same company, same kind of proof, thirteen years ago.

In 2011, Germany stopped an E. coli O104:H4 outbreak that sickened more than 3,800 people by implicating sprouts on a case-control study, a restaurant cohort and product tracing. As a 2025 Eurosurveillance perspective put it, laboratory evidence is neither sufficient on its own nor a prerequisite for action.

Closer to home, after a negative lettuce test in the November 2024 St. Louis outbreak, the county health department said plainly that a negative result did not rule out the salad. The epidemiology was the most compelling evidence.

What the argument really asks for

Take the “nothing tested positive” defense seriously and follow it to the end. The implicated product is almost always gone. Produce testing is insensitive. Some pathogens cannot be cultured at all. A rule that no company is the source until its product tests positive is a rule under which no produce outbreak could ever be attributed to anyone.

That is not a standard of proof. It is a standard of immunity. CDC, FDA, USDA, CIFOR, Western Growers, the LGMAs and IFPA have each rejected it in writing.

I spent four hours Sunday morning taking the deposition of an expert retained by the defense in the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak of November 2024 – the one traced to romaine lettuce that sickened 89 people in 15 states, hospitalized 36, put seven into kidney failure and killed one, and that FDA closed in January 2025 without a word to the public and without naming the grower or the processor. Four of the seven with HUS are my clients; two are children who each spent about two weeks on dialysis. The expert’s opinion was that children dialyzed that long have a less than fifty percent chance of needing a kidney transplant. That is the defense: the odds are better than a coin flip. It is little solace to a child who has already had a catheter in a vein, or to the parents who sat beside the machine. It may explain why I am less patient than usual today with the leafy greens industry, and with one grower and processor in particular. The company my clients are suing over that romaine, which denies its product was the source, is the company whose outgoing wastewater FDA reported positive for Cyclospora on Friday.

A disclosure, as always: Marler Clark represents people sickened in this summer’s outbreak and in the 2024 romaine outbreak and has filed suits against the Taylor Farms companies in both. Read accordingly.

On October 2, FDA closed its investigation of the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history – 12,883 sick, 570 hospitalized and two dead in 21 states – and reported the parasite in outgoing wastewater at the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant and in a drainage ditch at a traceback grower. Taylor Farms rewrote its outbreak page the same day. Mexico’s Secretaría de Salud and its regulator, Cofepris, answered on October 3. Guanajuato’s Secretaría del Campo issued a bulletin that afternoon. Side by side, the first two could have come from one outline.

The argument, in two voices

Taylor Farms says no product sample tested positive, that its own roughly 2,000 samples in central Mexico since May were all negative, and that epidemiology cannot confirm a product caused illness without a positive lab test of the product. Cofepris says its National Reference Laboratory tested raw material, finished product and water from the plant and found nothing, and that FDA’s environmental findings do not, by themselves, constitute evidence that agricultural products were the source.

Half of FDA’s sentence. Both quote FDA’s line that there is not enough evidence to conclusively determine how contamination occurred; Taylor Farms repeats it twice, Cofepris builds on it, and neither finishes the sentence.

The samples prove nothing. Taylor Farms says the wastewater sample was discharged sewer water outside the facility, taken more than three weeks after production stopped, and that the grower with the positive ditch is no longer a supplier. Cofepris says finding organisms in waste drains does not by itself show that vegetables bound for export were contaminated.

Each draws the same conclusion. Taylor Farms: FDA has no confirmed positive for any Taylor Farms product. Cofepris: the available information does not establish, through conclusive analytical evidence, that Mexican products were the origin of the outbreak – and said the same of the jalapeño Salmonella Javiana outbreak closed the same day.

What the argument leaves out

The other half of FDA’s sentence. FDA’s October 2 update reads in full: 

“While there is currently not enough evidence to conclusively determine how contamination occurred in this outbreak, the positive samples show that Cyclospora was present in the environment where lettuce was grown and processed. This adds to the strong epidemiological data and traceback convergence supporting the link between this outbreak and recalled shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico.” 

The same update says the traceback identified several farms and a processing facility and that FDA remains confident the recalled lettuce is off the market. That is an agency standing behind its conclusion. The half-sentence traveled to Salinas and Mexico City; the whole one did not.

Mexico’s negatives have a date. Cofepris collected ten iceberg samples and four water samples on July 18 through 20. The recalled lettuce shipped from June 29 to July 16, and the plant suspended production on July 18. IFPA’s own page explains why that matters: implicated product is often gone by the time testing becomes possible. A negative on July 20 says nothing about June 29.

Taylor Farms’ 2,000 samples have a question attached. The company told the New York Times in August that its fecal indicator testing covered all its water sources and every test was negative. Indicator tests look for bacteria; FDA’s validated method looks for the parasite and found it. The company has not said what its 2,000 samples tested for.

The genotype answer has two halves. Taylor Farms’ FAQ asks whether the environmental positives match the outbreak genotype and answers No, then concedes that FDA is still analyzing the results and had not confirmed a match as of October 2. Not yet confirmed and No are different answers.

The industry already answered this argument, in writing

IFPA’s consumer page, frozen on September 14, answers the question Was a specific food identified? with Yes. It says the recall and the outbreak findings rested on epidemiology and traceback, not a positive laboratory test, and that the absence of a positive sample did not mean the epidemiological and traceback findings were wrong. Western Growers told its members in July that testing for Cyclospora is not recommended, because sampling and technological limits make it of little value and may provide a false sense of security. The California LGMA’s statement accepted Mexican-grown lettuce as the likely source.

Those are the industry’s words, and they describe what two thousand-odd negatives are being used for now. On Friday I asked the industry to retire the water story; the replacement is the no-product-positive story, now with a government behind it. Since October 2, I can find nothing from IFPA, Western Growers or the leafy greens marketing agreements on FDA’s findings. Taylor Farms co-founded the Center for Produce Safety, helped create the LGMAs and hosts the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology. No association wants to referee between a founding member and the FDA.

But the silence has a cost. In Mexico, the only argument readers have seen is Cofepris’s. In Washington, a standard is hardening – no product positive, no case – that will be used against the next investigation, including the next one that clears California growers.

A request to eight people

Yesterday, I published a list of what would fix this and offered the industry three draft citizen petitions. Today I am asking eight people, by name, to answer. Max Teplitski and Eric Stevens at the International Fresh Produce Association. De Ann Davis and Joelle Mosso at Western Growers. Tim York at the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement. Hilary Thesmar at FMI. Greg Ferrara at the National Grocers Association. Lance Jungmeyer at the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, which represents Mexican produce importers.

Two things.

First, go down the list and say, item by item, what you support, what you oppose, and why. The items are short: repeal the traceability delay and comply with FSMA 204 now; numeric standards and routine testing for pre-harvest water on high-risk produce; parasite testing of growing and processing water where outbreaks have happened; processor wastewater kept away from fields, canals and product; a kill step that works on parasites; feedlot setbacks and watershed monitoring; the same standards for imports under FSVP; Cyclospora back in FoodNet; a produce testing trip wire like the Microbiological Data Program; one genotyping standard; data shared with CDC and FDA in hours; verified worker sanitation at supplier farms; published root cause analyses, Taylor Farms’ water results included; and no more support for FSMA rollbacks. If an item is wrong, say why; if it works only in another form, say which.

Second, ask me for the three petition drafts: FDA sampling at feedlots implicated in outbreaks, naming the firms implicated in outbreaks, and consignee lists with ten-day classification for every Class I recall. Tell me what is wrong with them; I would rather hear it from you than from FDA.

I will publish every response in full, unedited and under the author’s name, here, and I will say where it changed my mind.

The Global Produce & Floral Show opens in Orlando on October 13. An answer before then would let the industry walk in with a position on the record. My email is bmarler@marlerclark.com.

One plant, one grower

FDA’s finding is narrow: one plant and one grower in Guanajuato. An argument that says that finding proves nothing is an argument that no finding will ever prove anything about this parasite, because no product will ever test positive in time. The industry can say that, or it can say what its own page said on September 14. It cannot say both. I would like to know which.