Personal Injury Law

Families sue raw milk producer, Organic Pastures, over E. coli outbreak

Posted on February 08, 2008
The Associated Press reports that the families of two children sickened by the E. coli bacteria are suing a Fresno dairy.  The lawsuits filed Thursday in Fresno County Superior Court accuse Organic Pastures Dairy Co. of shipping raw milk tainted with the bacteria to stores in September 2006...

Salmonella Outbreak Sickens 33 Leading to Recall of Ahi in Hawaii

Posted on February 08, 2008
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported again on the ongoing story last week of about 33 illness of Salmonella Paratyphi B tied to the consumption of yellow fin Tuna Ahi. Now Choyce Products announced that it has voluntarily recalled 11,000 pounds of previously frozen yellow fin tuna that tested positive for salmonella...

Who's Minding the Store? - The Current State of Food Safety and How It Can Be Improved - Friday & Saturday, April 11 & 12, 2008

Posted on February 05, 2008
"Seminar in Seattle" - Registration Below.  Few subjects draw more immediate attention or concern than the safety of the food we eat. Recent years have included a plethora of food warnings and recalls, raising new questions about the quality and integrity of our existing system for assuring food safety...

Enterobacter sakazakii: Infections Associated with Powdered Infant Formula

Posted on February 05, 2008
Enterobacter sakazakii is a gram-negative rod-shaped bacterium within the family Enterobacteriaceae. The organism was called "yellow-pigmented Enterobacter cloacae" until 1980 when it was renamed Enterobacter sakazakii. The majority of cases of infection reported in the peer-reviewed literature have described neonates with sepsis, meningitis, or necrotizing enterocolitis as a consequence of the infection...

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E. Coli Lawyer Is Busier Than Ever

Posted on February 04, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A girl fell into a 40-day coma after eating a bad Jack in the Box hamburger. Fifteen years later, she is still suffering ill effects. That doesn't bode well for a toddler who spent six weeks in the hospital in 2006 after eating E...

Abusing Downer Cows and Feeding Them to Our Kids - It is All About Making a Buck

Posted on February 03, 2008
The recent YouTube video is certainly shocking, but nothing new - we have simply not been paying attention. Schools are scrambling to pull downer meat off the menu because cows are being abused, and even Agricultural Secretary Ed Schafers issues a statement on downer cow brutality: "I am deeply concerned about the allegations made regarding inhumane handling of non-ambulatory disabled cattle in a federally inspected slaughter establishment…...

Minnesota Department of Health and CDC Pins Name on Pig Slaughterhouse Illness - Progressive Inflammatory Neuropathy

Posted on February 02, 2008
Lauran Neergaard of the AP again breaks another disturbing story about the dangers of our food supply.  She reports this evening that Investigators are preparing to test pig brains as they struggle to tell what is causing a mysterious nerve illness affecting pork plant workers in Minnesota and Indiana...

Schools, Burger Chains Ban Beef from Hallmark and Westland

Posted on February 02, 2008
The Associated Press reported that hamburger chains Jack-In-the-Box and In-N-Out, as well more than 150 school districts around the nation, have banned meat from a Chino, California slaughterhouse after a video showed workers brutalizing sick and crippled cows...

Whittier Farms Shutting for Good in Response to Listeria Deaths

Posted on February 02, 2008
The Associated Press reported this morning that a fifth-generation owner of a milk processing plant is shutting down after the dairy was linked to a listeria outbreak that resulted in the deaths of three people and the miscarriage of a child. State health officials identified various strains of the bacteria in milk samples and on equipment at the plant in December, when operations were suspended once the listeria link was made...

"Bug Sites" Updated

Posted on January 31, 2008
In 1998 when I started Marler Clark, Al Gore had only recently invented the internet (only kidding).  Search Engines were new and Google was probably being run out of someone's basement.   Because I was in the middle of many of the earliest food poisoning battles, like Jack in the Box and Odwalla, I had a lot of research collected on most of the nasty bugs that plague our food supply and the illnesses caused by contracting them...

Why I Still Have A Job

Posted on January 30, 2008
I suppose I should be shocked by the headline at KTLA today: “Local Slaughterhouse Used Sick Cows to Feed School Children,” but I have grown a bit too cynical for that. Apparently, Hallmark Meat Packing Co. of Chino, California has been cited for violating food safety and animal cruelty laws after video footage showed workers kicking, shocking and otherwise abusing "downed" cows - considered too sick or injured to walk - to force them into a federally inspected slaughterhouse...

Seattle Morning Sky

Posted on January 29, 2008

More on the E. coli "Uptick"

Posted on January 27, 2008
So, first some facts:  the CDC reports that Escherichia coli O157:H7 is a leading cause of foodborne illness.  Based on a 1999 estimate, 73,000 cases of infection and 61 deaths occur in the United States each year.   The CDC found also that from 1996-2004, the incidence of E...

Dr. Paul Effler, Hawaii State Epidemiologist Cracks the Case of Salmonella Ahi

Posted on January 26, 2008
Helen Altonn of the Hawaii Star Bulletin profiled crack Epidemiologist, Dr. Paul Effler, as he helped break the outbreak of a rare type of salmonella poisoning on Oahu that is linked to similar cases on the mainland. The case was cracked through the use of "genetic fingerprints" of the bacteria's DNA...

Words not Usually Associated with Food Safety

Posted on January 26, 2008
My insomnia got the better of me this morning.  So, as I cruised the Internet for tidbits on food poisoning I found a few interesting morsels.  Lately I have been obsessing about how the safety of raw milk has become so tied up with anti-big Ag, save the family farm and the un-verified health benefits...

Salmonella Turtles Attack in 33 States

Posted on January 25, 2008
Multistate Outbreak of Human Salmonella Infections Associated with Exposure to Turtles --- United States, 2007--2008 As of January 18, 2008, a total of 103 cases with isolates indistinguishable from the outbreak strain had been reported to CDC from 33 states...

I donate to International Food Safety Network, or is it "Barfblog?"

Posted on January 25, 2008
From the pages of "Barfblog:" Fifteen years ago this week, Seattle lawyer Bill Marler and Kansas State University professor Douglas Powell were drawn into the food safety arena when the Washington Department of Health announced that Jack in the Box restaurants were the source of a multi-state outbreak of E...

Food-Borne Illness Litigation

Posted on January 24, 2008
Advanced Strategies for Managing and Defending Food Contamination Claims Thursday, February 28, 2008 to Friday, February 29, 2008 Millennium Resort, Scottsdale McCormick Ranch, Scottsdale, AZ, United States Overview 2007 was the year of the recall, with E...

A Room With A View

Posted on January 23, 2008

Well, I got my Raw Milk T-shirt and Button

Posted on January 22, 2008
I also had the chance, sitting here at the Seattle Airport on my way to a status conference in the E. coli outbreak from the summer of 2006 involving a Wendy’s restaurant in Utah, to read again the full report on the Organic Pastures raw milk outbreak from the fall of 2006...

Marler Clark to Test Retail Hamburger for Non-O157:H7 Pathogenic Shiga Toxin Producing E. coli

Posted on January 22, 2008
2007 was a record year for hamburger-related food safety recalls - over 20 individual recalls involving over 33 million pounds of meat. Because of the failure of the beef industry and government to protect the public, the law firm of Marler and Clark has approved a project to commission a baseline study to determine the prevalence of non-O157:H7 pathogenic shiga toxin producing E...

Food Poisoning Can Be Long-Term Problem

Posted on January 21, 2008
Lauran Neergaard of the Associated Press in Washington wrote this well done, but ominious article about the long-term impacts of food poisoning on its victims. The opening sentence says it all: “It's a dirty little secret of food poisoning: E...

Mao Would Be Proud

Posted on January 21, 2008
I was reading The China Daily (my source of “real news”) and stumbled across this article by Zhu Zhe – “Beijing food, drug safety drive 'complete success.’”  Unlike Food Safety Authorities in every other part of the world, Chinese “[a]uthorities in Beijing Wednesday declared the city's four-month campaign against unsafe food and drugs a "complete success"...

Chuy's Mesquite Broiler Implicated in Hepatitis A Scare - Vaccine Shots to be Available After Shortage

Posted on January 21, 2008
According to the Kern Faculty Medical Group, they expect to have enough hepatitis A vaccine shots after supplies temporarily ran out Saturday. The medical group had given about 90 vaccine shots Saturday morning before supplies ran out, said Dr. Mansukh Ghadiya with the clinic...

We Don't Cover Norovirus Enough

Posted on January 20, 2008
I don't talk about norovirus much on the pages of my blog despite the fact that norovirus is estimated to cause 23 million cases of acute gastroenteritis (commonly called the "stomach flu") in the U.S. each year, and are the leading cause of gastroenteritis...

Raw Milk Legislation Makes Hay on Both Coasts - Is It about Health or Money?

Posted on January 19, 2008
I missed out on the Legislative Hearing in California on Raw Milk bacterial limits.  However, one of my crack lawyers was there and the hearing is all of tape for later use (from the video it reminds me of a Grateful Dead concert).  The bottom line seems to be that the lawmakers felt the Department of Agriculture had not adequately informed them of possible opposition, and that the two major producers of raw milk would be put out of business because they could not meet the new standards...

Another Restaurant Employee Infected with Hepatitis A

Posted on January 19, 2008
It reads like the who’s who of restaurants - Carl's Jr., Chi-Chi's, D'Angelo's, Friendly's, Houlihan's, Maple Lawn Dairy, McDonald's, Quizno's, Silver Grill Location Catering, Subway, Taco Bell – who we have sued over the last dozen years for allowing either a Hepatitis A infected worker to serve food, or serve food already infected with Hepatitis A...

New Era Botulism Beans Recalled - Again

Posted on January 18, 2008
New Era Canning Company of New Era, Michigan is recalling all cans of green beans and garbanzo beans in #10 cans (large cans containing between 6 and 7 pounds) because they may have been processed under conditions which could have led to contamination by Clostridium botulinum bacterium spores, which can cause life-threatening illness or death...

Foodborne Outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium Infections Associated with Quiznos Restaurant in Rochester, Minnesota

Posted on January 18, 2008
As part of our investigation on behalf of several clients sickened in this outbreak, we were provided the report by the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH).  The significant parts are below as is the full report.Background On October 16, 2007 the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) Public Health Laboratory (PHL) identified seven case isolates of Salmonella Typhimurium with indistinguishable pulsed-field gel electrophoresis patterns (subtype designated TM5b) through routine surveillance...

Welcome New Readers - Tony Roma's and Rochester Meat

Posted on January 17, 2008
I think it is great to have new folks (other than my mom) reading my blog.  A hearty welcome to: Both have logged on multiple times over the last few days.  They appear to be some of my more frequent visitors - some of which include, ConAgra, Cargill and Topps...

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