Saturday, October 24, 2026
Last Saturday’s Weekend Wrap-Up was about the wrong door: a chicken wrap outbreak at 50 sick whose first brand name came from a courthouse, an Oregon Salmonella advisory that reached doctors and no one else, and three FDA explanations posted weeks to months after the illnesses ended. This week the government did say the names — in an email to a reporter, in a line of an enforcement database, in a state’s own tally — and in every case the page the public is told to read still says less than the record behind it. USDA confirmed Trader Joe’s wraps to USA TODAY on Friday while its outbreak table still calls the product a suspect. FDA’s enforcement report carries the name of the seed company its sprout advisory still calls the seed supplier. Virginia counts 55 oyster illnesses in 19 states where CDC counts 27 in 12, and every one of the eight oyster samples Virginia pulled from the river on October 13 came back positive. FDA closed a 119-person SalmonellaNewport outbreak that never got a food, an inspection or a CDC notice. The through-line is two sets of books: the record the agencies keep, and the one they publish.
The government finally named Trader Joe’s wraps — by email, to a reporter, on a Friday afternoon. USA TODAY asked the Food Safety and Inspection Service about the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak FDA carries as ref 1421 and FSIS as 2026-04, and on October 23 an FSIS spokesperson answered by email that the investigation had identified chicken wraps from certain Trader Joe’s stores as a common exposure, that the wraps had been removed from the market before the link was established, that extensive product testing has been negative and that the chicken is unlikely to be the source (the USA TODAY report, as republished by the Spokesman-Review). Trader Joe’s had told the same paper on October 20 that it pulled its Tarragon Chicken Salad Wraps from shelves in nine states after FDA flagged a possible issue in September. None of that is on an agency page. FDA’s table, re-stamped October 21, still reads multi-ingredient wrap with chicken, suspect, 50 sick, traceback, inspection and sampling checked, no recall, no advisory, no brand, no states, no hospitalizations; FSIS’s own outbreak page links back to FDA’s. I wrote up the email and what it means Friday.
Massachusetts, North Carolina and a quality department in New Jersey supplied the rest of the record. Health department records obtained for the two women in Gottlieb and Bright v. Trader Joe’s (No. 2:26-cv-12017, C.D. Cal., filed October 15) show CDC counting 39 cases in 13 states by mid-September, 20 of 21 interviewed shopping at Trader Joe’s and 12 of 16 naming the Tarragon Chicken Salad Wrap; the case work names F&S Fresh Foods of Vineland, New Jersey, as the maker, and that firm’s quality systems coordinator had already contacted one of the sick before any agency named a product. North Carolina listed the Pembroke plaintiff’s exposure as a wrap from Trader Joe’s (WRAL). The NCBI cluster that corresponds to this outbreak held about 40 clinical isolates through October 20. Fifty people, two federal agencies, a retailer, a manufacturer and a state — and the only official sentence naming any of them went to a newspaper. The fix is the one in my two draft citizen petitions, open for comment through October 30, which Food Safety News ran Friday as a Publisher’s Platform.
A new multistate outbreak arrived with two counts, and the public was handed the smaller one.CDC posted its first notice October 19: 27 people sick with Salmonella in 12 states, five of 21 with information hospitalized, no deaths, illnesses beginning May 29 through September 14, ten reporting raw oysters, and traceback for seven of ten running to Little Wicomico Oyster Company on Virginia’s Little Wicomico River. FDA’s safety alert the same day named the serotype, Telelkebir, the dealer certification VA-1421-SP and a harvest window of September 18 to October 8, with distribution to 15 states and the District of Columbia. Virginia had been counting since before either page existed: its own tally, posted October 21, was 55 sick in 19 states with the newest illness beginning October 6 — inside the recalled harvest window, where every one of CDC’s 27 began before it. Friday the Virginia Department of Health added the result that matters most: all eight oyster meat samples from the 400 oysters it pulled from river cages October 13 tested positive for Salmonella. A second 400-oyster round came out October 21, fecal-contamination samples October 22, and the genetic results are promised next week. The river closed October 9 for an initial 30 days and reopens only after three consecutive negative rounds. Georgia’s agriculture department lists the oysters as sold at Publix under the James River Oysters name through October 14, five days after the recall. Marler Clark was retained this week by a Colorado resident sickened in this outbreak. I covered the two counts and why every illness began before the recall window as they happened, with the recall detail on Food Poison Journal.
The seed company behind the Evergreen sprout outbreak has a name in FDA’s enforcement database and none on FDA’s advisory. Event 99985 in the enforcement report, surfaced by Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert October 22 and Food Safety News October 23, lists Wild West Seed Inc. of Albany, Oregon, recalling 9,476 pounds of broccoli sprouting seed in 50-pound bags — Green Sprouting Calabrese lot 4105 and Waltham 29 lot 4475, which the report describes as the same seed relabeled at a consignee’s request — for Salmonella, shipped to consignees in eleven states and the United Kingdom, customers notified by letter, no press release, no class and no date reported. Lot 4105 is the supplier lot W4105 named on the EAK Distribution, Eden Brothers and Gardeners Basics retail notices earlier this month. FDA’s sprout advisory, still stamped October 9, says a seed sample from the supplier tested positive and matched the outbreak strain by whole genome sequencing, and still does not say who the supplier is. The outbreak itself is unchanged since September 24: 32 sick in six states, 24 of them in Washington, three hospitalized. FDA has not stated the connection in words. The record states it in a lot number.
FDA closed a 119-person Newport outbreak this week without ever naming a food, and the ledger of the unnamed went up, not down. The table re-stamped October 21 moved ref 1403 — posted August 26 at 84 sick, then 97, 109, 111 and 116 with sampling, never inspected, no advisory, no CDC notice — to 119 and ended. A second no-food file, ref 1379, Listeria, 11 sick since July 22, ended the same day. The Listeriafile at ref 1417 grew to 46 and got an on-site inspection and sampling; the Cyclospora file at ref 1392 ticked to 241. Fifteen active rows now carry nine with no food named and 630 people in them, up from 626 last Saturday; seven of those nine rows are marked ended, 573 people whose outbreak is over and whose food was never posted. Add the 50 in the wrap row FDA labels a suspect and 680 of the people on FDA’s active page are sick from something the page will not say. CDC’s dashboard, re-stamped the same day, works 29 multistate investigations — 18 Salmonella, seven E. coli, three Listeria, one Campylobacter — down from 30; FSIS lists one. I ran the arithmetic on the closure and on the three tables separately.
The named outbreaks held still, which in late October is its own kind of news. Alfalfa sprouts: 76 sick in 16 states, six hospitalized, unchanged since October 1, with that seed supplier also unnamed on FDA’s advisory. Graziers raw milk cheese: 13 sick in nine states, eight hospitalized, three with hemolytic uremic syndrome, unchanged since September 25. The Deschutes County clinician advisory on a multistate Salmonella Enteritidis outbreak produced no public notice, count or food in its second week, and Monongalia County, West Virginia, has not updated its Salmonella cluster since September 30.
A pumpkin farm petting zoo in Illinois closed Friday with five Shiga toxin infections under investigation. The Will County Health Department said October 23 that five laboratory-confirmed Shiga toxin-producing E. coli infections may be connected to visits to Bengtson’s Pumpkin Farm in Homer Glen on or after September 29; the department contacted the farm Wednesday, the farm closed its petting zoo until further notice and arranged for a veterinarian to sample its animals, and no serotype, ages, hospitalizations or HUS have been released (ABC7 Chicago, Herald-News). I put the questions the Compendium says investigators should be asking in a post Friday, with the consumer version on Food Poison Journal. In Overland Park, Kansas, the Johnson County health department declared the Bentwood Elementary norovirus outbreak over at 97 sick, 95 of them students and staff, two lab-confirmed.
The week’s biggest recall had no pathogen in it, and the week’s most dangerous product had no recall at all. Kayem Foods of Chelsea, Massachusetts, recalled about 1,584,361 pounds of ready-to-eat bacon, hot dogs, sausage, turkey breast and ham October 17 — more than a hundred products under the Kayem, Al Fresco, McKenzie and other labels, produced March 31 through October 7, sold nationwide and in Hong Kong — for possible temperature abuse in a warehouse cooler, found after a customer complained of warm product on delivery; Class I, no confirmed illnesses (Food Safety News). FSIS’s website would not load all week; that link is FSIS’s own GovDelivery bulletin. At the other end, FDA advised consumers Friday not to eat cold-smoked sprats from D&M Smoked Fish, doing business as Haifa Smoked Fish of Jamaica, New York, sold in bulk boxes to restaurants and seafood counters in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, after an inspection found the fish made without the controls that keep Clostridium botulinum from growing — and after the firm declined FDA’s request to recall. In between, Lidl US recalled Gelatelli coffee and vanilla gelato in nine states and the District of Columbia for Listeria found in routine testing, no illnesses. Phyllis Entis’s daily ledger at eFoodAlert carried all of it, plus Ireland’s SuperValu and Centra smoked-fish Listeria recalls and a 930-case festival Salmonella outbreak in South Korea.
Nobody has to follow the 2022 traceability rule until 2028, and FDA is holding a meeting about who should be excused from it. FDA’s November 6 virtual public meeting on lot-level traceability takes speaker registrations through Monday, October 26, and docket comments through December 6, against a compliance date Congress pushed to July 20, 2028; the enforcement-discretion draft on the table would excuse retailers and restaurants with food sales between $250,000 and $1 million. I wrote how the delay happened and what FDA is doing with the time for Food Safety News Friday. Also this week: FDA proposed cadmium action levels for baby foods — 10 parts per billion for fruits and vegetables, 45 for dry infant cereal — with a webinar November 16; Judge Vince Chhabria’s stay of USDA’s reorganization, which would move FSIS to a National Food Safety Center in Urbandale, Iowa, holds on appropriations riders that expire in December; Congress is out until November 9 on a continuing resolution that runs to December 11; and Consumer Reports’ Cyclospora letter to FDA asks for answers by November 6. The produce industry’s incoming board chair told the Global Produce and Floral Show the industry should reclaim its story and speak with one voice; I wrote what that voice should say. Two writers put the summer in print — Gina Shaw’s Invaders From Planet Lettuce in Infectious Disease Special Edition and Kalmia Kniel’s five-question editorial in ASM Food Microbiology — and I answered the first and the second with a list of what has to change before the 2027 season.
That’s the week — fifty sick and a brand name delivered by email, a seed company named by lot number, a river where eight of eight oyster samples carried Salmonella while two governments published two counts, 119 people closed out without a food, a petting zoo shut on five E. coli cases, and 1.58 million pounds of meat recalled for a warm cooler. The names exist. The pages are what need fixing. 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.
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