Saturday, November 7, 2026
Last Saturday’s edition was about things getting put in writing. This week (week 18) was about files getting closed. San Luis Obispo County closed its Brookshire Farms investigation Friday afternoon, five and a half hours after the farm reopened with free pumpkins, at fifteen sick, three children with kidney failure, one unique strain and no source. FDA closed six outbreak files in a single Wednesday update, 540 illnesses in all, and named romaine and parsley on the way out but not whose. CDC and FDA closed the Evergreen broccoli sprout outbreak at thirty-four sick and said the seed came from New Zealand through a domestic supplier they still will not name. Virginia went the other way and extended its oyster closure past the end date on its own order. And on Tuesday the voters closed one Congress and opened another, the part of the week that decides whether any of these files get reopened. That is where this week starts.
The county closed the Brookshire Farms file at 4:27 Friday afternoon, five and a half hours after the farm reopened at eleven with thousands of free pumpkins. San Luis Obispo County Public Health’s closing release counts five laboratory-confirmed E. coli O157 infections, all in people who visited the farm on October 17 or 18, plus ten symptomatic visitors between October 16 and 26, fifteen in all, up from thirteen on October 30. Whole genome sequencing matched three of the five to each other, a fourth result is pending and a fifth could not be sequenced; the matched strain did not closely resemble anything in the national databases, which the county reads as a common and unique source. Water, food and environmental samples came back negative for O157, other E. coli turned up in some of them, four exposures remain notable but unconfirmed, edible corn cups, pumpkins, hay and non-potable water, and no further testing is planned. The release also says no farm animals or petting zoo were open to the public during the outbreak, which takes the animals off the table and leaves the things children handle and eat. The words HUS, hospital and child do not appear in it; the three children with hemolytic uremic syndrome are in the October 30 release and nowhere since. The farm had announced the reopening on Instagram Thursday night on the strength of negative tests. I wrote Friday morning that a negative swab does not clear a farm and that the county should say where it stood before the gates opened, and Friday night that it closed the file five hours after they did without the pending sequence, a sampling summary or a word about the children. Will County has posted nothing on Bengtson’s Pumpkin Farm since October 23, with five confirmed cases and the animal, bedding and water samples at the state lab since the twenty-seventh, and Dallas County has still published nothing on the nine State Fair of Texas petting zoo cases beyond what its director told a television station on October 28. I put the national number on the record Friday: CDC estimates roughly a million illnesses a year from animal contact, and we are still building petting zoos without sinks. The firm represents a Brookshire Farms family.
FDA closed six outbreak files in one Wednesday update, 540 illnesses, and named two foods on the way out without saying whose. The CORE table stamped November 4 marks ref #1402 closed at 43 Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- cases with romaine lettuce named as the likely source twelve weeks after the row was posted, every environmental sample negative and the product past its shelf life; ref #1392 closed at 175 Cyclospora cases, adjusted down from 241, with parsley named; a new ref #1396 split off from it was posted and closed the same day at 66 cases with no food; and the 119-person Salmonella Newport file, the 99-person Oranienburg file and a 38-person Cyclospora file closed with nothing named. Of the 540, 218 got a food on the way out and 322 never will. No grower, brand or state appears for the romaine or the parsley; FDA’s explanation to Food Safety News is that the products were past their shelf life. I wrote Thursday about what twelve and fifteen weeks buys, and on Sunday about why a negative sample is not a dead end when sequencing, epidemiology and traceback are in hand. That leaves ten active rows. Five carry no food and 161 illnesses between them, down from 693 in ten rows last Saturday because the closures moved the cases to the other table, not because anyone found a food; the Salmonella Javiana file posted October 28 is at 65, up from 59, with traceback now checked; the Listeria file posted in September is at 51; and the chicken wrap file is now marked confirmed. CDC’s dashboard reads 28 active multistate investigations, sixteen Salmonella, seven STEC, three Listeria, two Campylobacter, and CDC posted no new notice this week.
CDC and FDA closed the Evergreen Fresh Sprouts outbreak Wednesday at thirty-four sick in six states, and the closing update names the country the seed came from but not the company that sold it. The final count is 34 ill, Washington 26, Montana 4, Idaho, Minnesota, Oregon and Utah one each, three hospitalized, onsets July 7 to September 11, ages two to 87. FDA’s advisory says its own sample from the domestic seed supplier matched the outbreak strain by whole genome sequencing, traceback showed the lot was imported from New Zealand, and the supplier recalled it; the advisory still calls it the seed supplier, while FDA’s enforcement report, as I noted two Saturdays ago, lists an Albany, Oregon seed company recalling two broccoli seed lots to consignees in eleven states and the United Kingdom. Three retail seed recalls off that lot, EAK, Eden Brothers and Gardeners Basics, are the only names a home sprouter will find. CDC’s final update drops Evergreen’s name from its text. The Justice Department told FDA on October 26 that its disclosure rule is its own and can be rewritten; the sprout file closed nine days later written exactly as it would have been before. The firm represents a Washington resident sickened in this outbreak.
Virginia extended the Little Wicomico River closure past the end date on its own order, and the order itself still reads November 7. VDH’s outbreak page, updated Friday, says that effective November 8 the harvest-area closure extends beyond the thirty-day emergency closure because of the positives on October 13 and 21, and that reopening will take three consecutive clean rounds. Round two, collected October 21, found Salmonella in three of the four company leases, and its whole genome sequencing is still pending sixteen days later; a third round came out of the cages November 2 and water and oyster samples from the public grounds went to the University of North Carolina on November 4, neither with results posted. The October 26 public-ground samples were negative. Emergency Condemnation #010A, the legal instrument, was last updated October 8 and still says October 9 through November 7, with no amended order on the page the day before it lapses. CDC is unchanged at 28 sick in 13 states, five hospitalized, as of October 30, and Virginia counts three residents. The company’s notice still does not say Salmonella.
A Yakima County dairy worker died of H5N1 on Sunday, the first bird flu death in the United States this year, and Washington’s herd count reached forty in three weeks. The Yakima Health District announced the death November 1: a resident with underlying conditions, exposed at a dairy with infected cattle. The county has three confirmed human cases, none since, and its herd table runs from two confirmations on October 8 to thirty-nine by October 30; WSDA confirmed one Benton County herd on October 26, making forty. CDC read the virus’s genetic sequence and found nothing suggesting easier spread, and says the risk to the public is low. USDA confirmed Indiana’s first two dairy herds November 2 through the national milk testing program, the twenty-first state since March 2024. Yakima’s page says pasteurized milk is safe and raw milk is not; Washington still licenses raw milk for retail sale, and nothing public says whether licensed raw milk from the two counties is being tested for the virus. Food Poison Journal has what Washington families need to know.
The recall ledger was light on pathogens and heavy on things that are not supposed to be in food at all. Brad’s Raw Chips recalled about 25,000 bags of Crunchy Kale and Veggie Chips Kale nationwide on November 3 for thallium, a heavy metal, after the California Department of Public Health traced one person’s elevated thallium level to the chips; the lots shipped October through December 2025 and the best-by dates run to February 2027. FDA added a twenty-first product, Wise Wife ground cinnamon at 2.118 parts per million of lead, to its elevated-lead cinnamon list. Vitality Works’ recall of one lot of 365 Whole Foods Market ashwagandha capsules for Salmonella, on sale eleven months in thirty states, reached FDA’s page October 30. Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert logged no United States alerts from October 31 through November 2 and on November 4 caught the one pathogen recall nobody announced: Arrow Reliance, which makes Darwin’s Natural Pet Products, pulled two lots of Natural Selections chicken cat food for Salmonella by emailing consignees, with no public notice, nine days after FDA’s October 26 advisory on the same brand. She also carried FDA’s warning letter to La Cabana Food Distributing of Oceanside, California, posted November 3, with Listeria monocytogenes on a scale, cart wheels and the floor of a salsa plant and no environmental testing program. FSIS posted one public health alert, for Betterballen frozen snacks with undeclared sesame and anchovy, and no pathogen recall; its site would not load this week and that item comes from Food Safety News. West Virginia has said nothing since its October 29 advisory on 41 Salmonella Typhimurium cases with no source.
Perrigo told investors Wednesday that infant formula was consuming cash, and the congresswoman who wrote the botulism testing bill said parents deserve answers before the ByHeart founders buy the business. On its November 4 earnings call Perrigo priced the sale of its formula business to MeridianMade at up to $175 million, $40 million at closing and $135 million in milestones through 2030, moved formula into discontinued operations, and did not mention ByHeart. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s October 30 statement says families still do not know how, when or where their children’s formula became contaminated, and that she worries about consolidation. FDA’s formula testing page, updated October 29, now covers 312 samples for four heavy metals, thirty PFAS, 318 pesticides and twenty-one phthalates, and still has no row for the organism that put 52 babies in the hospital. I wrote the committees a third time on Wednesday, the morning after the election, with five legislative weeks left and an offer to fly the families to Washington, and the Clostridium botulinum testing petition goes to FDA this week with Stop Foodborne Illness and the parents of twenty-three infants as co-petitioners. The supply chain behind Nara and the long version of ByHeart are both on the blog.
The voters handed both chambers to the Democrats on Tuesday, and the people who chair the committees that fund and oversee FDA and USDA change in January. CBS has Democrats at a minimum of 54 Senate seats with Alaska and Mississippi uncalled and on pace for roughly 255 House seats. Frank Pallone has asked for the Energy and Commerce gavel, Rosa DeLauro is in line for Appropriations, Bernie Sanders is expected back at HELP, and both Agriculture committees need new Democratic leaders because Angie Craig and Amy Klobuchar are leaving. Congress returns November 9 with the continuing resolution, and its Section 780 bar on traceability enforcement before July 20, 2028, running to December 11. I published fifteen things the lame duck can do and a Project 2027 working paper this week. FDA held its traceability public meeting Friday: twenty-nine registered commenters, from FMI to Oceana to a retired field epidemiologist, with neither the acting commissioner nor the acting head of the Human Foods Program on the agenda; comments on the lot-code flexibilities are due December 6, and no account of what was said had been published by Saturday morning. FSIS said in its October 30 constituent update that it will swab food-contact and non-food-contact surfaces in ready-to-eat plants nationwide starting January 2027. Judge Chhabria refused Wednesday to lift his stay on USDA’s relocation notices. Consumer Reports’ November 6 deadline for FDA to answer its eight questions on the Cyclospora outbreak passed without a public reply that I could find. And USDA’s romaine shipping study got my answer at Food Safety News: truck routes did not put manure on lettuce, the field did.
That’s the week — a county that closed its file five hours after the farm reopened, with fifteen sick, three children in kidney failure and no source; FDA closing six files in an afternoon and naming romaine and parsley but not whose; a sprout outbreak closed with the seed traced to New Zealand and the supplier still unnamed; an oyster closure extended past its own order; a dairy worker dead of bird flu in Yakima County; and an election that decides who gets to ask about any of it. Next week brings the pending Brookshire sequence, Illinois’s animal and water results, Virginia’s third round, Congress back in session and, if it posts, the botulism petition on FDA’s docket. 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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