Saturday, October 17, 2026
Last Saturday’s edition closed on a seed lot with no named supplier, a chicken wrap outbreak with no brand, and 619 sick on FDA’s files with no food named. This week the wrap file reached 50 and the first brand on the record came from a federal complaint, not an agency page; Oregon told its doctors about a multistate Salmonella Enteritidis outbreak and no one else; FDA explained three closed outbreaks six weeks to nine months late; the ledger rose to 626; and a 99-person Salmonella Oranienburg outbreak ended with no food named. The through-line of this fifteenth column: the information exists. It reached the public through the wrong door, or not at all.
The chicken wrap file reached 50 sick on Thursday, and the first brand name on the public record came from a courthouse. FDA’s outbreak table, re-stamped October 15, moved reference 1421 — the E. coli O157:H7 file shared with USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service as 2026-04 — from 38 to 50; it was 25 on September 23. Product: multi-ingredient wrap with chicken, suspect; traceback, inspection and sampling checked; recall blank; no FDA advisory, no CDC notice; USDA checking whether the chicken went into other products. The same Thursday, Marler Clark filed Gottlieb and Bright v. Trader Joe’s Company, No. 2:26-cv-12017, Central District of California, the first lawsuit in the outbreak, for two women — Gayle Gottlieb of Pembroke, North Carolina, and Meaghan Egan Bright of Somerville, Massachusetts — hospitalized after eating Trader Joe’s Tarragon Chicken Salad Wraps bought August 23 and 24; the complaint alleges Trader Joe’s pulled the wraps before the link was confirmed, and as of Friday the company had not answered the reporters who asked. Why the name still matters, and what the two pending petitions would have done about it, is Friday’s post.
Oregon told its doctors about a multistate outbreak and told no one else. Deschutes County, with the Oregon Health Authority, sent a Health Alert Network advisory to clinicians in three Central Oregon counties about a multistate Salmonella Enteritidis outbreak — exposure histories wanted on eggs, raw milk, animal contact and restaurants; reflex cultures after every positive PCR — with no case count, no food, no other states, no onset dates, and no public notice from the county, the state, CDC or FDA as of Friday. The public learned of it from Food Poison Journal Sunday and Food Safety News Monday. CDC’s current outbreaks page, updated Wednesday, counts fifteen active multistate Salmonella investigations, seven E. coli, six Listeria and two Campylobacter — thirty in all. Monday’s post is here.
FDA explained three closed outbreaks this week, and every explanation arrived long after the file closed. Thursday’s table moved the egg, moringa and infant formula files to Closed 2026 with an Executive Incident Summary Abstract each. The egg abstract — 134 sick in 18 states, 34 hospitalized, 1,589,577 dozen eggs recalled — closes on a Form 483 with three Egg Rule observations at Midwest Poultry Services, the plainest that a henhouse which tested positive during the prior flock was not cleaned and disinfected before new hens went in; Food Poison Journal has the detail. The moringa abstract: a file opened in January, 131 sick in 38 states, 36 hospitalized, four Salmonella strains, three recalling brands, a Form 483 with thirteen observations, a contract manufacturer and foreign supplier redacted even now. The infant formula abstract: the three infants sickened since April after eating Nara Organics powdered formula got lots made with fluid milk from Organic West Milk, spray-dried by Dairy Farmers of America; the ingredient suppliers overlapped with the November 2025 ByHeart outbreak; the Washington infant’s isolate sits five SNPs from six ByHeart isolates; not enough evidence to confirm sources and routes of contamination. That is the record behind the draft petition for Clostridium botulinum testing of powdered formula and its dairy ingredients, open through October 30, and Friday’s two questions on every ingredient and every tanker of raw milk.
The no-food ledger rose to 626, and a 99-person outbreak ended with no food ever named. Nine rows on FDA’s active table carry a case count and no product: Listeria 1415 at 11 and 1417 at 46, up two; Salmonella Newport 1403 at 116; Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- 1402 at 43; Cyclospora 1398 at 22, 1392 at 240, adjusted up five, and 1385 at 38; Listeria 1379 at 11; and Salmonella Oranienburg 1387 at 99, opened July 8, traceback, inspection and sampling run, now simply ended. Five of the nine read Ended with no food named, 442 sick among them. Listeria 1415 has started sample collection. Last Saturday the nine rows summed to 619.
The sourced outbreaks did not move, except for one line about Korea. Evergreen Fresh Sprouts broccoli sprouts stand where CDC left them September 24: 32 sick, three hospitalized, six states, 24 in Washington. FDA’s advisory, current to October 9, lists all three retail recalls of seed lot W4105 — EAK Distribution, Eden Brothers and Gardeners Basics — and not the supplier. Alfalfa sprouts hold at 76 sick in 16 states, six hospitalized, 27 in Wisconsin, unchanged since October 1. Graziers raw milk cheese holds at 13 sick, eight hospitalized, three with HUS, nine states, more than half five or younger; the October 9 re-stamp of FDA’s advisory added one undated section — the recalled cheeses were also shipped to the Republic of Korea — and FDA is now collecting samples. Pet turtles: 20 sick in 12 states since September 18. Comments on the draft raw sprout and raw milk cheese warning petitions closed Thursday; the last call is here.
Three state clusters are running on local reporting alone, and a fourth got its final report.Virginia closed the Little Wicomico River in Northumberland County to shellfish harvest from October 9 through November 7 after Pennsylvania traced at least five Salmonella cases to its oysters and clams; the closure order cites FDA’s recommendation and names no harvester, Pennsylvania has issued nothing, and Food Poison Journal has what is public. In Lebanon, Tennessee, the state calls the illness that sent 19 Walmart fulfillment-center workers to hospitals October 11 a possible foodborne outbreak associated with a meal; 911 recordings point at homemade rice, no pathogen is named, and Food Poison Journal followed it. Monongalia County, West Virginia, which reported 16 lab-confirmed Salmonella cases in two weeks at the start of the month, has posted nothing since. Maricopa County’s final report on the 2025 Arizona State Fair outbreak — 18 sick, 11 hospitalized, six with hemolytic uremic syndrome, a petting zoo odds ratio of 190, and 73 percent of the animal-area visitors using hand sanitizer — is in Monday’s post.
Six food warning letters posted Tuesday, and the one from Bakersfield describes five years of positive swabs. FDA’s September 29 letter to Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, the Froneri plant in Bakersfield: the company’s own environmental monitoring from 2021 through February 5, 2026 showed ongoing findings of Listeria monocytogenes — 19 Listeria positives and eight confirmed L. monocytogenes in the first five weeks of 2026 alone — the Round Top Drumsticks hazard analysis did not treat environmental Listeria as a hazard needing a preventive control, and the ready-to-eat cones, sandwiches and fruit pops are adulterated; no recall, no illness, no finished-product result. The August 5 letter to Lewis Sausage Company of Burgaw, North Carolina — Phyllis Entis identifies it as the contract manufacturer FDA redacted from Viva Raw’s letter — rests on the August 2025 state samples that found Salmonella Enteritidis and Listeria monocytogenes in raw pet food.
The recalls ledger, with the standing credit to Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert. Family Farmstead Dairy of Worcester, New York, recalled its 8-ounce Raw Mild Cheddar, lot and best-by 7/22/27, on Thursday; the first version named E. coli O157:H7 and grocers in New York and New Jersey, and the corrected notice posted the same day names O26:H11 and O45:H2 — two strains, from two samples at a Maryland laboratory in FDA’s state sampling program — and seven states; no illnesses; Thursday’s note and Food Safety News carry the detail. Krasnyi Oktyabr of Brooklyn, a week after its Starfish Seafood trio, recalled Starfish cold-smoked Norwegian salmon Friday — lot D080-148, best before November 27, 2027, six states — after New York agriculture sampling found Listeria monocytogenes; no illnesses. Entis’s October 10, 11–12, 13, 14 and 15–16ledgers carried the foreign items — Canadian and Québec cheeses for Listeria and Shiga toxin E. coli, and the United Kingdom’s second egg strain, 36 cases traced by sampling to a Ukrainian packer while the main imported-egg outbreak passes 650 sick. No FSIS recall or alert surfaced in any named outlet; FSIS’s pages would not load from here.
The lettuce outbreak’s after-action moved to the people writing about it, and the argument is published separately. Consumer Reports’ Paris Martineau wrote the clearest outside account of the outbreak and its four gaps, and Tuesday’s post adds to each; IFPA’s Cathy Burns gave the industry’s State of the Industry version in Orlando; FAO’s fact sheet says washing and chlorine do not reliably remove the parasite, which Wednesday’s post takes upstream to Guanajuato; the counts as of October 15 are unchanged at 12,883 in the outbreak and 19,883 in CDC’s season; and what the beef industry did after 2002 and what Salinas said in 2007 are linked, not repeated.
The policy week was short, and the one durable item came from FSIS. Food Safety News reports FSIS will take its Listeria environmental swabbing program nationwide between January and March 2027 — four swabs, two on food-contact surfaces and two off, every time an inspector samples ready-to-eat product at a federally inspected plant, whole genome sequencing on every Listeria monocytogenes positive — after a pilot in the Alameda, Chicago and Raleigh districts whose results have not been published. Judge Vince Chhabria on Tuesday stayed USDA’s reorganization indefinitely; FSIS is not among the components listed. The Senate is out until November 9, so Heidi Overton’s FDA nomination waits; FDA’s virtual lot-level traceability meeting is November 6, speaker registration closing October 26. Friday’s Publisher’s Platform puts all seven petitions — formula botulism testing, raw milk cheese and sprout warnings, Salmonella as an adulterant in poultry, sampling at animal feeding operations, naming implicated firms, and consignee lists — in one place, formula-petition comments open through October 30.
That’s the week — 50 sick from a chicken wrap whose name is in a federal complaint and not on a federal page; an Oregon advisory the public was not meant to see; three outbreaks explained after they closed; 626 sick on nine files with no food; a 99-person outbreak that ended with no answer; and a raw cheddar whose serotype changed between the morning and the afternoon. Check back next Saturday.
About Bill Marler
William “Bill” Marler has spent more than thirty years as a food safety lawyer and advocate—work that began with the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak and has never really stopped since. In the years that followed, he has represented victims in nearly every major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States. That case, and the movement it launched, is the subject of the book “Poisoned” and the Emmy Award–winning Netflix documentary of the same name.
Bill’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker (“A Bug in the System”), the Seattle Times (“30 years after the deadly E. coli outbreak, a Seattle attorney still fights for food safety”), the Washington Post (“He helped make burgers safer. Now he’s fighting food poisoning again”), and many others.
Dozens of times a year, Bill speaks to industry, regulators, and universities across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, China, and Australia about a simple idea: outbreaks are preventable. He has testified before Congress on the Food Safety Modernization Act and teaches food safety at institutions including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He writes regularly about food litigation and food safety at Marler Blog, and in 2009 he founded Food Safety News, which he continues to publish.
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