Saturday, September 5, 2026
This is the ninth Saturday column. Last Saturday’s edition ran under the headline The Federal CyclosporaOutbreak Added 528 People, 41 Hospitalizations and Three New States on the Last Thursday of the Season, and it closed on a prediction: the season CDC defines would end Monday, and nothing else would. That held. The season closed August 31 and the national count went up 1,265 the next morning. What changed this week is who is holding the paper. In three outbreaks a regulator asked for a recall, or the evidence plainly called for one, and none came: a San Diego County egg farm whose barns carry the outbreak strain, an Idaho sprouter on its third outbreak in fifteen years, and a seed supplier that has not answered FDA’s recall recommendation at all. Then on Thursday CDC said it would stop updating the largest outbreak of the year every week. The recall became optional and the count became occasional, in the same seven days.
On Friday afternoon San Diego County said the thing it had been unable to say since July 28. FDA sampled the hen houses at Eben-Haezer’s Happy Hens in Ramona beginning August 17 — floors, perch rails, nest boxes — and Salmonella was found in two of seven houses. Genetic testing linked it to the strains from the sick. The outbreak stands at 23 cases and seven hospitalizations, and for the first time the County said where they live: La Mesa, Del Mar, Ramona, Jamul, and one in Riverside County. Eighteen ate the raw-egg mayonnaise at Ramona Family Naturals Market; five got sick from the eggs themselves. The California Department of Public Health gave the results to the owners and recommended a voluntary recall. As of Friday the farm had not issued one, and results on the eggs are still pending. In December the same two state agencies got a genetic match at Vega Farms, the firm recalled, and CDPH published a warning with the handler code and Julian dates on it. Here the farm announced FDA’s two positives itself, on Instagram, before any agency had said a word. I wrote it up Friday night: the epidemiology already linked those people to those eggs, and a genetic match is the point at which a recall stops being a judgment call.
Sixteen people in Washington, Montana and Idaho are sick from broccoli sprouts, and nobody has recalled them. Washington’s Department of Health posted the outbreak Wednesday: thirteen Washington residents in seven counties, two hospitalized, onsets July 7 to August 18, plus two in Montana and one in Idaho, all Salmonella Bovismorbificans, all pointing at broccoli sprouts from Evergreen Fresh Sprouts of Moyie Springs, Idaho. Montana followed Thursday. Both states say do not eat them and told retailers not to sell them. There is no recall, and as of Friday neither FDA nor CDC had posted a line. This is the company’s third outbreak since 2011 — 25 sick with Salmonella in 2011, when it declined to recall until FDA issued a public warning of its own, and 19 with E. coli O121 in 2014 — roughly sixty people over fifteen years from one sprouter that is still shipping.
The alfalfa seed behind the Minnesota outbreak went to at least two sprouters, and the supplier has not answered FDA. FDA’s August 31 update says the Everything Sprouts alfalfa does not explain all 55 illnesses, that traceback found at least one more grower using the same seed lot from a common supplier, and that FDA recommended the supplier recall the lot and tell its customers to recall what they grew from it. The supplier has not responded, has sent no recall notice, and has instructed nobody. Neither the supplier nor the second grower is named. The count holds at 55 in fifteen states, four hospitalized, and on August 28 the recall grew a fourth product, Robust Radish mix in four lots that shipped through August 26, four days after the alfalfa came off the shelf. I wrote Monday that FDA has held mandatory recall authority over that seed lot since 2011. A recommendation that goes unanswered is the case for using it.
The season closed Monday, the count rose Tuesday, and on Thursday CDC said the weekly updates would stop. CDC’s national page moved September 1 to 18,445 confirmed cases, 990 hospitalizations and two deaths in 49 states and the District of Columbia — up 1,265 confirmed and 68 hospitalizations in a week, with Hawaii joining the map and 13,505 more cases CDC says it is aware of and has not confirmed. Last year’s May-to-August total was 1,180. The federal outbreak page stayed at 11,458 sick, 495 hospitalized, two dead and twenty states, the August 27 numbers, and on Thursday CDC added a line saying it is reducing the frequency of updates as new reports decline. Michigan is at 14,718. Indiana closed its count Wednesday at 2,104. Only thirteen of the forty-one states that ever published a number still maintain a page, and the fifty-state floor is 33,525, nearly three times what the federal outbreak attributes to the lettuce. Nearly 7,000 confirmed illnesses have no source on any page. Shoppers have noticed: the salad aisle is down double digits and July brought the largest one-month lettuce price drop on record.
The research that would explain the parasite is being shut down while the parasite is still moving. Politico reported, and Reuters carried it Sunday, that two of USDA’s three Cyclospora research projects at Beltsville were not funded in this year’s agriculture appropriations and are closed, and the third moves to Iowa this fall without one of its scientists agreeing to go. USDA’s spokesperson said none of the research is disrupted. I said what I thought of that Sunday.
The egg outbreak that took seven months to find is over at 134. CDC closed the Midwest Poultry Services investigation Thursday: 134 sick in eighteen states, 34 hospitalized, no deaths, onsets from November 21, 2025 to August 12, 2026 — three weeks past the July 22 recall of more than 1.5 million dozen eggs. Eighty-five percent of those interviewed ate eggs. FDA’s advisory for the same outbreak still reads July 24 and 98 cases, and its investigation table still carries the file as ongoing. Across the Atlantic the UK’s imported-egg outbreak is at 528 confirmed and two deaths as of September 1, 67 admitted to hospital, and still no importer, no country of origin and no recall named.
The frozen blueberry outbreak added five people and a Walmart lot. CDC’s Thursday update puts the E. coli O145:H28 outbreak from Frutas y Hortalizas del Sur of San Carlos, Chile, at 17 sick — thirteen in Florida, four in Georgia — six hospitalized, onsets May 11 to August 2. On Wednesday the firm expanded the recall to one lot of Great Value Organic Triple Berry Blend sold at Walmart stores in sixteen states, with a best-by date in February 2028. FDA never walked the Chilean plant; it did a remote assessment and put the firm on an import alert. The map and the epi curve are here.
Three smaller files moved, and one of them got no headline at all. CDC’s hepatitis A outbreak from La Serranita frozen conchas negras now stands at 37 sick in four states, thirty of them hospitalized — an eighty-one percent hospitalization rate on an imported frozen clam that dealers in New Jersey and New York have recalled. In Washington, four E. coli cases with onsets in late May and early June trace to raw milk from Dungeness Valley Creamery in Sequim, the dairy’s fourth outbreak since 2009; a June sample came back negative, so there was no recall and no press release either. And in northern Utah the Bear River Health Department has 21 confirmed cases of Salmonella in Cache and Box Elder counties with no source, no serotype and no date range published, in a district that averages about 35 cases a year.
The file with no food named grew again. FDA’s investigation table was updated Wednesday: the Salmonella Newport file posted August 26 went from 84 to 97 cases with traceback only and no food, and the Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- file went from 41 to 43. CDC’s dashboard was working 40 multistate investigations as of Wednesday — 24 Salmonella, seven E. coli, seven Listeria, two Campylobacter — none with a product named, and USDA’s table lists nothing open at all. I put the three pages side by side Wednesday night. The empty USDA page is what continuous inspection of beef bought, and it is the page the proposal below would refill.
The recall ledger, with Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert keeping it as she does every week. Beyond the radish mix and the Walmart berries: Panorama Produce of Mamaroneck, New York, recalled 302 boxes of Martina-brand mangoes from Mexico sold at Walmart stores in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania after FDA found Salmonella in mangoes from the same farm; Northwest Naturals of Portland recalled raw chicken cat food and dog food that tested positive for Salmonella and Listeria; and on Friday Foods Alive of Angola, Indiana, recalled organic moringa leaf powder shipped nationwide from January 27 to August 7 after its supplier found Salmonella in a retail sample — the third recall this summer to trace to the same moringa ingredient, no illnesses reported, no supplier named. Her ledger is here, and it was the first place I saw the Evergreen story treated as what it is: a second sprout outbreak running alongside the first.
The proposal to let beef bypass inspection got a Monday follow-up that did not mention inspection. The President wrote on August 28 that he was authorizing documents to let farmers and ranchers process their own food, and the Secretary of Agriculture answered that she was on it. Her Monday announcement was an insurance endorsement, a loan program and a procurement preference — nothing about the Federal Meat Inspection Act, which is a statute, and nothing about custom-exempt slaughter. Representative Massie says it takes a bill, not an order; the Meat Institute and the cattlemen came out against weakening inspection. I explained last Friday what continuous inspection did to my hamburger practice, and I would rather it stay explained.
The formula botulism outbreaks got a report this week, and the report got no rule. The Reagan-Udall Foundation published a 44-page report from a July roundtable paid for by ByHeart and the International Dairy Foods Association: 22 recommendations, all voluntary, and not one parent among the 24 contributors. It landed a week after ByHeart said FDA had no further questions about its root-cause submission, a document nobody outside the company and the agency has read. Fifty-two babies were hospitalized across the two brands, and the testing rule still names Salmonella and Cronobacter and not the organism that paralyzed them. Here is what I would do with the report. The t-shirts go to every member of Congress this month.
Peter Barton Hutt died Wednesday at 91. He was FDA’s chief counsel from 1971 to 1975, the lawyer who persuaded the agency it could write binding regulations, a Covington partner for nearly five decades, co-author of the casebook, and a Harvard Law teacher for thirty years. I spent a career across the table from his work and never doubted he knew the statute better than anyone in the room. I wrote about him Friday. Two more items, compressed: Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic read the FRESH Act’s preemption clause line by line and found it reaches state pathogen standards, restaurant inspection and the right to sue; and on Tuesday the firm files three complaints in San Diego Superior Court for people sickened in the Ramona outbreak, one amended to carry Friday’s genetic match and two new. We are still hiring; the ad from two weeks ago stands, and bmarler@marlerclark.com is the address.
That’s the week — a genetic match in two of seven hen houses and an egg recall the state asked for and did not get, a sprouter on its third outbreak with sixteen sick and no recall, a seed supplier that has not answered FDA, a Cyclospora count that reached 18,445 the day after the season ended and a federal outbreak page that will now update when it updates, an egg outbreak closed at 134 seven months after it began, a 97-case Salmonella file with no food named, a formula report with 22 recommendations and no rule, and the passing of the man who wrote the food law the rest of us practice. The season is over on paper. 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.