The Salmonella in two Ramona hen houses matches the Salmonella in the patients. Twenty-three people are sick and seven were hospitalized. The state asked for a voluntary recall and did not get one. On Tuesday we amend one lawsuit and file two more.
Picture a refrigerator door in La Mesa. Second shelf, toward the back, a carton of pasture-raised eggs from a store that was proud to carry them. Nobody in that kitchen has read a county news release. Nobody has heard the phrase “perch rail swab.” That carton is the whole argument in this outbreak, and it is the one thing that a hold at the farm cannot reach.
What changed on Friday
San Diego County published a release late Friday afternoon that closed the hole sitting in the middle of this investigation for six weeks. The Food and Drug Administration collected samples inside the hen houses at Eben-Haezer’s Happy Hens in Ramona beginning August 17. Salmonella was found in two of the seven houses tested. Genetic testing linked the Salmonella from the farm to the strains from ill San Diegans. The California Department of Public Health gave those results to the owners and recommended that the farm issue a voluntary egg recall. As of that release, no recall had been issued. Testing of the eggs the farm distributed is still pending.
For six weeks the answer to every question about this farm was a single sentence: nothing from here has ever tested positive. It was said on camera and repeated on social media. That sentence is gone.
The outbreak now stands at 23 confirmed and probable cases with seven hospitalizations, up from the 13 cases and four hospitalizations the County first reported on July 28, and the 21 it reported on August 17. Cases are in La Mesa, Del Mar, Ramona and Jamul, plus one in Riverside County.
A hold is not a recall
The farm has answered, more than once. Co-owner Chloe Nevarez told the Times of San Diego that nobody asked her for a recall, that eggs from the two implicated houses were pulled on the farm’s own initiative, and that everything still moving came from other sites. She has described the whole thing to NBC 7 as David and Goliath, and she has put the cost of the shutdown at more than $70,000 a week. I understand that math. I have watched families do that math from a hospital chair.
None of it answers the question on the table. A hold protects eggs that are still sitting at the farm. A recall reaches the carton that is already in a kitchen, and that carton is the only one left that can put somebody in the hospital this week. The June and July eggs do not know which pasture they came from. The people who bought them have been told nothing at all — no brand, no dates, no code, no list of the stores that received them.
The statute has a ladder. Nobody has climbed past the first rung.
A voluntary recall is the first step in a sequence, not the only tool in the drawer. Under 21 U.S.C. § 350l, when FDA determines there is a reasonable probability that a food is adulterated and that eating it will cause serious adverse health consequences, the agency must first give the responsible party an opportunity to cease distribution and recall. If the company declines, FDA may order it to stop distribution, order it to notify everyone holding the product, hold an informal hearing, and issue a recall order. Congress wrote the request as step one precisely because it knew some companies would say no.
California ran this exact play nine months ago
In December, CDPH and the California Department of Food and Agriculture inspected an egg operation in Dixon, collected samples, and matched one of them by whole genome sequencing to the strain in sick people. The firm recalled. CDPH then issued its own consumer warning naming the brand, the handler code and the sell-by dates, and telling Californians to throw the eggs out or take them back. Sixty-three people were sickened in that outbreak and thirteen were hospitalized.
Same state agency. Same kind of evidence. This time, a recommendation and a wait. Nobody has explained why this outbreak is the exception.
Three cases on Tuesday
We filed the first case in this outbreak on August 18 in San Diego County Superior Court for Whitney Hight of Ramona and her husband, Casey. She ate the market’s Ramona Red chicken salad on June 25, was sick two days later, and tested positive for Salmonella on July 3. On Tuesday, September 8, we file a First Amended Complaint adding what the County announced Friday — the two positive hen houses, the genetic match to the patient strain, the recall recommendation and the response to it.
Two new complaints go in the same day, both naming Ramona Family Naturals, Inc. and Eben-Haezer’s Happy Hens, with Frederic L. Gordon of San Diego as local counsel.
Julie Dye is a registered nurse with nineteen years of experience and the nurse educator of the emergency department at Sharp Grossmont Hospital. She ate the market’s apple walnut chicken salad during the week of June 21. She was admitted with septic shock and acute kidney failure, spent seven days in the hospital, and was discharged on her fifty-first birthday. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer weeks before, and the surgery set for July 2 had to be postponed. The nurse who teaches an emergency department how to care for people came in through her own front door.
Virginia Ann Terrell ate the market’s egg salad and tuna salad, and had also bought Happy Hens eggs directly for years. She became ill on June 28 and was seen in the emergency department on July 1.
What the complaints allege
California law required the market to substitute pasteurized eggs for raw shell eggs in foods that are not thoroughly cooked. Health and Safety Code section 114012 names mayonnaise expressly, and the only lawful alternative is a written variance from the local enforcement agency. The complaints further allege that Happy Hens, which operates well above the 3,000-hen threshold that triggers both California’s egg safety rule and the federal shell egg rule, shipped eggs contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis into retail and food service.
If you got sick
Anyone who became ill after eating undercooked eggs in San Diego County should see a physician, ask for a stool culture, and report the illness to the County Department of Environmental Health and Quality at (858) 505-6814. We keep a page on this outbreak for people trying to work out whether they were part of it.
Everything else here — who knew what, which barn, which invoice, which inspection — is what discovery is for, and we will get to all of it. Today there is one question, and the answer is a single word that costs a phone call. Somebody in La Mesa is going to open that refrigerator tonight.