Saturday, September 12, 2026
This is the tenth Saturday column. Last Saturday’s edition ran under the headline The State Matched the Outbreak Strain to the Farm’s Barns and Asked for an Egg Recall That Has Not Come; its point was that the recall had become optional and the count occasional. This week the paper moved. The egg recall came Tuesday, though nobody said so until Friday. The sprout recall notice reached FDA’s page six days late. FDA closed a romaine E. coli file Thursday and named nobody who grew it. CDC declared the largest Cyclospora outbreak in the country’s history over Friday at 12,883 while the national count passed 19,000. Closed is not the same as answered.
On Friday CDC declared the Taylor Farms de Mexico outbreak over, at 12,883 confirmed illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths in 21 states. CDC’s outbreak page says that at the peak, before the recall, more than 1,000 infections occurred in a single day, and that August averaged fewer than two; Virginia was the twenty-first state, per Food Safety News. CDC’s national case page, updated the same Friday, counts 19,595 confirmed domestically acquired cases from May 1 through September 8, 1,043 hospitalizations, two deaths, 49 states plus the District of Columbia, 9,355 confirmed cases still being sorted between domestic and travel, and at least 6,149 more never lab-confirmed; last year the window held 1,180. The subtraction is the number worth stopping on: 19,595 minus 12,883 leaves 6,712 confirmed illnesses with no food named. I wrote Thursday, as the Washington Post reported the end was near, that thirteen congressional letters have drawn no published answer and no hearing, and Friday what it would take to prevent the next one, starting with a traceability rule enforced before 2028.
FDA marked the close with a letter. Acting Deputy Commissioner Donald Prater’s September 11 letter to the produce industry asks the supply chain to apply the Produce Safety Rule, verify suppliers and develop new practices, with no case count, no company name, no country and no new requirement. FDA’s post-outbreak page says the root-cause investigation continues, that FDA has met with Mexican officials on a prevention framework, and that inspection and sampling in Mexico began August 20, the first visit to the Guanajuato site since 2019 per an Associated Press report counting foreign food inspections down from about 1,700 in 2019 to 1,140 in fiscal 2025, nearly 35 percent; Food Safety News says the results are pending. Congress should hold a hearing on what real inspections cost; my ten things that would have stopped this outbreak ran Monday.
The egg recall the state asked for came on Tuesday, and the state announced it on Friday. CDPH release NR26-029 says Happy Hens of Ramona voluntarily recalled its brand eggs on September 8. The count is unchanged at 23 sick, seven hospitalized, none dead, onsets June 21 through August 16, outbreak ongoing; two poultry-housing samples from FDA’s August 17 to 20 inspection matched the outbreak strain of Salmonella Enteritidis. The recall covers in-shell organic eggs under handler code CA-0677, lots 223, 226 and 237, sell-by September 10, 13 and 24, consumer cartons and 15-dozen foodservice cases. The lot codes are Julian pack dates, so 223 is August 11, 226 is August 14 and 237 is August 25, each sell-by thirty days later: the recall reaches August shelf stock, and almost every illness came from June and July eggs. CDPH also published a retail distribution list of 41 locations, every one in San Diego County, among them three Whole Foods stores, a home-delivery service out of Escondido and the Ramona market that is a defendant in the firm’s three complaints, though the release says Southern California and the Central Coast. I wrote up the store list Friday night and, that morning, the farm’s argument that a genetic match is not proof because no egg was tested; the federal egg rule acts on the positive house, not the egg. As of Friday night the farm’s website carried no recall notice and its shop was taking orders; Phyllis Entis had the recall that night. Marler Clark represents seven people in this outbreak.
The broccoli sprout outbreak went federal on Wednesday, and the recall notice reached FDA’s page on Thursday, six days after the recall began. FDA and CDC posted the same day: 22 sick in Idaho, Montana, Utah and Washington, two hospitalized, none dead, onsets July 7 through August 26, broccoli sprouts from Evergreen Fresh Sprouts of Moyie Springs, Idaho. Utah is new; Montana officials collected the matching sample. Evergreen initiated its recall September 4; the company notice reached FDA’s page September 10: 215 cases of six four-ounce bags, use-by September 7 through 16, three Washington distributors, shipped August 24 to September 2, crediting a third-party lab rather than the state sample. Washington’s pagelists 16 cases in eight counties; I wrote the federal notice up Wednesday. With the Minnesota alfalfa outbreak at 55, two sprout outbreaks carry 77 sick, and FDA has warned high-risk consumers off raw sprouts since 1998; I first asked for a warning label in 2000.
Phyllis Entis found the seed supplier’s name in FDA’s Enforcement Report, which is where FDA put it instead of on its advisory. The supplier in the alfalfa sprout outbreak is International Sprout Holdings of Cookeville, Tennessee, doing business as International Specialty Supply; its recall, initiated August 23, covers lot SAL2-24JB, 43,799 pounds of seed in roughly 876 fifty-pound bags, shipped to sixteen states plus Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Tahiti and Venezuela, per eFoodAlert. The outbreak stands at 55 sick in fifteen states, four hospitalized, 46 with Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, seven with Salmonella Agona and two with both. FDA’s advisory has not moved since August 31, and the second sprout grower is still unnamed.
FDA closed a romaine file Thursday, named the lettuce, and named nobody who grew it.Reference 1382, fourteen people sick with E. coli O157:H7, was posted July 1 and closed September 10 with romaine as the likely source, beyond shelf life when identified. No grower, processor, brand or county. FDA has named all of those after the product was gone at least eight times, from Dole spinach in 2006 to FreshKampo strawberries in 2022. On July 23 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency loosened its fall romaine rule, trading the attestation form for one letter per season and citing the absence of reported O157 romaine outbreaks in recent years; FDA disclosed this one six weeks later.
The files with no food named kept growing. FDA’s CORE table, stamped September 10, carries sixteen active investigations. The Salmonella Newport file posted August 26 went from 84 to 97 to 109 with traceback only, no inspection, no sampling, no advisory and no CDC notice. Oranienburg holds at 99, the I 4,[5],12:i:- file at 43, the Listeria file at nine, the largest leftover Cyclospora row at 231, and the iceberg row was still marked active the day before CDC ended the outbreak. CDC’s dashboard, dated September 9, counts 37 active multistate investigations: 21 Salmonella, eight Listeria, five Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and three Campylobacter.
Two small egg farms, one hot sauce maker and a thousand backyard flocks. Vermont said Friday that Leaping Bear Farm of Reading recalled eggs after Salmonella Enteritidis turned up in eggs and environmental samples, with fourteen Vermont residents sick and linked cases elsewhere; cartons dated June 1 through September 5 went to eighteen locations in Windsor and Windham counties, and the farm’s 1,800 hens sit under the federal egg rule’s 3,000-hen threshold, so none of its testing applied (Food Poison Journal, Food Safety News). The largest Salmonella outbreak of the year is not a food: CDC’s backyard poultry page, updated August 27 and written up this week, counts 1,061 sick, 234 hospitalized and two dead across 46 states and Puerto Rico, nearly a quarter of them children under five, the hatcheries unnamed. Connecticut told consumers Friday to throw away every bottle of Phire in the Hole hot sauce, made in Monroe without a license or an approved scheduled process and sold at a Shelton cider mill from November through August 17; the maker declined a voluntary recall and has not answered a cease-and-desist order, per WFSB, and no illnesses are reported.
The recall ledger, with Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert keeping it as she does every week. Made Fresh Salads of Bay Shore, New York, recalled 43 varieties of deli salads and cream cheese on September 6 after FDA and company environmental sampling found Listeria in the plant; the product went across New York City, no illnesses reported. Prime Line Distributors and Ferrarini USA recalled 1,513 pounds of Italian guanciale after FSIS import reinspection found Listeria monocytogenes, a Class I recall reaching eight states, per Food Safety News. Fi recalled two lots of dog supplements sold direct, on Amazon and on Chewy for possible Salmonella, written up at Food Poison Journal. FSIS also flagged 264 pounds of chicharrón potato chips from Colombia, a country not eligible to ship pork here. The full ledger is hers.
Two policy items, one in a courtroom and one in a box of t-shirts. In January the childhood immunization schedule made the hepatitis A shot a matter of shared clinical decision-making; a judge stayed the change in March and the appeal is pending. Cases fell about 95 percent after the 2006 recommendation, and making the shot optional is a very bad idea. The week of September 14 two shirts go to each of the 77 offices on House Energy and Commerce and Senate HELP, the committees that can move H.R. 7867 and S. 272, the bills that would require infant formula to be tested for C. botulinum; 52 babies were hospitalized across the ByHeart and Nara outbreaks, and one dose of antitoxin costs $69,300. A poll this week found 94 percent of Americans worried about food recalls. One firm note: Marler Clark is hiring an associate with five or more years and a paralegal with ten or more, on Bainbridge Island, at bmarler@marlerclark.com.
That’s the week — the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history closed at 12,883 while 6,712 confirmed illnesses have no food named, an egg recall made Tuesday and announced Friday, a sprout recall notice six days late, a seed supplier named by a microbiologist rather than the agency, a romaine file closed with the lettuce named and the grower not, and a Newport file at 109 with no food. Closed is not the same as answered. 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.