I have been writing this blog since 2004. Something north of five thousand posts. Nearly all of them are about somebody getting sick from something they ate, and too many are about somebody dying from it.
Here is what I
Every so often someone asks me why a recall they saw all over the news barely exists in FDA’s files, or why a recall they stumbled on in an FDA database never made the news at all. The answer is
The cyclosporiasis season closed on August 31. The counting did not. CDC now reports 18,445 laboratory-confirmed cases of domestically acquired cyclosporiasis since May 1, with 990 hospitalizations and two deaths across forty-nine states and the District of Columbia. The comparison
Newsweek reported this morning, in a piece by Aliss Higham, that a new GS1 US survey of 1,000 U.S. adults found 94 percent concerned about the frequency of food recalls, up from 93 percent in 2025 (Newsweek, September 7
Lena H. Sun and Paige Winfield Cunningham walked through each of the childhood vaccines the CDC stopped broadly recommending, in the Washington Post. Their piece is what prompted this one. It is worth your time in full. But the hepatitis
Extraordinary Circumstances
Infant botulism is normally sporadic; most cases involve one infant, one household, and no single identified commercial source. Bacterial spores are widely present in soil and dust around the country and therefore may cause sporadic, random infections. A
On Friday afternoon San Diego County published a release saying the Food and Drug Administration collected samples inside the hen houses at Eben-Haezer’s Happy Hens in Ramona, that Salmonella turned up in two of the seven houses tested, and that genetic testing
Christina Jewett and Julie Creswell of the New York Times obtained Michigan’s outbreak correspondence under the state’s open records law and published the dates on August 15. An epidemiologist on the state’s rapid response team asked Yum Brands for
The New Lede reported last week on a Farm Forward analysis of USDA sampling data that ought to end a long-running argument about how we measure progress on Salmonella in poultry. Between 2014 and 2025, three serotypes — Infantis, Enteritidis
Infant botulism is normally sporadic; most cases involve one infant, one household, and no single identified commercial source. Bacterial spores are widely present in soil and dust around the country and therefore may cause sporadic, random infections. A
