FDA adds two food-poisoning outbreaks to its tracker without naming a food

The Food and Drug Administration this week added two new foodborne-illness investigations to its public outbreak tracker, together accounting for 65 reported cases of E. coli O157:H7 and Listeria monocytogenes, without naming the food, the states involved, or the ages of anyone who got sick. The entries, posted on Sept. 23, list both investigations as active, with product traceback described as "initiated" but no source identified.

What the tracker shows

The E. coli listing, reference number 1421, records 25 illnesses from Shiga toxin-producing E. coli O157:H7. Because a meat or poultry product has not been ruled out, the case also appears on a parallel list kept by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service, under its own reference number. The Listeria monocytogenes entry, reference 1417, lists 40 illnesses. Neither posting includes hospitalization or death counts, geographic distribution, or the date the first illness was reported, details that FDA has included in past outbreak notices once an implicated food was confirmed.

Food Safety News, which tracks the agency's investigations page, reported the two new listings early Thursday, noting that FDA "has not determined the pathogen source for either outbreak." The trade publication's account matches the entries as they appear on FDA's investigations of foodborne illness outbreaks page, which the agency updates as cases are confirmed and traceback work proceeds.

How we got here

The two new entries did not appear in isolation. FDA's tracker was already carrying an outbreak of Salmonella Newport that has grown to 116 confirmed illnesses, up from 111 a week earlier, first flagged around Aug. 26 with its food source still undisclosed. Separately, the agency and state partners have spent the past month unwinding a cluster of recalls tied to contaminated sprouting seed. On Sept. 23, Berlin Seeds of Millersburg, Ohio, recalled 950 pounds of alfalfa sprouting seed distributed from Feb. 13 through Aug. 23 after the FDA's own recall notice said the seed carried potential Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Salmonella contamination. That seed traces back to a Tennessee supplier whose own recall, issued Aug. 23, has now touched off six separate sprout recalls in a month.

• Six sprout-related recalls have followed the same Tennessee seed lot in the past month.
• The recalled seed was sold at retail in 44 states, but only the five-pound and 50-pound bags carry a printed lot code.
• An outbreak tied to that lot has been linked to roughly five dozen illnesses across 15 states, including several hospitalizations.

Raw sprouts have a long history as an outbreak vehicle because the same warm, humid conditions used to germinate seeds also favor bacterial growth, and pathogens can be embedded inside a seed's outer coat, where rinsing does not reach them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks listeriosis outbreaks separately and has long identified pregnant women, newborns, older adults and people with weakened immune systems as the groups most likely to be hospitalized or to die from the infection, even when the number of confirmed cases is small.

Who is affected

Without a confirmed food source, FDA has not issued consumer guidance telling shoppers what to avoid, which means anyone eating from the ordinary grocery supply has no way to know whether they are at risk from either the new E. coli or Listeria cases. The agency's practice is to withhold naming a specific product until traceback investigators, working with state health departments and the companies involved, can connect illnesses to a single supply chain with enough confidence to support a public warning. That standard protects retailers and growers from unsubstantiated blame, but it also means the public often does not learn what happened until weeks after the first illnesses are reported, if a source is identified at all.

What people are saying

Bill Marler, a Seattle-based food-safety attorney who has represented outbreak victims for decades and closely tracks FDA's outbreak table on his firm's blog, said in a post published Sept. 23 that ten separate entries on the agency's current list, including the two newest ones, list no identified food at all. Combined, he calculated, those ten entries cover 645 people.

"The public list of where the lot went is being assembled one retailer notice at a time, a month after the supplier started emailing, on a page most people never open, while the advisory they do open names nobody," Marler wrote, referring to the pace at which retailer-level recall notices have been posted following the Tennessee seed supplier's initial recall.

Marler's criticism is aimed less at any single outbreak than at a pattern he has flagged repeatedly this year: that FDA's outbreak table and its public health advisories often carry different levels of detail, so a consumer reading only the agency's advisories may not learn that an outbreak exists at all, let alone how large it has grown.

What happens next

Both the E. coli and Listeria investigations remain open, and FDA's own description of "traceback initiated" indicates the agency is still working to identify a common food, supplier or distribution point among the people who fell ill. Historically, entries at this stage can resolve in one of several ways: the agency confirms a source and issues a public health advisory or works with a company on a recall, the case is closed without a source ever being publicly identified, or, as with the sprout cluster, additional illnesses and retailer notices accumulate over weeks as more of the supply chain comes into view. Consumers are not currently being told to avoid any specific product tied to the two new investigations. Federal food-safety guidance for reducing exposure to E. coli and Listeria more broadly includes cooking ground beef to an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, avoiding raw sprouts altogether for young children, older adults, pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems, and washing produce under running water even when a food has not been named in a recall.