Marler Clark LLPDrew Falkenstein joined Marler Clark in January, 2004 and has concentrated his practice in representing victims of foodborne illness. He has litigated nationwide against some of the biggest food corporations in the world, including Dole, Kellogg’s, and McDonald’s. He has worked on landmark cases that have helped shape food safety policy, HACCP protocol, and consumer rights, such as the E. coli outbreak in fresh spinach in 2006 and the 2008 Peanut Corporation of America outbreak of Salmonella. A frequent speaker for the not-for-profit organization Outbreak, Inc, Mr. Falkenstein travels the country to address public and environmental health organizations as well as food safety meetings and annual educational conferences. He speaks on the intersection of law and public health, and addresses companies on how to prevent food borne illness outbreaks.
As of Monday, the Rhode Island Department of Health reports 33 possible cases of Salmonella with 17 hospitalized in an outbreak linked to holiday pastries called zeppole. (Wednesday update: 43 ill, possibly including one fatality; 22 hospitalized.)Having over one third of victims in a Salmonella outbreak require hospitalization is a rarity. A high hospitalization rate speaks to the dangerous nature...
The judge's full opinion in Commisioner of Minnesota Dept. of Ag v. Mike Hartmann et al. is the kind of read that makes you wish the feds and state governments took more seriously the notion of criminally prosecuting the worst offenders of food safety laws.If this is a biased opinion, it's only because of the sorry way that the Hartmann...
Sprouts . . . nutritionally dense, next to irresistable on sub sandwiches, and an exceptional medium for the proliferation of dangerous bacteria.Sprouts have been called one of the 10 riskiest foods. They have been estimated to have caused 40 percent of foodborne illness outbreaks linked to fresh produce. And now they are implicated in a major Salmonella outbreak linked to...
It may be only a rarity that a widely contaminated food product distributed to a major grocery chain all over an entire region of the country does not cause many severe illnesses.Even though there are at least 37 confirmed illnesses in the E. coli outbreak involving Gouda-style cheese, many people probably escaped severe illness under some relatively difficult epidemiological circumstances. It...
Sangar Fresh Cut Produce is in the midst of a public relations nightmare, now that everybody who pays attention to food safety events knows that it is at the center of a Listeria outbreak that may have killed four people.Sangar's brass is taking a pretty brash stance on its implication in the outbreak, saying that the state of Texas got...
Senator Coburn is wrong. The Senate needs to pass meaningful food safety legislation immediately, not keep it on the backburner through the lame duck session so that it can start from scratch again next term. He has raised legitimate questions of cost, but even his estimated costs of implementing S. 510 (Food Safety Modernization Act) pale in comparison to the...
At the risk of jinxing the apparent success, it is worthy of note that, excluding the recent problem with bison meat, ground beef and other beef products have been conspicuously absent from the news this summer. This is a significant step for an industry that collectively recalled millions of pounds of meat products in 2007, 2008, and 2009 due to...
Certain times of year are associated with increased prevalence of foodborne disease--most notably, E. coli O157:H7 during summer months. Springtime, to the author's knowledge at least, has not had any such specific association with a particular pathogen or particular food problem, which is why it was so striking to watch the events of April and May 2010 unfold like they...
Last week, in the wake of the State Supreme Court's ruling in Brayton et al. v. Pawlenty et al., Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty issued Executive Order 10-07, which seeks to prioritize core government functions in anticipation of shutting down non-core government functions to save money for the state's significant budget deficits. The detection of communicable diseases like E. coli, Salmonella,...
One need not look far to grasp the scope of this country's food safety problems, and the personal devastation that can happen when somebody is infected by E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, or any other foodborne pathogen. Stephanie Smith, who, at the time of her illness, was a 19-year-old dance instructor from Cold Springs, Minnesota, suffered an E. coli O157:H7-hemolytic uremic...
Sick foodhandlers. It's a problem nationally at many restaurants, and is the source of many outbreaks of foodborne disease. Currently, in the Shigella outbreak linked to a Subway restaurant in Lombard, Illinois, sick foodhandlers are believed to have been the cause of the outbreak. As in the Lombard Subway outbreak, when sick foodhandlers are, in fact, the cause of an...
We cannot rely on beef and fresh produce companies to police themselves. Restaurants are sometimes inept, caring more about customer count than safety. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection service (FSIS) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are ill equipped to do it all alone. And the 50 states, which currently operate independently and without...
For many, hunting is much more than a hobby; neither snow, nor ice, nor anything else will stand in the way of the pursuit. For some, it's just a hobby. But for all, hunting carries risks . . . even if you're not hunting with a scattershot ex-VP who forgot to take a hunter's safety course. Most of those risks...
Raw milk folk are certainly wedded to their cause. I was present at the California Legislature in January 2008 when one to two hundred people paraded to the podium to say who they were and how far they had come to support the repeal of California's newly instituted coliform limit in raw milk. And I have certainly witnessed the vehemence...
In late August 2009, patrons of Mi Ranchito restaurant in Lenexa, Kansas, began falling ill. Their symptoms included severe nausea and vomiting. Part of the mystery surrounding the outbreak of illnesses was that the victims' symptoms came on so quickly after dining at the restaurant--sometimes just after eating the meal. The reason, as investigating health authorities recently discovered, was that the...
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