Tag Archives: Lawsuit

KFC ordered to pay $8 million for poisoning; will appeal

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KFC has been ordered to pay $8 million damages by a judge who found a young Sydney girl was left severely brain damaged after eating a Twister chicken wrap.

AAP reports the family of Monika Samaan (right) successfully sued the fast food giant, claiming the source of her salmonella poisoning was a Twister.

Her father told the NSW Supreme Court he bought the wrap on October 24, 2005, at the KFC outlet at Villawood, in Sydney’s west.

While Monika, her parents and her brother ended up in hospital with salmonella poisoning, the then seven-year-old was left severely brain damaged and is effectively now a quadriplegic.

On Friday, Justice Stephen Rothman ordered KFC to pay $8 million damages plus legal costs.

Last Friday, he found KFC had breached its duty of care to the young girl.
KFC has indicated it will appeal his finding.

In a statement, the family’s lawyer George Vlahakis said, "The compensation ordered is very much needed. KFC have to date been determined that Monika does not receive a cent."

Victims lose: the legal wrangling of the Rhode Island salmonella-in-Zeppole mess

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WPRI continues its in-depth coverage on the one-year anniversary of the salmonella-in-Zeppole outbreak that killed up to 3 and sickened 83.

A lawsuit filed by the family of a Cranston man who died one year ago this week after eating zeppole pastry days before the salmonella outbreak, named three Rhode Island companies in a lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit , plaintiff Frank R. Castelli bought “bakery products from Defusco’s Bakery, Inc. and/or Tony’s Colonial Food, Inc to be consumed by his father, Plaintiff, Frank Castelli.”

The 84-year-old Cranston resident developed flu like symptoms around the time of last Saint Joseph’s day and died on March 23, 2011. Frank R. Castelli said his father was healthy in the days leading up to eating the pastry.

Buono’s Italian Bakery is the third company named in the lawsuit. John Doe Corporation is also listed as a defendant as a "fictitious" place holder for a company that could be named at a later date.

The defendants are accused of 3 counts each; Strict liability, breach of warranty and negligence.

The lawsuit alleges Castelli’s “illness and death were a result of the bakery products he ingested which were contaminated with salmonella.”

Arnold Buono, the owner of Buono’s, is unsure why his bakery is name in the lawsuit.

“All toxicology reports from my bakery came back negative for salmonella,” Buono said.

Buono told target 12 he sold zeppoles to Tony’s Colonial Food last year.

“We made about 7,500 zeppoles and we didn’t hear about anyone getting sick," Buono said.

None of the other defendants would comment on the lawsuit. Castelli’s attorney advised his family not to comment about the pending litigation. The lawsuit does not name a dollar amount.

One of the other deaths involved a man in his 90’s according to the Department of Health. No details on the third death have been released.

Investigators blamed the storage of pastry shells on cartons that had contained raw eggs and improperly chilled custard as potential causes for the outbreak.

Going public: Del Monte drops lawsuit against Oregon public health over cantaloupe

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Fresh Del Monte is ending its lawsuit against Oregon health officials who linked a salmonella outbreak to its Guatemalan cantaloupe.

In August, Coral Gables, Fla.-based Del Monte Fresh Produce NA Inc. said it would sue the Oregon Health Authority’s Public Health Division and the agency’s top scientist over how it handled the investigation of the February and March 2011 outbreak that sickened 20 people in the western U.S. and Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Lynne Terry of The Oregonian reported yesterday that Del Monte Fresh Produce said in a letter e-mailed to the state earlier this month that it would not act on its notice to sue William Keene and Oregon Public Health.

"Obviously, it’s a relief for us that that’s withdrawn so now we can focus on the job we’re supposed to do which is to protect the public’s health," said Dr. Katrina Hedberg, state epidemiologist. The tort claim filed last August had gobbled up time of state scientists and lawyers dealing with it, she said.

The claim was unprecedented. State epidemiologists investigate dozens of foodborne illness outbreaks every year and name the culprits to prevent more people from getting sick. No other company has ever filed a suit or threatened to sue Oregon over one of those investigations.

"There have been lots of outbreaks," Hedberg said. "Why some companies choose to work with public health and others want to fight it — I can’t answer that."

Del Monte Fresh Produce wouldn’t either. A spokesman said the company "does not comment on ongoing or closed investigations."

The company’s letter said the withdrawal marked "a show of good faith" in its discussions with Oregon Public Health over food safety. It asked for another meeting with Oregon’s top food safety detectives.

The state agreed to a meeting in Portland.

"I’m not sure why they want it," Hedberg said. "We work with businesses and companies but that does not preclude us from notifying the general public if we find a food item that’s been responsible for an outbreak or cluster of illnesses."

The saga dates to January 2011 when people started getting sick. In March, the company recalled nearly 60,000 whole cantaloupes imported from its facility in Guatemala. The recall notice, published on the Food and Drug Administration website, said the melons could be contaminated with Salmonella Panama, the strain involved in the outbreak.

In July, the FDA imposed an import alert, effectively banning the sale of the Guatemalan melons until the company demonstrated they were safe. Located in Coral Gables, Fla., Del Monte Fresh Produce is a major importer of cantaloupe. A third of its supply comes from Guatemala.

The company, which is not part of the Del Monte Foods conglomerate, responded to the alert by filing suit against the FDA. Then in August, it filed the tort claim against Keene and Oregon Public Health along with a separate ethics complaint against Keene.

The documents said Keene conducted a shoddy investigation. They said he never found salmonella in its cantaloupes but named the company anyway. Del Monte Fresh Produce also blamed Keene for the recall, saying he pushed the FDA to take action.

But Keene was not the only epidemiologist who concluded that Del Monte Fresh Produce was to blame in that outbreak. His peers in Washington state reached the same conclusion.

In September, the FDA lifted its import alert and Oregon’s Government Ethics Commission dismissed the ethics claim against Keene.

At the time, Kirk Smith, epidemiology supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Health, told the Washington Post it’s rare for scientists investigating foodborne illness outbreaks to test the exact food suspected of carrying pathogens. By the time symptoms occur and a foodborne illness is reported and confirmed, the product in question has likely been consumed or has exceeded its shelf-life and been thrown away.

Instead, scientists, like detectives, interview victims, collect data, analyze patterns and match food “fingerprints” to determine the likely source of an outbreak.

“The majority of outbreaks, we don’t have the food to test,” Smith said. “Laboratory confirmation of the food should never be a requisite to implicating a food item as the vehicle of an outbreak.

Epidemiology is actually a much faster and more powerful tool than is laboratory confirmation.”

German public health authorities sued for summer cuke alert

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Public health folks in the city of Hamburg are being sued for €2.3 million (about $3 million USD) after their market was damaged during an outbreak of E. coli O1O4 which was later linked to fresh sprouts. Spanish company Frunet, lodged the claim and is seeking damages for sullying the country’s reputation.

In response to the suit, according to AFP, German health authorities are supporting their summer cucumber warning,

"The Office for Health and Consumer Protection rejects these claims since the warning about the company’s cucumbers was necessary and right," the health office said in a written statement.

Insisting it believed it had taken the right course of action in issuing a warning with the information it had at the time, it said: "Protecting health comes before economic interests of companies."

The European Union provided €227 million in compensation for European producers of cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, courgettes and sweet peppers, withdrawn from the market as a result of the disease.

This isn’t a unique lawsuit, earlier this year Del Monte sued the state of Oregon following an outbreak investigation linked to their products.

Paul Mead, of the oft-quoted Mead et al paper (76 million illnesses a year) was once cited as saying, "Food safety recalls are either too early or too late. If you’re right, it’s always too late. If you’re wrong, it’s always too early."
 

Whole Foods says Miami Beach has poop problem; store mess was promptly cleaned

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Whole Foods has denied any wrongdoing after firing an employee who complained about poop in the cheese aisle at the Miami Beach store.

Libba from Whole Foods Market took to the Eater blog to say:

“Here are the facts regarding the plumbing issue: that area of Miami Beach has problems with pipes backing up during high tide when there’s been significant rainfall. The backup in our store equated to about an inch of water that encompassed about a three-foot span over one of the drains. The entire area was closed for complete cleaning as soon as the problem was discovered, and was cleaned and sanitized again the next day by a professional cleaning service.

“When it happened again the same professional cleaners were back at the store in less than 24 hours and the entire area was sanitized again.

“At all times, the areas of the store open to customers were clean and safe."

Whole Foods sucks at food safety, so I look forward to disclosure in the lawsuit filed on behalf of the former employee by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Whole Foods sued by feds for firing Miami Beach poop leak whistle blower

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On Nov. 1, 2009, the smell in the Miami Beach Whole Foods super-stinky cheese aisle reached a new level of pungency as raw sewage covered the floor.

Despite the efforts of Whole Foods management to view the situation through rose-scented glasses, and a lot of air freshener, raw sewage is neither an aromatic nor safety enhancement.

Miami New Times Blogs reported at the time that an unnamed employee said after brown-colored and rank smelling water flooded the cheese aisle she discovered that a sewage line had broken. After local management decided to just lock the bathroom doors and cover the mess with air spray, she reported the incident to corporate management.

She got fired.

Now, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration is suing the chain for firing the employee.

OSHA is asking the federal court to remedy the situation by issuing an order that includes a permanent injunction against Whole Foods to prevent future violations of this law; reinstating the former employee with full benefits; paying back wages, punitive damages and compensatory damages to the employee; expunging the employee’s personnel file with respect to the matters at issue in this case; and granting any other appropriate relief.

Cantaloupe moves through the system; Frontera CEO discusses company’s role in listeria outbreak

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On Nov. 21, The Packer conducted an exclusive question-and-answer interview with Will Steele, president and CEO of Frontera Produce, Edinburg, Texas, the marketer of the listeria-tainted cantaloupes shipped by Jensen Farms, Holly, Colo. Below are some edited highlights from that interview.

Q. Please explain Frontera Produce’s business relationship with Jensen Farms.

Our role was that of a marketing agent, providing our expertise to find buyers and manage the sales paperwork and logistics for cantaloupe grown and packed by Jensen Farms.

As part of our marketing services, we utilized our inventory control system in which every pallet of Jensen Farms cantaloupe marketed by Frontera was remotely entered into our database when it was harvested and shipped. This proved to be important in tracking the product to customers in our database because we had records of where each pallet came from and where Jensen Farms shipped it.

Q. What are Frontera Produce’s food safety requirements and traceability systems? Have any changed since this outbreak?

In the wake of this experience, we are examining, among other things, the role of audits. Third-party audits are an important and useful tool, but they are obviously not fail-safe. Audits provide baseline information on conditions at the time they are conducted. So we are looking at possible changes that might further enhance food safety. One area of focus is whether additional steps are needed to validate the audit findings regarding food safety protocols that are in place. Validation could be in the form of a follow-up audit, or perhaps other measures that will help provide additional assurance of food safety compliance.
This is an industry-wide issue that all of us must deal with, so we are also talking with others in the produce industry and sharing our experience so that we can further our collective knowledge and understanding.

Q. What’s your view on the lawsuits that have named Frontera as a defendant?

First, it is important to remember that the greatest tragedy in all of this is the human one. And it is this human tragedy that drives us to continue to analyze every aspect of this unprecedented event in an attempt to prevent it from ever happening again.

That there is litigation is not surprising; almost anytime there is an injury, a lawsuit will follow. In fact, it is to be expected. We have seen this again and again, where even companies that never saw or touched the product were drawn into litigation based on association or something other than actual wrong-doing. It is an unfortunate reality.

More food safety types voice concern about Del Monte’s ‘embarrassing and spurious’ lawsuit

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“I would be the first one to defend any company if the data were incomplete or if the investigation didn’t show an association, but this one almost reminds me of the intimidation lawsuits the tobacco industry has used in the past.”

That’s what Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Doug Ohlemeier of The Packer regarding Del Monte’s lawsuit targeting Oregon’s top food safety scientist, William Keene.

Michael Doyle, a former Food and Drug Administration advisor who heads the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, said he fears such lawsuits could limit effectiveness of public health messages to consumers.

“One of the most difficult points that epidemiologists have to make is the call as to whether a specific food is a vehicle for an outbreak. If they do this later than sooner, more people could be exposed to the implicated food and made ill. There needs to be a balance because some epidemiologists may be overly aggressive with insufficient information or pulling the trigger too fast. This lawsuit could do more harm than good but it might make epidemiologists more cognizant of the fact that they’re responsible for not only public health, but economic consequences.”

Dennis Christou, Fresh Del Monte’s vice president of marketing, said the suit is necessary to ensure investigations are conducted properly.

“When a product recall is later determined baseless due to a failure to conduct a comprehensive and reliable investigation, the public health is not protected. The investigation must be comprehensive and reliable such that the public can be reasonable confident that the product recall effectively eliminates the threat to consumer safety.”

A table of cantaloupe-related outbreaks is available at: http://bites.ksu.edu/cantaloupe-related-outbreaks.
 

Will Del Monte’s lawsuit against Oregon health succeed in setting poisonous tone for outbreak investigations?

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Del Monte Fresh Produce, a company that recalled its cantaloupes in March after health investigators in several states linked them to a Salmonella Panama outbreak, said yesterday that is plans to sue Oregon Health Authority and, Dr William Keene, one of the nation’s most well-known disease outbreak investigators (right, exactly as shown), claiming that the company’s products were wrongly singled out.

Lisa Schnirring of CIDRAP news at the University of Minnesota interviewed several public health types, who say the company’s suit is unprecedented, and some worry that it may inhibit future foodborne illness investigations.

Lon Kightlinger, MPH, PhD, state epidemiologist with the South Dakota Department of Health, said some of his department’s disease investigations have involved legal tug-of-wars. "Although we do have some worries of legal threats, that does not drive our investigation, but causes us to do a better job," he said.

In Iowa, laws require public health officials to treat the names of entities such as restaurants or companies the same as people, said Patricia Quinlisk, MD, MPH, medical director and state epidemiologist for the Iowa Department of Public Health.

She said that, before going public with names, health officials must discuss the issue with the state attorney general’s office to make sure the action complies with a "necessary for public health" clause. "Thus something like this might have more scrutiny here than other places," she said, adding that she’s never seen a legal threat like Del Monte’s.

Tim Jones, MD, MPH, state epidemiologist for the Tennessee Department of Health, said he’s been bullied and subjected to implied threats in the course of epidemiologic investigations. "I’ve never taken them seriously, and legally I’ve never been worried," he said.

Though Del Monte’s legal threat could create an inhibitory effect, epidemiologists take pride in being able to respond to outbreaks faster and freer than federal agencies, which are often bound by legal restrictions, Jones said.

"Our job is to protect people."

Some measure of immunity is needed for investigators, Jones said. "If anyone in public health is nervous about getting sued, it could be dangerously inhibitory."

Victims of IHOP salmonella outbreak win $1.4M

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Rinse the damn syrup containers.

That’s the lesson as victims of a 2008 salmonella outbreak at the International House of Pancakes left a Potter County courtroom with more than $1.4 million in damages.

The jury, which included eight men and four women, deliberated for more than three hours before returning a verdict of $140,000 for each of the 10 plaintiffs.

Dean Boyd, one of the victims’ attorneys, said in closing arguments that the compelling, graphic testimony should be a warning for other Amarillo restaurants to keep their facilities clean.

“Two of the clients seriously came very close to death,” Boyd said. “Others’ injuries were very bad and their tear-filled testimony proved that.”

The case stems from three separate salmonella outbreaks that sickened the restaurant’s patrons, starting in June 2008.

From the first known poisoning case in June to a city health review in September, more than 125 people who ate at the IHOP location were victims of salmonella poisoning, according to court records.

Interviews with IHOP employees revealed the syrup pitchers were not washed or sanitized before they were refilled, according to the initial civil complaint.

During that time, the restaurant closed its doors three times in response to potential salmonella outbreaks. The closures were prompted by a June 2008 city review in which 11 IHOP employees tested positive for the salmonella toxin.

In the last case, which prompted the September 2008 closure, city officials determined the cause was an infected water bath used to warm bottles of syrup.