Lawsuit alleges man gets 9-foot tapeworm from seafood restaurant

The first salmon Amy cooked for me – she caught me a delicious salmon – was damn near raw. Now, we cook it to about 125 F, checked using a tip-sensitive digital thermometer, and it warms up to 130-140 F in the minutes from grill to gullet.

Apparently that didn’t happen for Anthony Franz, who is suing the parent company of Shaw’s Crab House for causing him to become “violently ill” after eating undercooked salmon at the trendy River North restaurant.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the suit, filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, claims Franz ate periodically at Shaw’s between May and August 2006 as part of a healthier diet.

For several days, Franz became violently ill and eventually passed a nine-foot long tapeworm, the suit said.

A suburban doctor he visited in late August said he got the tapeworm from eating undercooked fish. …

He claims in the two-count suit that the restaurant failed to supervise employees in safe food handling and allowed customers to eat food that was not safe to consume.

Raw and undercooked seafood continues to present risks. The N.Y. Times covered the issue of tapeworms in seafood in a 1981 article.

Stick it in.
 

Pigeon poop payoff

Fifty-six-year-old Shelton Stewart, a former New York doorman who slipped on a pile of pigeon droppings on a subway station’s stairs in 1998, has been awarded $6 million in compensation.

The New York Post reports that the trial took three weeks, but the jury took less than a day to award Stewart $7.67 million in damages. He’ll get only 80 percent of that, or $6.13 million, because he was found 20 percent liable for failing to avoid the poop pile the second time around.

New York City Transit has indicated that it planned to appeal.

Stewart was planning to use his windfall to buy a house and take his two daughters and grandchild to Disney World in Florida.

The devil wears Prada?

Food safety lawsuits continue to pile up, at home and abroad.

In Jordan, the family of a man who died after falling ill from eating a shawarma in a restaurant in Jordan has filed lawsuits against the restaurant’s owner and a hospital doctor who dealt with him before his death.

Bilal Jarwan, 23, was one of hundred of people struck down with salmonella poisoning after eating chicken shawarmas from a restaurant in the Baqaa refugee camp near Amman.

Father Abu Ramzi was quoted as telling newspaper The Jordan Times,

"The Jordanian judicial system is known for its integrity and we trust it will hold to account whoever was responsible for the death of my son."

Over two hundred cases of food poisoning were reported in the salmonella outbreak, leading the Jordanian government to ban shawarmas across the kingdom. The restaurant from where the outbreak originated, located around 27 kilometres northwest of Jordan’s capital, has now been closed and its owner and staff arrested. The owner is facing up to three years in prison and a fine.
Hospital response

In Chicago, Joel Parker is suing Pars Cove Persian Cuisine after his 16-year-old son ate hummus alleged to be contaminated with salmonella at the Taste of Chicago event.

According to the Chicago Health Department, as of last week, 790 people claimed they got salmonella after consuming food bought from the Pars Cove booth. Following laboratory testing, 182 of those cases were confirmed. In the latest news release from the health department, 38 people are known to have been hospitalized.

Love them or hate them, lawsuits seem to be a tool to hold food producers, marketers and retailers accountable, and keeps food safety stories in the news, perhaps raising the overall level of awareness and contributing to a culture that values microbiologically safe food.