BY C STONE | STONE NEWS NETWORK
A deadly E. coli outbreak has hit 15 U.S. states, killing at least 1 person and seriously sickening 88 people so far. The FDA said in February it had closed the investigation without stating what had occurred - the FDA did not name companies at all.
“There were no public communications related to this outbreak,” the FDA said in its report, which noted that there had been a death but provided no details about it.
“The FDA names firms when there is enough evidence linking an outbreak to a firm and there is actionable advice for consumers, as long as naming the firm is not legally prohibited,” a spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News. “By the time investigators had confirmed the likely source, the outbreak had already ended and there was no actionable advice for consumers.”
E. coli can cause severe illness such as organ damage and death. All the people who were sick were high school students who lived in the St. Louis County.
“We no longer have all the mechanisms in place to learn from those situations and prevent the next outbreak from happening,” said Taryn Webb, who led the FDA’s public engagement division for human foods until she was laid off during the mass firing this month.
And the administration has separately moved to delay a new federal rule requiring food companies and grocery stores to rapidly track down contaminated food and pull it off the shelves, though the FDA said the delay was meant to give time to ensure better compliance.
The FDA said its staff members “continue to provide critical communications to consumers associated with foodborne outbreaks,” including information about recalls and investigations.
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