Lawyer takes up listeriosis fight
As a class action suit looms for victims of listeriosis, heartbreaking stories are emerging of the human cost of this deadly outbreak
IT’S meant to be one of the best moments in a mother’s life – when you hold your newborn baby in your arms for the first time. But 26-year-old Vuyani Moledi barely had time to cradle her tiny son before he was rushed off to ICU. Two days later she watched in anguish at the decreasing numbers on the heart monitor as her baby boy, Orefile, lay dying in front of her.
“I saw him take his last breath,” Vuyani says, sobbing. “I thought, ‘There’s no way my child could die.’ I prayed God would take me and not him.”
Subsequent tests revealed the newborn had died as a result of being infected by the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes – or listeria for short.
Unborn babies are highly susceptible to the bacteria, which enter the mother’s bloodstream, travel straight to the placenta and infect the fetus.
Vuyani, who’s single and a public management student, had heard of the listeriosis outbreak when she fell pregnant but its source hadn’t yet been discovered.
During her pregnancy she made sure she ate well, stocking up on fruit and vegetables.
She also ate a lot of Enterprise Foods products “from Vienna sausages to polony, ham and all that nice stuff. We always had them at home.”
Now, of course, the main source of the outbreak is only too well known: an Enterprise factory in Polokwane, where the bacteria were so widespread that health inspectors found it in the air-conditioning vents, the meat-slicing machine and even the metal clips used to secure tubes of polony.
Vuyani’s is one of many stories that have driven home the horror and heartbreak of an outbreak that’s killed at least 180 people and affected more than 1 000 in the biggest listeriosis epidemic the world has ever seen.
ONE man who’s all too aware of the havoc listeriosis can wreak is Richard Spoor, a Johannesburg lawyer who was approached by an NGO to become involved in a potential class action lawsuit for victims of the outbreak and their families.
“Until you speak to the people involved you can’t get a proper sense of it,” he says. “It’s only when you hear their stories that you begin to realise the extent of the pain and anguish of it. And that’s what I’m feeling here.”
Spoor took to Facebook recently to post firsthand accounts of a few of the people whose lives will never be the same again.
“Today I was instructed in three new matters,” he wrote. “A 77-year-old granny in a Cape Town old-age home shares her polony with her golden spaniel, Sophie. Both contract listeriosis. Granny is in ICU for three weeks. City health inspectors check her fridge. They find an unopened roll of Enterprise polony. It tests positive for listeria. Sophie is okay, Granny not so much.
“A 26-year-old from Durban is pregnant. She has a craving for polony. At seven and a half months baby shows signs of distress. Baby dies after two days. Listeriosis. Weeks later mother still won’t leave her room. She just cries and cries.
“Another mother who also had a craving for polony gives birth. Baby is infected with listeria. The illness manifests as hydrocephalus [an accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain]. Today baby went back to ICU. Mother can’t afford the treatment. Medical aid has reached the limit. She’s crying on the phone.”
Spoor, who defended victims of apartheid in the ’80s and litigated for trade unions and mineworkers, now focuses on cases involving health and safety. He’s engineered settlements related to occupational injuries in the mining and industrial sector, as well as occupational outbreaks of disease.
Now listeriosis is his No 1 priority. He’s joined forces with American law firm Marler Clark, which specialises in foodsafety cases and has agreed to litigate and lend its expertise.
He’s also working with his own legal team – a microbiologist from Stellenbosch University and an epidemiologist and specialist in infectious diseases from the University of Cape Town.
Spoor and his team believe the listeriosis outbreak began around January 2017 if not earlier, although it started making news headlines only around December. Then when the source of the outbreak was traced to Enterprise’s Polokwane factory earlier this year, the news made international news.
Although Tiger Brands, Enterprise’s holding company, shut down the factory and pledged to get to the root of the bacteria leak, the company was widely criticised for not taking full responsibility. Since then, the source of affected products hasn’t been confined to that factory, with almost weekly reports emerging of stores pulling various brands of processed meats from their shelves.
Spoor is well aware of this but says there’s overwhelming evidence the Polokwane factory is at the root of the issue.
“This epidemic has spread across the country. It’s not isolated. It matches the pattern of an epidemic that’s caused by a contaminated product, probably a foodstuff that was distributed nationally.
“We’ve tested a lot of food and we found really, really specific bacteria with the ST6 strain – and lo and behold we find that strain in the Polokwane factory where these products come from.
“If you look at all the victims, what links them together? What do they have in common? And then you say, ‘Hey, if it wasn’t Enterprise polony then you tell me what the hell it is’.”
But, he adds, it’s not his job to “name names and shout and scream”.
“Our job is to engage with Tiger Brands. They’re the party we’re litigating against and we have to have a professional detachment – to sit at a table and shout abuse isn’t going to work.”
VUYANI isn’t one of Spoor’s clients but she hopes justice will be done for her baby boy. “I hope I can get some compensation somewhere down the line for the pain I’ve been through,” she says.
The events leading up to her son’s death will forever be etched in her memory. Little Orefile arrived at 32 weeks and weighed just 1,3kg. He came out blue but was revived and placed in an incubator in the neonatal ICU (Nicu).
At first Vuyani thought his complications were as a result of his being born prematurely but two days later she heard her doctor being called to the Nicu.
Then a nurse came to call her. “When I heard the intercom I didn’t think it was my baby – I mean, there are a lot of babies there. But when I got there the doctor told me I needed to prepare myself for the worst.”
Holding onto her son’s fingers, Vuyani broke down as she saw him take his last breath. “I lost my son because of food I consumed,” she says. “I’m very angry about that.”
TIGER Brands CEO Lawrence MacDougall said last month the company “wants to be at the forefront of finding a solution”.
“We acknowledge and recognise we’re dealing with a national crisis which has impacted customers, consumers and the industry.”
But as far as Spoor is concerned, the issue has nothing to do with whether the company was negligent or reckless.
“The law doesn’t require us to prove whether they were negligent. All we need to prove is that they distributed and manufactured products that have made people sick.”
He’s taking the case on a contingency basis – meaning the complainants don’t have to pay him anything unless they win. “And we’re going into the case confident that we can win.”
‘We’ve tested a lot of food and found specific bacteria with the ST6 strain – and lo and behold we find that strain in the Polokwane factory’