Officials lift romaine lettuce warning
Report: Vegetable not currently being distributed from Yuma
Federal officials said Wednesday it’s “unlikely” that any of the romaine lettuce currently found in stores or restaurants originated from the Yuma growing area, lifting the nationwide warning to check the source of any romaine before buying or eating it.
This marks the end of an advisory issued April 13 when a multistate E. coli outbreak was first linked by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration to Yuma-grown romaine lettuce. The total number of illnesses now stands at 172 reported from 32 states, including the death of one patient in California.
The FDA announced that officials have “received confirmation from the Arizona Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement administered by the Arizona Department of Agriculture that romaine lettuce is no longer being produced and distributed from the Yuma growing region and that the last date of harvest was April 16, 2018.”
With the agency considering romaine lettuce to have a 21-day shelf life, chances are slim at best that any is on the market now, it said.
The FDA also said its investigation “indicates that the illnesses associated with this outbreak cannot be explained by a single grower, harvester, processor, or distributor,” leading it to look for factors that could have factored in to contamination of more than one supply chain.
“The agency is examining all possibilities, including that contamination may have occurred at any point along the growing, harvesting, packaging, and distribution chain before reaching consumers,” the statement said.
One field maintained by a Yuma grower, Harrison Farms, was identified late last month as the source of the whole heads of romaine that caused eight illnesses at a prison in Alaska, but the FDA said it wasn’t known whether the contamination occurred in the field or somewhere else.
All of the other cases in the outbreak have apparently been linked to consumption of romaine sold as part of prewashed and cut salad mixes.
“I think they may have been a little bit early in naming a particular grower to begin with,” said Elston Grubaugh, general manager of the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation and Drainage District. “Certainly the whole industry, all of us involved in some way, hope everybody gets well soon, and that the cases are handled,” he said.
He added that people who make their living from Yuma agriculture wish the FDA would include them in the race to find the culprit for the outbreak before the trail runs cold. “We would like to work with them; I think all the
growers want to know what happened so we can guard against it in the future.”
Yuma County Fresh Vegetable Association President Steve Alameda said growers continue to be frustrated by a lack of information from the FDA, with industry groups sending a small delegation Wednesday to its Washington, D.C., headquarters to meet with officials.
He said as far as he knew, the information they got wasn’t much different from Wednesday’s public statement.
“There aren’t any big smoking guns or anything like that. That’s the problem. We’re not getting to the bottom of it. It’s kind of scary because the further away we get from it, the less likely it is we’re going to find out the answer, and we really don’t want to have to rely on ‘I don’t knows’ or ‘hope it doesn’t happen again’ to our consumers,” he said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control also reported Wednesday that 23 more illnesses have been confirmed as part of the bacteria-caused outbreak in the past week, and the first illnesses were reported from three more states: Iowa, Oregon and Nebraska. California has reported the highest number of cases by far, at 39.
The Public Health Agency of Canada has reported six cases in that country caused by E. coli bacteria “genetically similar” to that being found in the U.S. outbreak.
E. coli bacteria-caused illness causes diarrhea, stomach cramps and other symptoms, but most patients recover from it in a week or two.
Twenty illnesses in this outbreak have led to hemolytic uremic syndrome, a type of kidney failure that is usually reversible but can be fatal. Seventy-five of the patients have been hospitalized, which is a bit lower than the 50 percent hospitalization rate that’s been reported throughout the outbreak.
The most recent illness reportedly began on May 3, which means more could occur in the following two to three weeks, given the time it takes to confirm and report them.
Seattle foodborne illness attorney Bill Marler, who now represents 86 of the victims of the outbreak, said he’s surprised the cases are still occurring, given the short shelf life of most romaine.
The illnesses caused by E. coli can be devastating; he said he’s representing the family of a woman in Minnesota who’s been in a drug-induced coma for 10 days due to experiencing continuous seizures, as well as being on dialysis due to kidney failure.
Marler said as the FDA investigation drags on, “it’s becoming more apparent that it’s likely not going to be like a single grower that’s implicated that is the cause of this entire outbreak, and more likely the cause of the outbreak is something environmental in Yuma, either windblown E. coli or water source, something that contaminated more farms, which would be the most likely explanation for the product going to a lot of different processors.”
That doesn’t answer questions like why romaine lettuce seems to be the only crop affected, he said, or how it could have evaded all the testing and other food safety-related measures at multiple facilities.
Paula Rivadeneira, a food safety specialist at the University of Arizona’s Yuma Ag Center, said the lack of a smoking gun by this point shows that “not only could it have come from anywhere on the farms, it could have come from trucks, processors, coolers, literally anywhere. The one thing we learned from this is that the traceback system does not work,” she said.
Alameda said most local growers agree there’s something unusual about this outbreak and are doing some “soul searching” as they wait for some kind of answer to what happened.
“We think there’s something different going on. There’s something new. In what way, I don’t know, but it appears to be something that is exceeding our metrics, is exceeding our caution. It got through, so it’s gotta be something. All the things we’re doing and precautions we’re taking, and for something to slip through that’s this big is disconcerting to us, to say the least,” he said.
He added, “It calls into question everything that we’re doing.”