Health Law

Wright County Egg receives warning letter; Hillandale Farms cleared to resume shipping

By Drew Falkenstein

Today, the FDA released its warning letter to Wright County Egg in the wake of hte massive recall and outbreak that caused over 1,600 confirmed Salmonella illnesses nationally.  Hillandale Farms, which was also implicated in both the outbreak and recall, was cleared today to resume shipping shell eggs.  According to Andrew Zajac, of the Chicago Tribune's Washington Bureau:

The warning letter, dated Friday and made public Monday, followed weeks of negotiations between Wright County Egg and federal officials over how the company would correct a lengthy list of sanitation and biosecurity deficiencies identified by FDA inspectors in visits to the mammoth laying facilities.

These actions occur on the heels of a large Salmonella outbreak.  CDC continues to collaborate with public health officials in multiple states, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service to investigate a nationwide increase of Salmonella Enteritidis (SE) infections with an indistinguishable pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) pattern JEGX01.0004. This is the most common PFGE pattern for SE in the PulseNet database. Investigators are using DNA analysis of SE bacteria obtained through diagnostic testing to identify cases of illness and restaurant or event clusters (where more than one ill person with the outbreak strain has eaten) that may be part of this outbreak. Because the SE PFGE pattern commonly occurs in the United States, some of the cases identified may not be related to this outbreak.

Here is the outbreak epi-curve:

Full post as published by Food Poison Blog on October 19, 2010 (boomark / email).