Health Law

Bravo Farms cheese E. coli lawsuit

By Drew Falkenstein

Bruce Finley of the Denver Post profiled our client Madisyn Kirby who was sickened in the E. coli outbreak linked to Bravo Farms gouda cheese sold at Costco. 

Three months after she sampled gouda cheese at a Costco and got sick, a Colorado teenager and her family have bolstered their defenses.

No more ground beef.

No more sharing friends' lunch food at school.

No more tasting cheese, salmon or any other morsels that food stores offer to entice customers.

The illness that doubled her over in October "was the scariest, worst time of my life," said Madisyn Kirby, 15, who lives in Castle Rock. "I never want it to happen again."

At least 11 Colorado residents were sickened in the outbreak, as well as 19 residents of Arizona, 3 from California, 3 from New Mexico, and 2 from Nevada.  Lots of experience teaches, however, that these 38 confirmed victims are really only one layer of illnesses.  Undoubtedly, many more people in these states were sickened in the outbreak, and were simply never confirmed as being positive for E. coli O157:H7 by stool test.

In any event, with the passage of several months since the outbreak ended, and having examined much of the documentation generated during the multi-state/CDC/FDA investigation, it is worthy of repeating yet again what an exceptional job was done by the various health departments involved in this outbreak, including the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the Nevada and New Mexico Health Departments and Public Health Labs (the latter of which first detected E. coli in an unopened package of Bravo Farms cheese), and of course the Arizona and California Health Departments.  Makes you wonder how the CSPI study could come up with a ranking that graded 3 of these departments with an F, one a C, and the last, Colorado, a mere B.  

Full post as published by Food Poison Blog on January 21, 2011 (boomark / email).