NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — Food recalls appear to be sprouting up left and right, from cucumbers to onions to carrots and deli meat. But maybe the recalls are not happening as often as we think.
Dr. Joseph DeBiase with Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences at Old Dominion University said the recalls are actually happening less, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration.
“We did have a higher outbreak of high-risk recalls as opposed to last year,” DeBiase said. “But comparatively to 2022, it was actually a little bit lower.”
What is apparent to the infectious disease specialist is that the multi-state outbreaks are being covered more by the media, and the public is becoming more knowledgeable.
“We’re also getting better at diagnosing, testing and with the genomic testing,” he said. “We actually are able to link cases better together because of this DNA testing.”
Recalls are often linked to salmonella, listeria and most commonly E. coli, which contains strains that cause infections that are pathogenic to humans, from bloodstream infections to urinary tract infections to diarrhea illnesses.
The foodborne illnesses send people to the hospital and can even be fatal. So how does one fight back against a major corporation if they become sick from contaminated food they purchased?
10 On Your Side’s Lauren Martinez reached out to Ashley Davis, an attorney with the Richmond-based Allen & Allen Law Firm. She focuses on food poisoning cases, and said there are three things you can do, starting with getting medical help.
“You have a witness to the fact that you were sick,” Davis said. “If you curl up on your couch for three days and nobody sees you, people can’t corroborate how sick you were. In the hospital, the doctors are able to run the types of tests that need to be run for you to establish that this is the food that made me sick, because that’s the biggest challenge in this case, is picking, ‘what did you eat in the last day, two days, three days that made you sick?’ And in the hospital, they can do the blood tests, they can take stool samples and they can do the tests that they need to help establish medical causation, which you need to win the case.
Next would be to preserve your evidence. But the challenge is people have already consumed the food or thrown it away.
“So what we can’t do on the back end is test whatever’s left in that jar to see if it’s contaminated or check the item number on the jar to see if it matches a national recall,” she said. “So keeping the product in the pantry, but not eating it, making sure you put it in a place that no one’s going to eat it, or if you happen to have any food leftover, put it in a plastic container or a Ziploc bag and put it in the freezer so that we can test it later. Also, in terms of preserving the evidence, ‘do you have the receipts that you used to buy the products?'”
All of the above will certainly help the attorney establish a legal claim. But lastly and most importantly, don’t wait to get an attorney involved.