Victims blame FDA for food-recall failures
If I had heard about the problem even one week earlier
life today would be very different.
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY 07/04/2018 07:40 AM EDT
People had been getting sick from eating I.M. Healthy Original Creamy SoyNut Butter for more than two months when Peter Ebb, a 59-year-old Boston lawyer and health enthusiast, went for a run and then ate his usual gluten-free English muffin smeared with soy nut butter.
Later that morning March 6, 2017 Ebb saw a message from Amazon, which had sold him the nut butter, that the manufacturer had recalled it for contamination by E. coli bacteria. Ebb threw away a protein drink he had made with the soy nut butter, but didnt worry too much. The Food and Drug Administration warning that was linked to the email was worded very cautiously: Though serious illnesses might result, even potentially leading to death, most healthy adults can recover completely within a week.
Six days later, Ebb was hospitalized and developed a deadly type of kidney failure. Within days, doctors told his wife to send for their children in case they needed to bid him a last goodbye. He survived, but remains unable to work full time and has trouble climbing the stairs. Now, hes joining with 18 other victims to file claims against the companies responsible and call attention to the inadequacy of the nations recall system.
If I had heard about the problem even one week earlier and stopped then, I might have been able to avoid the disease completely, and life today would be very different, Ebb said.
A POLITICO investigation found that the I.M. Healthy SoyNut Butter case which officials at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have hailed as an improvement over past failures was nonetheless emblematic of persistent weaknesses in the nations food-safety system, some of which havent been corrected for two years after being flagged by the agencys inspector general.
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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/04/fda-food-recall-failures-victims-679636