Three New Outbreaks of Foodborne Illness Announced

Posted by: OFT Food Safety & Injury Lawyers

Every Wednesday afternoon, the FDA updates its Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation (CORE) investigation table of known foodborne-illness outbreaks. Typically, there is no update, and sometimes months go by without any new outbreaks being announced.

Today, however, the FDA announced three new outbreaks:

• An outbreak of Cyclospora with 32 cases.
• An outbreak of E. coli O121 with 15 cases.
• An outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium.

What explains this unusual occurrence? One possibility is that the waning COVID-19 epidemic is allowing state and local public health departments to focus more of their attention on investigating foodborne-illness outbreaks. For the past year, public health departments have been overwhelmed trying to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, which has likely left some food poisoning outbreaks unnoticed or unsolved. If so, today’s update could be a harbinger of things to come.