Listeria Lawyer & Attorney : Marler Clark Law Firm : Listeria Blog

Mark Pratt at the Boston bureau of the Associated Press is reporting that state officials have found the same strain of listeria inside the Whittier Farms Dairy processing plant that was responsible for three deaths and a miscarriage. 

The AP says the investigation now has to figure out exactly how the milk came into contact with the deadly listeria.

"We know that there's a problem in that plant and we have connected the patients to the products to the plant, now it would be nice to know exactly how that happened, but that is part of the ongoing investigation," said Dr. Alfred DeMaria, state director of communicable disease control.

More than 100 samples were taken from inside the plant located in Shrewsbury, MA  and responsible strain of listeria was found in seven bottles and on the floor near the homogenizer .at the Shrewsbury plant.  The AP story can be found here.

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Linda Bock at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette News yesterday (Jan. 9) wrote what might end up being the definitive wrap up piece on the Whittier Farms listeriosis outbreak.
With three elderly dead and one pregnant woman suffering a miscarriage, Bock reports that health officials cannot say the outbreak is over. That's because listeria has an incubation period of 70 days. Milk processing was shut down by state health officials on Dec. 27, meaning the incubation period will run to March 6.
Bock also reports the current outbreak is the third listeriosis outbreak involving pasteurized milk in the country. She says:

The first documented outbreak of listeriosis in pasteurized milk in the country occurred between June 30, 1983, and Aug. 30, 1983, when 49 people in Massachusetts contracted listeriosis, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine on Feb. 18, 1985. According to the journal, seven of the cases occurred in fetuses or infants and 42 in immuno-suppressed adults; 14 patients died. Testing at the time revealed that the illness was strongly associated with drinking a specific brand of pasteurized whole or 2 percent milk. The milk associated with the disease came from a group of farms where listeriosis in dairy cows was known to have occurred at the time of the outbreak.

In a CDC weekly report published Dec. 16, 1988, the 1983 Massachusetts outbreak implicated pasteurized whole milk or 2 percent milk. However, an inspection of a milk-producing plant detected no apparent breach in the pasteurization process, prompting further interest in the effectiveness of pasteurization.

Since then, several studies have shown that listeria bacteria are killed by pasteurization, according to the CDC. After reviewing the studies, a World Health Organization working group on food-borne listeriosis concluded in 1988 that “pasteurization is a safe process which reduces the number of Listeria monocytogenes (bacteria) occurring in raw milk to levels that do not pose an appreciable risk to human health.”

The second documented listeriosis outbreak involving pasteurized milk occurred in the Midwest in 1994. After an outbreak of gastroenteritis and fever among people who attended a picnic in Illinois, health officials determined that 45 people associated with the consumption of chocolate milk got sick with diarrhea and fever. Four people were hospitalized.

The Whittier Farms dairy is in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, about 35 miles west of Boston.
For Bock's complete story, go here. It's a good read.

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Stephen Smith at the Boston Globe tonight is reporting there has been a third death from the contaminated milk produced at Whittier Farms in Central Massachusetts.

Dead is an 87-year old Norfolk County man.  State health officials are declining to give out the man's name.  He died in the hospital, where he had been sent after becoming ill in November.

The Boston Globe also reports the total number of listeria cases now linked to the Whittier Farms operation is now five, up one from earlier reports.  Two other elderly men died earlier from the Whittier Farms listeria outbreak.

The newly identified victim, however, will survive.

"A 31-year-old Middlesex County woman was diagnosed with the disease in September while in the hospital to deliver a baby,  Dr. Alfred DeMaria, the state's director of communicable disease control, told the Globe.   Investigators connected her to the milk after discovering that she had consumed 2 percent and whole milk made by Whittier.

The 31-year-old woman and her baby are both healthy, as is a 34-year-old woman whose illness was previously linked to the outbreak. That woman, though, suffered a miscarriage after exposure to the bacteria."

Three dead, a miscarriage and still counting.

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