Listeria Hysteria: Should You Worry About the Flurry of Food Recalls?

CHICAGO, IL - While you pawed through your freezer this week in search of potentially contaminated fried rice and empanadas, checking serial numbers against lengthy lists of recalled products, food safety experts were educating industry professionals at the national Food Safety Summit in Rosemont.

Listeria was a topic of concern in light of many recent multi-state food recalls and outbreak warnings.

Listeria monocytogenes is a foodborne bacteria that can cause serious infections and deadly illnesses. Listeriosis mostly affects people with weakened immune systems, the elderly, pregnant women and newborns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

• See also: Listeria Warning Spreads To Frozen Vegetables With Meat

Though Listeria may be difficult to remove from food preparation facilities, Listeria is actually not ubiquitous, said Martin Wiedmann, a Cornell University’s professor in food safety, during a summit session cheerfully and ironically titled “Listeria: The Ubiquitous Bug That Won’t Go Away!”

Experts and industry leaders gathered in suburban Chicago last week to discuss food safety.

Wiedmann said the development of certain tools has helped scientists and government regulators better understand how listeria gets to food, and it's up to the food industry to up its game.

Genome sequencing and DNA fingerprinting paired with patient interviews have made it easier to identify outbreaks ... Before this technology evolved, investigators would go to people with listeriosis and ask, "What did you eat in the past two months?" and the patient would go, "Uh, hell if I know."

Those tools have, in a way, contributed to the recent rash of Listeria hysteria. It's hard to escape the frantic headlines declaring, “Massive Frozen Food Recall Over Deadly Listeria Fears” and “Symptoms Of Listeria Are Subtle, So Here's Exactly What To Look For.” Ten pages of Google News results cover Listeria activity from this month alone.

Though outbreaks may seem commonplace lately, Wiedmann said they’ve simply become easier to identify thanks to technology changing the picture of foodborne disease surveillance.

Data from the CDC shows the number of Listeria outbreaks identified in the United States has gone up over the past 20 years, but the number of people reporting Listeria-related sickness is decreasing.

The CDC’s electronic reporting system shows two Listeria outbreaks were identified in 1998, compared to nine outbreaks in 2014. However, 105 Listeria-related illnesses were reported in 1998, and 55 illnesses were reported in 2014.

Three Listeria outbreaks have been identified so far this year, and the Food and Drug Administration keeps rolling out overwhelmingly lengthy recall lists.

• On Jan. 27, Dole voluntarily recalled all salad mixes produced in its Springfield, Ohio, processing facility, which the CDC reports was the likely source of an outbreak. Dole faces lawsuits over the resulting illnesses and deaths, as well as a Department of Justice investigation.

• Raw milk from Miller's Organic Farm in Bird-In-Hand, Pennsylvania, was identified Jan. 29 as the likely source of an outbreak that infected two people in 2014.

• And CRF Frozen Foods of Pasco, Washington, likely caused eight people to be hospitalized, including one person from Maryland and one from Washington who died, though listeriosis wasn’t considered the cause of their deaths. There have been several recent and expanding recalls related to the outbreak.

Listeria is everywhere. It crops up in pretty much every food facility, and Wiedmann said the bacteria gets out when contamination happens after the "kill step" or during any part of the prerequisite programs before the food goes out to the people.

Technology and food safety practices, including all those frightening recalls, are turning things around.

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The Listeria Whole Genome Sequencing Project began in September 2013 as collaboration of federal agencies. Whole genome sequencing allows public health investigators to tell if more than one person is sick from the same strain of Listeria.

Now scientists just analyze patient poop samples and find every infected person in that outbreak ate the same hotdogs.

And when Listeria is isolated from facilities or foods, it gets sequenced and stored for future reference. The project already has sequenced 2,300 Listeria isolates from humans, food and environments, according to the CDC.

In the early days of genome sequencing in 2001, the cost of sequencing a human-sized genome was nearly $100 million, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. In 2015, a genome sequence cost a little more than $1,000.

Though the Listeria Whole Genome Sequencing Project is a relatively recent endeavor, the CDC has been using DNA fingerprinting and PulseNet — a national lab network of foodborne illness information — to identify and solve different foodborne illness outbreaks since 1996.

These tools helped investigators retroactively identify six illnesses reported between 2013 and 2015 that had the same Listeria strain as two illnesses reported in 2016. Those eight illnesses are all related to the current CRF Frozen Foods recalls, the CDC reports.

While we may find the many Listeria outbreak warnings and food recalls unnerving, and we wonder if they are signs of a breakdown in our food-prep industry, what we're really seeing is the development of a much better identification and food safety system.

The recall headlines of 2016 may be scary, but this year may be a sign significant improvements are on the horizon.

Robert Tauxe, director of CDC's Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases, said during a town hall meeting at the Food Safety Summit that whole genome sequencing technology targeting Listeria may be available in about 30 states in the next two years.

The new technology promises to increase the power and effectiveness of PulseNet, and the CDC plans to launch the next generation of the network: PulseNet 2.0.

“The collective system will find more outbreaks and find them when they're smaller,” Tauxe said. “We may look back on 2016 as a tipping point in food safety.”

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