When Jackie’s 9-year-old son got here down with a low-grade fever in October, she chalked it as much as a typical back-to-school bug. However his sickness worsened over the subsequent couple of days. “His pores and skin tone seemed grey,” she mentioned, and near-constant diarrhea left him unable to sleep and too weak to face.
After two emergency room visits and a three-day hospitalization, he lastly started to get well, mentioned Jackie, who lives in Southern California and requested to be recognized solely by her first identify to guard her household’s privateness. A stool tradition revealed that he had been contaminated with salmonella.
A public well being investigator requested Jackie to recount every part her son had consumed in the course of the two weeks earlier than his sickness, and to element the merchandise in her fridge. Per week later, they recognized the supply of his sickness: unpasteurized milk from Raw Farm, a dairy producer in Fresno, Calif.
Jackie’s son was one among 171 individuals sickened and 22 hospitalized from September 2023 to March 2024 in a salmonella outbreak linked to unpasteurized milk from Raw Farm, based on the California Division of Public Well being. The scale of the outbreak — the biggest recorded outbreak linked to unpasteurized milk in additional than twenty years — solely got here to gentle after a preliminary depend of 165 circumstances was released last week. Earlier than that, the most recent public notifications of the dimensions of the outbreak had been on Oct. 25, 2023, and listed 19 circumstances in San Diego County and Orange County.
“This outbreak could possibly be many occasions bigger than the 171 circumstances reported,” mentioned Michael Osterholm, the director of the Middle for Infectious Illness Analysis and Coverage on the College of Minnesota. Folks don’t at all times see a physician when they’re ailing, and in the event that they do, they might not be examined for food-borne sicknesses or cooperate with public well being investigations, he mentioned.
Practically 40 p.c of these contaminated in the course of the outbreak had been youthful than 5, California well being officers mentioned, and circumstances had been reported in California, Washington State, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Texas. Gross sales of unpasteurized milk, which has not been heated to a temperature that will kill doubtlessly dangerous micro organism, are illegal or heavily restricted in practically two dozen states. However retail gross sales are authorized in California and a rising variety of states.
