United States: Boar’s Head, the Maryland based deli meat maker that was identified as the origin of listeria that killed four and infected fifty six others, said on Friday that it will permanently shut down the Jarratt, Va deli meat manufacturing plant that produced the contaminated products.
Boar’s Head added that it also believes it has identified where contamination is coming from.
‘Our qualitative analysis has clearly pointed out that the issue of contamination stemmed from one particular process that fairly existed exclusively in the Jarratt facility and which was only used in liverwurst production’, the company said in a Friday statement.
As reported by HealthDay, A CDC update slating Aug. 28, showed that the toll from listeria associated with contaminated Boar’s Head deli meats had escalated to nine.
Fatalities have already been reported in Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Lynne Gillespie, a food-safety specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, said: 57 people have been hospitalized because of listeria illness linked to the outbreak.
That is the biggest reported listeria outbreak in the United States since another listeria outbreak associated with contaminated cantaloupes in the year 2011, the CDC said.
The list of the affected products has been extended and now totals 71 products which have been produced between May 10 and July 29, 2006 under Boar’s Head and Old Country brand names.
Part of the suspect product could still be in family refrigerators since some of the products had sell dates extending upto October.
People all ought to look for the other recalled Boar’s Head products within their residences as they might have a very long shelf-life, the CDC noted. These products are marked with special code ‘EST 12612’ or ‘P-12612’ inside the USDA mark of inspection.
Some of the reasons for the Jarratt plant shutdown include many citations received from the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service within the last two years.
Since they may also be contaminated by Listeria monocytogenes bacteria, the Boars Head deli meats were on July 30 recalled in an additional 7 million pound.
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