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› $150,000,000 verdict in personal injury case
A Georgia sugar company will pay more than $6 million in penalties for the February 2008 explosion at its Port Wentworth, Georgia, plant and subsequent health and safety violations discovered at the company’s other facility in Gramercy, Louisiana. The explosion at Imperial Sugar Co. claimed the lives of 14 workers and seriously injured dozens of others.
A California produce grower has recalled romaine lettuce that was distributed throughout 29 states, Canada, and Puerto Rico because of salmonella contamination. Tanimura & Antle, Inc. of Salinas, Calif., issued the recall after the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture detected salmonella on the lettuce in a randomized test.
The U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission announced that it has sworn in its new Chairman, Inez Tenebaum, an attorney and child advocate who recently completed two terms as South Carolina’s State Superintendent of Education. Ms. Tenenbaum was nominated by President Obama on June 9 and confirmed by the Senate on June 19. Her term will expire in October 2013.
Another salmonella-related recall was announced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, this time for a brand of sauce and gravy mixes manufactured by the C.F. Sauer Company of Richmond, Virginia.
Last month, inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration visited the Plainview, Texas, peanut processing plant owned and operated by the Peanut Corporation of America. The inspection was ordered after investigators linked a salmonella outbreak that sickened nearly 700 people in nearly every state to the Peanut Corp’s plant in Blakely, Georgia. Shortly after the outbreak, news broke that the company’s sister plant in Texas plant actually operated unlicensed and uninspected for years. Inspectors rushed in.
Peanut Corporation of America has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Virginia following the recall of peanut products produced in the company’s Blakely, Georgia, and Plainview, Texas, facilities.
Federal officials have been reporting that that the Peanut Corporation of America had salmonella-contaminated peanut butter retested in an apparent effort to obtain negative results. however, this week the Food and Drug Administration corrected its report, saying that in some cases the peanut processing plant in Blakely, Georgia, didn’t wait for results of the second tests before sending shipments of peanut butter. In other cases, independent labs hired by the Peanut Corp. found salmonella in some peanut butter, but the company shipped it out anyway, without retesting.
Most of the news concerning the massive peanut butter recall has focused on the manufacturing facility in Blakely, Georgia where Peanut Corporation of America produced the contaminated peanut butter that sickened so many people. Now Peanut Corporation’s other factory in Plainview, Texas, is in the spotlight because it operated unlicensed and uninspected for nearly four years.
Seven-year-old Christopher Meunier spent nearly a week in the hospital late last year after eating some peanut butter crackers contaminated with salmonella. The boy’s parents, Gabrielle and Daryl Meunier of Burlington, Vermont, are now suing the Peanut Corporation of America for an undisclosed amount of money.
A shipment of chopped peanuts from Peanut Corporation of America’s Blakely, Georgia, facility was rejected in Canada because it was deemed “filthy and putrid,” officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said.
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