Surviving salmonella: how one patient beat foodborne illness

“I thought normal food poisoning is, you get a stomachache and get some diarrhea and get over it in 24 hours,” Koehler said. “I didn’t know it could be as severe.” More than a week before he

fell ill, Koehler recalled, he’d cooked hamburgers to medium on a grill and shared them with his girlfriend’s daughter. He said he believes that because he handled the raw meat, he was the

only one who got sick. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends cooking ground beef to 160 degrees F, a temperature associated with medium to well-done. The USDA cautions people not to

judge a burger’s doneness by color alone. POLICY AND ACTION Soon after he recovered from his condition, Koehler went to two grocery stores to ask where the meat came from, but employees

couldn’t give him an answer. Although most people affected by the same outbreak lived in the Northeast, one case was documented as far away as Hawaii.  From Hannaford’s “limited records,”

the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service was unable to determine the suppliers responsible for the salmonella contamination, an FSIS spokesperson told AARP. The agency pursued a rule to

require retailers of ground beef to maintain records of their suppliers, which became effective in June 2016. “Our stores keep thorough records tracking information related to ground beef,

including the suppliers associated with the product placed on our shelves,” Hannaford told AARP. “These efforts provide greater transparency and accountability within the supply chain, as

well as the ability for the USDA to trace all product to its processing facility. We take this work very seriously and are fully committed to delivering safe and wholesome food to our

customers.” Koehler around the time he became sick with a salmonella infection. Ken Koehler An FSIS spokesperson highlighted two other changes “of note” to federal regulations around

processing ground beef since the 2011 Hannaford outbreak. First, the FSIS expanded its testing for Shiga toxin–producing E. coli (STEC) to include more types of raw beef products. Second, a

new sampling method is used to detect adulterants STEC and salmonella in domestic beef trimmings. These changes were implemented as of February 2023. FSIS said it regularly tests raw beef

products for salmonella and STEC. The number of samples it takes can vary based on the type of product manufactured and the quantity produced. The agency may conduct additional testing in

response to past performance concerns. It also tests imported beef and ground beef sold in stores. You can find the results of these tests on the FSIS website. Since the 2011 contamination

of ground beef sold at Hannaford stores, there have been nine multistate outbreaks of foodborne illness linked to ground beef. The worst was in 2018, resulting in 403 cases and 117

hospitalizations. Although there are performance standards for the presence of salmonella in other meat and poultry products, they aren’t strictly enforced because legal cases made it

difficult to do so, said Barb Kowalcyk, an associate professor at George Washington University’s Department of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences. Kevin’s Law (or the Meat and Poultry Pathogen

Reduction and Enforcement Act), named after Kowalcyk’s son who died of complications from an E. coli infection, attempted to address these inconsistencies, but it never passed. Salmonella

causes illness in approximately 1.35 million people in the U.S. annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This results in a cost to consumers of more

than $4 billion, based on a 2020 estimate from the USDA using data from 2018. Adults 65 and older, as well as people with weakened immune systems, are more susceptible to severe illness

from foodborne infections, according to the CDC.​