A heartbreaking lawsuit:
Surviving cancer, done in by salmonella
Source of Article: http://www.startribune.com/local/38433109.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUnciaec8O7EyUsl The family of a
Perham, Shirley Mae Almer seemed to be beating the odds. The 72-year-old
woman from Instead, she died Dec. 21, and
her children and grandchildren spent the holidays in grief. They soon got a second shock. Almer's daughter Ginger Lorentz, of Brainerd,
said she served her mother peanut butter toast a week before she died. She
said she prepared it in the nursing home, using the facility's peanut butter.
"It seemed so pointless --
with all the battles she overcame -- to have a piece of peanut butter toast
take her," Lorentz said. Now, 503 people in 43 states
have been infected by salmonella linked by DNA fingerprinting to peanut
butter produced in a Lorentz said she doesn't blame
herself or the nursing home. The family on Monday sued the manufacturer,
Peanut Corp. of Lorentz, her brother Jeff Almer of Savage and sister Vickie Hammes
of Oakdale said in an interview that they believe their mother would be alive
if she hadn't eaten tainted peanut butter. Salmonella typically causes
abdominal pain, nausea -- symptoms they say their mother suffered -- diarrhea
and fever. The infection can be fatal in young, elderly or frail people. "I am just sick of hearing
about contaminated food, and now it hurts in the most personal way,"
Jeff Almer said. A struggle back
to health Shirley Almer
was a mother of five and businesswoman who was president of the family's
bowling alley in Wadena, and later helped open another family-owned alley in
Brainerd. She retired five years ago and was found to have lung cancer in
2007, and her children worried. Yet her surgery at the University of
Minnesota Medical Center was pronounced a success, they said. In June she
took a When she returned from the
trip, she suffered a seizure that sent her back to the U, where doctors
treated a brain tumor with radiation. She spent two months in the hospital,
and for a time she couldn't move some limbs. "She got strong, she regained the use of all those limbs. They got
to be normal," Jeff Almer said. By October, she moved in with
her daughter in Brainerd and spent weekends at her home in Perham. Then came another setback, a urinary tract infection that sent
her to a transitional unit in Good Samaritan just after Thanksgiving. It was
meant to be temporary, to regain strength, her family said. "So we would bring her
snacks and cookies and things like that," said Lorentz. "They had a
little kitchenette in her wing and she liked peanut butter toast. So I made
her peanut butter toast for two days in a row." The family had planned to take
her home Dec. 22. Yet the day before that, she became gravely ill. "It went really
fast," said Hammes, who visited her mother in
a Brainerd hospital where she had been transferred. "She was not really
coherent. I know she heard us. She could squeeze my hands." By then, the state Health
Department was searching for clues to a salmonella outbreak that had struck
elsewhere in the country and turned up in A phone call from
the state Nine days after her mother
died, Lorentz said she got a call from a state epidemiologist. It was the
first time that she had heard that her mother had been tested for salmonella
and found to be infected with the strain afflicting people around the
country. "She asked about chicken, and she asked about peanut
butter," said Lorentz. "I said, 'Yes, I used to make her peanut
butter toast.'" Dr. Kirk Smith, who heads the
department's foodborne disease investigative unit,
said identifying victims at a long-term care facility -- as a policy, the
department doesn't identify institutions or victims by name -- and testing
its peanut butter were the keys to identifying the source of the outbreak. A
series of recalls soon began, first of the bulk peanut butter and then of products
made from it, including cookies, crackers, cereal, candy, ice cream and pet
food. Federal officials say the
contamination was traced back to the Peanut Corp. of None of this happened in time
to help Clifford Tousignant, 78, who died Jan. 12
in another Brainerd nursing home operated the Good Samaritan Society, a
nonprofit based in So far, the Almer
family is the first in George Clarke, spokesman for
Peanut Corp. of Hammes said the government needs to take
notice. "I really believe there
needs to be reforms, and speaking out is the best way to do it," she
said. "I know my mom would be proud of what we are doing right
now." |
Copyright (C) All rights reserved under FoodHACCP.com
If you have any comments, please send your
email to info@foodhaccp.com
