![]() “Listeria can lay in a drain for years,” she said. It can live for years on surfaces such as drains or pipes. Listeria didn’t get into ice cream through the milk because Blue Bell uses pasteurized milk, Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for Center for Science in the Public Interest, told CNN on Tuesday.īut listeria could have been carried on foods like nuts that go into ice cream, she said. Listeria: What is it, how do you get it, and what’s the risk? “At this point, we cannot say with certainty how Listeria was introduced to our facilities, and so we have taken this unprecedented step,” the company said. “This means Blue Bell has now had several positive tests for Listeria in different places and plants,” the company said in a written statement. “We don’t think something contaminated both factories.”īlue Bell decided to yank all its products after tests showed some half-gallon containers of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream contained listeria. “It looks to us like there was one group of closely related strains related to ice cream from one factory and another different group related to a different factory,” Tauxe said. Tauxe said the listeria strains found in Texas are different than those found in Oklahoma. ![]() “If tomorrow someone found another completely different pattern from (Blue Bell) ice cream products, we’d be looking to see if there were related cases to that as well.” “There may be cases that never got diagnosed and we are looking at the patterns, the DNA patterns, to guide us to which cases might be related,” he said. The “rough estimate” is one more case exists for every case the CDC hears about, he said. Tauxe said there may be more people sickened by listeria than the CDC knows about. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the CDC Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases. The origin of the strain is still unknown, but “the fact that it was the same strain over the last five years suggests it could have lurked somewhere in the factory the whole time,” said Dr. The agency connected patients from 2010-2015 to the current outbreak through comparisons to a database of bacteria DNA. People first became sick in January 2010, the CDC said. One person became sick in Arizona, five in Kansas, one in Oklahoma and three in Texas, the CDC said. Three people in Kansas have died in the past year and 10 people in four states have fallen ill from the bacteria believed to have come from Blue Bell products, the CDC said Tuesday. The CDC recommends consumers do not eat any Blue Bell brand products. The bacteria can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, the elderly and others with weak immune systems. The listeria outbreak that prompted Blue Bell Creameries to recall their entire product line dates to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control.Īfter weeks of gradual recalls, the company recalled all its ice cream, frozen yogurt, sherbet and other frozen treats sold in 23 states because they could be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, the company said Monday.
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