In Texas, investigators saw condensation dripping directly into food and onto surfaces that came directly in contact with food. In Alabama, FDA investigators observed at least two employees working with the food wearing soiled clothing. There were also violations at the Texas and Alabama plants. Violations in the Oklahoma plant include dirty equipment, inadequate food storage, food being held at improper temperatures and employees not washing hands adequately. The most extensive violations were found in Oklahoma, where the FDA released 16 separate positive tests for listeria on equipment and in ice cream from March 2013 through January 2015.īlue Bell did not immediately respond to a phone call or email seeking comment. The FDA released its investigations into Blue Bell’s plants in Oklahoma, Texas and Alabama after a Freedom of Information request by The Associated Press. The company recalled all of its products last month, following several smaller recalls.

Three listeria deaths in Kansas are now linked to the ice cream. The company then continued to ship ice cream produced in that plant after what the Food and Drug Administration says was inadequate cleaning.

Now, it will test every single batch before it ships.WASHINGTON - Blue Bell ice cream had evidence of listeria bacteria in its Oklahoma manufacturing plant as far back as March 2013, a government investigation released Thursday says. Prior to the news of the outbreak, Blue Bell regularly tested its product. That is exactly what Blue Bell said it will do going forward. Let’s just assume that the food is not safe until proven otherwise.” “If you are producing food, let’s not assume that the food is safe until proven otherwise. Companies should be diligent in their sampling and testing. “By the time people are sick, it’s too late,” he said. They occur whenever the investigators cannot connect the dots and are not able to find the source of the outbreak, which means that the contaminated product continues to be sold. Outbreaks that last this long are more common than one might think, said Samadpour. But to know that anyone may have gotten sick after eating our product – that’s heartbreaking to us.” And we hadn’t had a recall or a problem in our 108-year history. “You’re going along you’re not having a problem. “That was a surprise to us, yeah,” Joe Robertson, Blue Bell’s relations manager, told National Public Radio. The length and the span of the outbreak was news to the company. So far, the Blue Bell outbreak has been linked to cases as far back as 2010. The CDC has been collecting listeriosis samples from people who were affected but whose illness was never linked to a specific product since 2004. “You can never predict how big an outbreak is going to be.” “As new strains are identified out of the products, we will go back to the database and see if there are human matches,” Karen Neil, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases, told the Dallas Morning News. By testing additional Blue Bell products, collecting different strains of listeria and running them through a national database of previous listeria cases, investigators were able to link the products to past cases in other states. In the case of Blue Bell, that event was when five patients who contracted listeria at a Kansas hospital were found to have consumed milkshakes made with Blue Bell ice cream. “Many of these outbreaks are detected by chance events,” he said. The problem, he says, is industry-wide, not limited to Blue Bell Creameries. The outbreak shows a problem with our food surveillance system, said Mansour Samadpour, president and CEO of IEH Laboratories and Consulting Group, a food safety consulting lab.

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