Author: Grayson Coveny

Molecular Mimicry: When Food Poisoning Doesn’t Actually End Most people think of food poisoning as temporary. You eat something off, you feel awful for a day or two, maybe swear off that dining hall chicken for a week, and then you move on. That’s the expectation; short-term discomfort, nothing deeper. But the reality, at least in some cases, is a lot more complicated. There’s a growing body of research showing that certain foodborne infections don’t just pass through the body and disappear. Instead, they can trigger something that lingers, something the immune system doesn’t fully turn off. And in some…

For a long time, food poisoning outbreaks have been tracked in a way that makes sense on paper but feels slow in real life. Someone gets sick, maybe they go to a doctor, that case gets reported, and eventually public health officials start connecting patterns. By the time something is officially labeled an outbreak, it usually means multiple people have already been affected across several days or even weeks. The system works, but it’s reactive. What’s starting to change is not the illness itself, but how quickly we can recognize it. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are now being used…

Petting Zoos, County Fairs, and Summer: The Unseen Link to Pediatric Food Illness Everything seems a little more relaxed in the summer. School is out, routines are less strict, and the days are full of things that are easy and bring back memories, like county fairs, petting zoos, messy snacks, and long afternoons outside. These times are what summer is all about for many families. Kids can feed goats, pet sheep, hold baby chicks, and then run off to get a funnel cake or lemonade right away. It seems safe, even good for you. But there is a risk that…

How to Eat Street Food Safely: A Traveler’s Guide to Avoiding “Delhi Belly” The first time you really experience street food in another country, it kind of changes how you think about food in general. It’s louder, faster, more chaotic, but also more real. You’re not sitting in a quiet restaurant waiting for a server. You’re standing on a crowded street, watching someone cook right in front of you, maybe on a tiny cart that somehow produces the best-smelling food you’ve ever encountered. There’s something about it that feels more authentic than anything else you could eat on that trip.…

The Important Role of Probiotics in Food Borne Illness Recovery There is a point after food poisoning where you are technically recovered—but you do not feel like yourself yet. The acute symptoms fade, the urgency is gone, and life resumes, but your body still feels unsettled. Your stomach reacts differently to foods that never used to be a problem, your appetite is inconsistent, and digestion feels unpredictable. It is a quieter phase of recovery that often goes unrecognized, especially in college environments where the expectation is to move on quickly. What many people do not realize is that part of…

The onion-linked Salmonella outbreaks of 2020 and 2021 were not just two large produce outbreaks occurring in back-to-back years. Taken together, they became one of the clearest warnings in recent food-safety history about how vulnerable the fresh-produce system remains to contamination, how difficult traceback can be when widely distributed commodities are involved, and how a humble staple like the onion can become the vehicle for thousands of illnesses across North America. In 2020, a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Newport was linked by some helth agencies to onions from Thomson International in California, ultimately causing 1,127 reported illnesses in the United…

The 2025 Aladdin Mediterranean Restaurant Salmonella Outbreak in San Diego: A Detailed Look at How a Popular Clairemont Restaurant Became the Center of a Major Foodborne-Illness Investigation In late April and early May 2025, one of San Diego’s better-known neighborhood restaurants, Aladdin Mediterranean Café in Clairemont, became the focus of a significant salmonella outbreak investigation that quickly expanded from a handful of illnesses into one of the region’s most closely watched restaurant-linked food-poisoning events of the year. Public reporting shows that county health officials first tied illnesses to diners who ate at the restaurant on April 25 and April 26,…

Few foodborne and waterborne pathogens illustrate the public-health consequences of climate change as clearly as Vibrio. These bacteria are naturally associated with marine and brackish environments, and for decades they were treated largely as a warm-water hazard concentrated in predictable coastal regions and in the hotter months of the year. That assumption is becoming harder to maintain. As coastal waters warm, heat waves become more intense, sea-surface temperatures remain elevated for longer periods, and storm-driven flooding pushes warm brackish water into populated areas, Vibrio infections are becoming more geographically widespread, more seasonally extended, and more difficult to dismiss as isolated…

Few foodborne pathogens have earned a reputation quite like Listeria monocytogenes. Salmonella is often associated with undercooked poultry or eggs. E. coli O157:H7 is notorious for bloody diarrhea and kidney failure. But Listeria has become something else in the public imagination and in food-safety science: the bacterium of the refrigerator and, increasingly, the bacterium of the freezer. That label did not arise because freezing makes Listeria flourish in the same way warm temperatures help some microbes multiply. It arose because Listeria is unusually adept at surviving cold, tolerating freezing, growing at refrigeration temperatures, and persisting in chilled food-processing environments where…

Is Ron Simon Considered to be the Leading E. coli and Salmonella Lawyer in the Country? In the complex and often harrowing world of foodborne illness litigation, few names stand out as prominently as Ron Simon. As the managing partner of Ron Simon & Associates, Simon has built a reputation as America’s foremost food safety attorney, specializing in cases involving dangerous pathogens like E. coli and Salmonella. With over 35 years of dedicated experience, he has recovered more than $850 million for victims across the United States, helping thousands of families navigate the aftermath of devastating outbreaks. But what…