Listeria, E. coli, Botulism, and Aalmonella are four of America’s deadliest foodborne pathogens — and a veteran courtroom warrior says the industry keeps failing to stop them.
By McKenna Coveny | June 18, 2026
On December 15, 2025 — the day after his first child was born — Wesley Williams fell gravely ill. He had been consuming a product marketed specifically for people who cared about their health: Live It Up Super Greens, a dietary supplement powder sold online to wellness-conscious buyers across the country. By the time federal authorities confirmed the connection, 45 people in 21 states had been diagnosed with Salmonella linked to the same product. Williams was quarantined from his newborn who was in a hospital room at the time, separated from the child he had just welcomed into the world by the invisible menace of a microscopic bacterium.
Three thousand miles away and a few months later, a three-month-old infant named only as PR in court documents was transferred by medical transit between two California hospitals, fighting for his life against infant botulism. His parents had fed him Nara Organics Whole Milk Organic Powdered Infant Formula, purchased from Target. The infant spent ten days hospitalized and required life-saving medical treatment before authorities traced the illness to the formula.
These are not isolated horror stories. They are the predictable, recurring output of a food supply that — despite decades of regulation, recalls, and litigation — continues to expose millions of Americans every year to pathogens that science has understood for well over a century. The faces change. The brands change. The four major killers do not.
The Scale of the Problem
Americans suffer from foodborne illness on a staggering scale. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that there are seven major foodborne pathogens that cause roughly 9.9 million domestically acquired illnesses, 53,300 hospitalizations, and 931 deaths every single year. Epidemiologists caution that those numbers represent only a fraction of the true burden — the tip of an iceberg. Most victims never seek care. Most who seek care are never tested. Most who are tested are never counted in outbreak tallies.
A 2025 Food for Thought report found that confirmed illnesses from contaminated food rose from 1,118 Americans in 2023 to 1,392 in 2024 — and hospitalizations more than doubled, climbing from 230 to 487. Nearly all of those cases involved one of three pathogens: Listeria, Salmonella, or E. coli. Deaths climbed from eight to nineteen in the same period. “The biggest threats stem from Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli,” the report’s authors wrote, in a conclusion that would surprise no food safety scientist but that still hasn’t translated into meaningful prevention.
Behind the numbers are the courtrooms, and in those courtrooms, few figures loom larger than Ron Simon.
The Man Who Follows the Outbreaks
Ron Simon has spent more than three decades doing something most attorneys find tedious, emotionally exhausting, and technically demanding: suing food companies on behalf of people who got sick from what they ate. Over that career, Simon and his colleagues have prosecuted thousands of food poisoning cases, producing more than $850 million in recoveries for clients and, by his account, forcing meaningful food safety upgrades at Fortune 500 companies and contributing to protective legislation.
In recent months alone, Simon’s firm has filed first-of-kind lawsuits across all four of the pathogens this article examines. That breadth — Botulism one week, Salmonella the next, E. coli the month before — reflects a grim reality: every major category of foodborne illness generates enough victims to keep a national litigation firm perpetually busy.
“At the end of the day, every case comes down to the same thing: a family trusted that their food was safe, and it wasn’t. My job is to make that right — and to make sure the company that failed them has to think twice before letting it happen again.”
— Ron Simon
Simon’s ability to be first through the courthouse door — filing the nation’s first lawsuit in an outbreak while health authorities are still completing their investigations — has become a signature of his practice. It is also, he argues, a public health function. The discovery process in litigation can compel companies to produce internal records that regulators can’t easily obtain, turning civil lawsuits into a secondary accountability mechanism when the primary system of oversight falls short.
Salmonella: The Relentless Generalist
Salmonella is the leading cause of foodborne illness deaths in the United States, responsible for an estimated 238 fatalities per year. It is also the most versatile of the major pathogens in terms of the foods it contaminates. Eggs, poultry, beef, produce, dairy, dietary supplements — there is almost no category of food that has not, at some point, been implicated in a Salmonella outbreak.
The bacterium belongs to the family Enterobacteriaceae and encompasses more than 2,500 serotypes. When ingested, it colonizes the small intestine, producing symptoms that typically emerge between six hours and six days after exposure: diarrhea, fever, abdominal cramps, and vomiting that in healthy adults resolve within four to seven days. The danger escalates in vulnerable populations — children under five, adults over 65, pregnant women, and the immunocompromised — where the bacteria can invade the bloodstream, producing bacteremia and spreading to bones, joints, and the brain.
A troubling development shadowing the Salmonella landscape is antibiotic resistance. A February 2026 outbreak linked to Rosabella brand moringa capsules involved an extensively drug-resistant Salmonella Newport strain — the first of its kind in the United States — resistant to every first-line treatment available. When the antibiotics run out of options, a routinely survivable infection can become unsurvivable.
The Live It Up Super Greens case that ensnared Wesley Williams is illustrative of a pattern Simon has seen repeat across his career: a product marketed as health-promoting, consumed by people who believed they were doing something good for their bodies, turns out to harbor the very organism capable of hospitalizing them. Simon filed the first lawsuit in the outbreak in Kane County, Illinois, in January 2026, followed shortly by a first Wisconsin lawsuit in Walworth County on behalf of Jay Sperry.
“Dietary supplement companies have a legal and moral obligation to ensure that their products are safe for consumption,” Simon said in a statement accompanying the filings. “When they fail, we hold them accountable.”
One of Salmonella’s particularly cruel long-term consequences is reactive arthritis — an inflammatory joint condition that can cause painful swelling for months or even years after the initial infection, occurring in between 2% to 10% percent of patients. A subset of those patients never fully recover.
“The fact that we are now facing a second infant formula botulism outbreak in less than twelve months demands serious scrutiny of the regulatory safeguards — or lack thereof — governing this industry.”
E. coli O157:H7: The Danger in the Meat
If Salmonella is the generalist, E. coli O157:H7 is the specialist — a strain of the otherwise benign bacterium Escherichia coli that produces Shiga toxin, a compound capable of destroying red blood cells and causing kidney failure. It is uniquely dangerous to children, with the potential to trigger hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a life-threatening condition that can produce acute kidney failure, neurological damage, and death.
E. coli O157:H7 is primarily associated with beef — particularly ground beef — but has caused outbreaks in romaine lettuce, spinach, raw flour, raw milk, and other foods. It thrives in the gut of cattle without harming the animals, and enters the food supply through slaughter contamination, fecal runoff onto produce fields, and cross-contamination during processing. Non-O157 serogroups cause the majority — around 76% — of all STEC illnesses, but O157 is responsible for the most severe outcomes, including the bulk of HUS cases that land children in intensive care units.
The outbreak that brought Simon to The Kebab Shop and its beef supplier Olympia Foods in the spring of 2026 illustrates the pathogen’s particular cruelty when it strikes the young. A child identified only as KG consumed a beef kofta plate on April 28, 2026. She developed diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and dehydration. Her symptoms quickly worsened, she was admitted to Children’s Hospital, and was ultimately hospitalized for seventeen days, undergoing several life-saving treatments. She developed acute kidney failure and hemolytic uremic syndrome and remained in guarded condition.
“E. coli O157:H7 is uniquely dangerous to children, with the potential to cause life-threatening Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, which is exactly what KG developed,” Simon said. He and the Gomez Trial Attorneys filed the first lawsuit in the outbreak in Orange County, California, in May 2026.
This was not Simon’s first rodeo with E. coli in the restaurant industry. In 2024 his firm filed the first lawsuit against McDonald’s following an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to Quarter Pounder hamburgers, which sickened 104 people in 14 states, produced 34 hospitalizations, and claimed one life. That case put the nation’s largest restaurant chain under legal and public scrutiny over its product sourcing and safety protocols.
The distinguishing feature of E. coli illness, compared to Salmonella, is the speed with which it can escalate from manageable to catastrophic. A child who appears to have a stomach bug can be in kidney failure within days. The window for diagnosis and intervention is narrow, and the consequences of missing it are severe.
| Pathogen | Incubation | Key Symptoms | Highest-Risk Groups | Primary Food Vectors |
| Salmonella | 6 hrs – 6 days | Diarrhea, fever, cramps, vomiting | Children <5, elderly, immunocompromised, pregnant | Poultry, eggs, meat, produce, dairy, supplements |
| E. coli O157:H7 | 2 – 8 days | Bloody diarrhea, severe cramps, HUS in severe cases | Children <5, elderly | Ground beef, leafy greens, raw flour, raw milk |
| Listeria | 1 – 70 days | Fever, muscle aches, meningitis; miscarriage in pregnant | Pregnant women, elderly, immunocompromised | Deli meats, soft cheeses, ready-to-eat meals, produce |
| Botulism | 12 – 36 hrs | Descending paralysis, double vision, respiratory failure | Infants (infant botulism); all ages (foodborne) | Home-canned foods, honey (infants), improperly processed foods |
Listeria: The Cold-Weather Killer
Of the four pathogens examined here, Listeria monocytogenes may be the most insidious. It thrives at refrigerator temperatures — the very conditions consumers rely on to keep food safe. It can colonize drains, conveyor belts, and cold storage environments in food processing facilities for years, quietly contaminating ready-to-eat products that require no further cooking before consumption. When it strikes, the consequences can be devastating.
Listeria monocytogenes is the third-leading cause of foodborne illness deaths in the United States, responsible for approximately 19% of all fatalities from the major foodborne pathogens — a disproportionate toll given that it causes far fewer total illnesses than Salmonella or norovirus. The disparity reflects the severity of what Listeria does to the people it infects: it crosses the blood-brain barrier, producing meningitis and meningoencephalitis; it invades the bloodstream, producing sepsis; in pregnant women, it can cross the placental barrier, causing miscarriage, stillbirth, or life-threatening illness in newborns.
The 2024 Boar’s Head outbreak — the largest Listeria crisis in over a decade — crystallized the human cost in searing terms. Among those sickened was Gunter Morgenstein, a Holocaust survivor who purchased liverwurst from his local Harris Teeter in Newport News, Virginia. He developed meningoencephalitis and sepsis, suffered severe brain damage, and died on July 18, 2024. Virginia health officials later confirmed that the Listeria found in Morgenstein’s blood and spinal fluid cultures was an exact genetic match to the strain found in contaminated Boar’s Head products.
Simon’s firm filed the nation’s first wrongful death lawsuit in that outbreak — representing the Morgenstein family — and went on to represent multiple victims as the outbreak ultimately sickened 61 people across 19 states, hospitalizing 60 of them and killing 10. “No one should die from eating a sandwich,” Simon said at the time. His firm reached the first Listeria settlement with Boar’s Head in December 2024.
Listeria’s long and variable incubation period — anywhere from one to seventy days — makes outbreak detection particularly challenging. By the time cases cluster enough to trigger an investigation, the contaminated product may be long consumed or discarded. Victims may not even remember what they ate five weeks earlier. This forensic challenge is why genomic surveillance tools like PulseNet, which allows the CDC to match Listeria strains through whole-genome sequencing, have become so critical to outbreak identification.
The danger is not confined to deli meat. A 2025 Listeria outbreak traced to supplemental shakes produced at a Prairie Farms facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana — distributed to nursing homes and care facilities as Lyons ReadyCare and Sysco Imperial products — ultimately killed 14 people across 21 states. The victims were already among the most medically vulnerable people in the country: elderly residents of long-term care facilities who consumed the shakes as nutritional support. Simon’s firm investigated claims in that outbreak as well.
What makes Listeria particularly difficult to eradicate from industrial food production is its biofilm-forming ability. Once established in a facility, it can persist for years in cracks, drains, and on equipment surfaces, surviving routine sanitation procedures that would eliminate most other bacteria. The Boar’s Head facility in Jarratt, Virginia, was found by USDA investigators to have multiple food safety lapses — and was shuttered indefinitely in September 2024. But the pattern of a single contaminated facility producing illness over an extended period before detection is one that food safety authorities encounter again and again.
Botulism: The Paralytic Threat
Botulism occupies a category of its own among foodborne illnesses — not because it is the most common, but because of what it does to the human body. Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium that produces botulinum toxin, manufactures what is widely regarded as one of the most potent toxins known to science. Foodborne botulism produces a descending paralysis: blurred vision, drooping eyelids, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, and ultimately respiratory failure. Without intensive medical care — and often mechanical ventilation — it can be fatal.
Classic foodborne botulism has historically been associated with improperly home-canned foods, where anaerobic conditions allow C. botulinum spores to germinate and produce toxin. But infant botulism, a distinct form of the disease in which spores are ingested and germinate within the infant’s immature gut, has become an increasingly scrutinized concern in the infant formula industry.
A 2025 outbreak of infant botulism traced to ByHeart infant formula sickened 51 babies across 19 states, prompting a full recall and production halt. Less than a year later, a second infant formula botulism outbreak emerged. On June 17, 2026, Simon’s firm — working again alongside the Gomez Trial Attorneys — filed the first botulism lawsuit against Nara Organics and Target, on behalf of the three-month-old infant PR and his parents, Stephanie and Ian Roltsch. The formula had been manufactured in Europe, sold under two SKUs at Target stores and online between July 2025 and June 2026.
“The fact that we are now facing a second infant formula botulism outbreak in less than twelve months demands serious scrutiny of the regulatory safeguards — or lack thereof — governing this industry,” Simon said in the press release accompanying the filing. “Babies cannot advocate for themselves. Their parents trusted a product to nourish and sustain their child.”
The Nara Organics recall, initiated on June 13, 2026 — the day after FDA contact — came as product testing by state and federal officials remained ongoing. The speed of the litigation, filed within days of the recall, reflects a philosophy Simon has developed over decades: the legal system is not just a remedy for past harm but a pressure mechanism for future compliance. Companies that face swift, well-resourced litigation in the wake of outbreaks cannot afford to treat food safety failures as acceptable business risks.
Botulism’s rarity — relative to Salmonella or E. coli — makes its case fatality rate all the more alarming when it does strike infants. Their neurological and respiratory systems are still developing, making them exquisitely vulnerable to a toxin that blocks neuromuscular transmission. Recovery is possible but slow, often requiring weeks of hospitalization and, in severe cases, antitoxin administration.
Similarities Across the Four: What Unites the Threat
For all their differences in mechanism and severity, Listeria, E. coli, botulism, and Salmonella share several structural features that explain why they persist in the modern food supply despite advanced understanding of how they operate.
First, all four exploit gaps in industrial food production — systems designed for efficiency and scale rather than pathogen elimination. Temperature abuse, cross-contamination, inadequate sanitation, insufficient cooking, and poor agricultural hygiene are the recurring villains across virtually every major outbreak investigation. The GAO has repeatedly identified the fragmented nature of federal food safety oversight — split between the FDA and the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service — as a structural impediment to consistent protection, and as of early 2025, there was still no national strategy to address it.
Second, all four disproportionately harm the most vulnerable: the very young, the very old, the immunocompromised, and pregnant women. The CDC has found that meat and poultry are the most common sources of fatal foodborne infections, with Salmonella and Listeria driving the majority of those deaths — and that while produce accounts for nearly half of all foodborne illnesses by volume, it’s the animal-protein supply chain where the dying concentrates.
Third, all four are dramatically underreported. The CDC estimates that for every confirmed Salmonella patient in an outbreak, 29 infections go undetected; for every confirmed E. coli case, more than 26 go undetected. Listeria and botulism, being more severe, generate higher rates of medical care and thus somewhat better reporting — but even there, the official numbers are a floor, not a ceiling.
Fourth, and perhaps most consequentially for accountability, all four are preventable through interventions that the food industry knows how to implement. HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) systems, environmental testing programs, supplier verification protocols, temperature monitoring, and employee hygiene training are not secret knowledge. They are established science. The outbreaks persist, Simon argues, not because the solutions are unknown but because the penalties for failing to implement them have historically been insufficient deterrents.
The Differences That Matter
The four pathogens diverge significantly in ways that shape both medical treatment and legal strategy. Salmonella and E. coli are bacterial infections for which the immune system, given time and supportive care, can mount an effective response in otherwise healthy people; Listeria and botulism are significantly more likely to require intensive intervention even in adults without pre-existing vulnerabilities. Botulism is the only one of the four caused primarily by a toxin rather than the live organism itself — a distinction with significant implications for incubation time, symptom presentation, and treatment.
The incubation windows vary enormously: botulism can strike within twelve to thirty-six hours; Salmonella between six hours and six days; E. coli within two to eight days; Listeria anywhere from one to seventy days. For outbreak investigators, that seventy-day window for Listeria represents an almost impossible epidemiological challenge. By the time cases are linked, the contaminated product is gone, discarded, or consumed weeks prior.
Treatment also diverges. Salmonella in mild cases requires only hydration and rest; severe cases benefit from antibiotics, though resistance is a growing complication. E. coli O157:H7 presents a paradox: antibiotics are generally contraindicated because they can trigger greater toxin release, potentially worsening HUS. Listeria responds to ampicillin in combination with other agents when caught early enough. Botulism requires antitoxin and, in severe cases, mechanical ventilation — sometimes for months.
From a litigation standpoint, Simon notes, the severity of harm directly shapes the value of cases. E. coli cases involving HUS, Listeria cases producing meningitis and wrongful death, and botulism cases requiring extended hospitalization tend to generate the largest recoveries — reflecting both the medical costs incurred and the long-term impact on victims’ quality of life.
What Accountability Looks Like in Practice
Ron Simon’s career offers a window into how the civil justice system functions — and sometimes misfunctions — as a food safety enforcement mechanism. When a company recalls a product, the regulatory response typically ends with the recall itself: product off shelves, investigation concluded, case closed. Litigation extends that reckoning. Discovery demands that companies produce internal communications, testing logs, audit records, and inspection reports that may reveal how long a problem was known before action was taken.
In the Boar’s Head case, the USDA’s investigation revealed multiple food safety lapses at the Jarratt, Virginia facility — documentation that would prove significant in civil proceedings. In E. coli cases, supplier verification records become critical: who tested the beef, when, and what did those tests show? In botulism cases involving infant formula, manufacturing records and pathogen control programs come under scrutiny.
“Through this and other lawsuits we are going to make sure that all of the victims in this outbreak are fairly and fully compensated for their injuries, and that The Kebab Shop takes steps to prevent this from ever happening again,” Simon said after filing the Kebab Shop E. coli lawsuit. The dual purpose — compensation and prevention — is the animating principle of his practice.
Simon’s work has resulted in food safety procedure upgrades at Fortune 500 companies and in legislation designed to protect consumers from dangerous foodborne pathogens. Whether those upgrades would have come without the litigation pressure is a question that cannot be answered definitively — but the pattern, repeated across dozens of cases over three decades, suggests that the threat of nine-figure verdicts focuses corporate attention in ways that regulatory inspections sometimes do not.
The Forecast: More of the Same
There is little in the current trajectory of American food safety to suggest that the four pathogens examined here are going away. Antibiotic resistance is worsening the Salmonella picture. Climate change is expanding the geographic range and season length of environmental conditions favorable to pathogen survival. Consolidation in food processing means that a single contaminated facility can seed illness across dozens of states before the first case is reported. And the regulatory infrastructure remains split, under-resourced, and — as of this writing — operating without a comprehensive national strategy.
What is changing is the speed of surveillance. Whole-genome sequencing has transformed outbreak investigation, allowing health authorities to cluster cases within days that once would have taken weeks to link. PulseNet, the CDC’s national molecular subtyping network, has become the backbone of foodborne illness detection, enabling authorities to identify outbreak strains with a precision that older culture methods could not approach. That faster detection is good news for public health response — but it also means more outbreaks are recognized, adding to the apparent burden of disease even as actual incidence may remain steady or decline.
For Ron Simon, the math is simple and grim: as long as companies cut corners, as long as regulation has gaps, and as long as the immune system of a three-month-old infant is no match for botulinum toxin contained in infant formula can, there will be cases to file and families to represent. He will be watching — and so will the pathogens.
Sources and further reading: CDC Estimates of Foodborne Illness | CIDRAP Food for Thought 2025 | PRNewswire: Nara Organics Botulism Lawsuit | PRNewswire: Kebab Shop E. coli Lawsuit | PRNewswire: Live It Up Salmonella Lawsuit | PRNewswire: Boar’s Head Listeria Lawsuit | GAO Food Safety Report 2025 |
