Vegetable Mix Used In Costco Chicken Salad Recalled For E. Coli

FDA officials say Taylor Farms Pacific is recalling a mix of celery and onion that is used in Costco’s chicken salad and other foods.

The CDC said laboratory testing was still ongoing.

“We take E. coli very seriously in Washington”, State Epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist.

According to ABC news, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officials were investigating and have yet to identify the source in the rotisserie chicken salad that had caused the outbreak.

Most recently, an E. coli outbreak linked to the Chipotle restaurant chain has sickened 45 people in six states.

Costco announced that has stopped the sale of chicken salad. Although most healthy adults can completely recover within a week, some people can develop a form of kidney failure called hemolytic uremic syndrome. Now, it is found that the multi-state outbreak is the result of a celery-and-onion in the chicken salad. The CDC has been told they are all getting better, Tauxe said.

The multinational membership-only club has had other food contamination issues in the past.

Those incidents include a listeria outbreak last April that killed three at a Kansas hospital where Blue Bell ice cream was served, and another outbreak in 2011 linked to Colorado cantaloupe, which killed 30 people. The CDC said the illness reports began on October 6 and involved people from age 5 to 84.

Tauxe said both investigations are ongoing and he hopes they will eventually find the exact cause of both outbreaks.

Symptoms of HUS usually set in on the eighth day of an E. coli infection.

Health workers are still trying to figure out which ingredient in the chicken salad was contaminated.