--- title: "On World Food Safety Day, We're Turning Off the Lights" date: 2026-06-08T13:20:00-07:00 author: Bill Marler canonical_url: "https://marlerclark.com/news_events/on-world-food-safety-day-were-turning-off-the-lights" section: News --- [All News](/news_events) / [Press Releases](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/press-releases) / # On World Food Safety Day, We're Turning Off the Lights The baby could not hold up her head. She could not suck, could not swallow, could not fully open her eyes. Her parents thought she was just sleepy, until she went limp in their arms. What they were watching was botulism — a paralytic poison — moving through an infant who had done nothing in her short life but drink the formula she was handed. She ended up on a ventilator. Hers was one of dozens of cases tied to a powdered formula last fall, in the richest country on earth, in one of the most tightly regulated products we make. That is what the "burden" of unsafe food actually looks like. Not a number. A four-month-old who can't breathe on her own. Today is World Food Safety Day. This year's theme, set by the World Health Organization, is "From burden to solutions — safe food everywhere," and it rests on a single sensible idea: count the harm unsafe food does, then use what you learn to prevent it. This month the WHO is publishing new global estimates. By its latest accounting, contaminated food sickens roughly 866 million people and kills more than 1.5 million every year — more than 100,000 of them children under five. The entire premise of the day is that you cannot solve a problem you refuse to measure. Which is exactly what my country has quietly decided to stop doing. On January 22 of this year, the United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization — the very body that convenes this day and compiles the numbers it is built around. We walked out of the global effort to measure the harm just months before the day that celebrates measuring it. I have spent more than thirty years as a lawyer for the people inside those numbers — the children with their kidneys destroyed by \*E. coli\*, the families who buried a parent over a sandwich, the infants poisoned by formula. My career began in 1993 with the Jack in the Box outbreak that killed four children and sickened more than 600 people across the West. We caught that outbreak — and forced the changes that followed — for one reason: public health workers were watching. Washington State had the surveillance to connect a sick child in one county to a contaminated hamburger patty in another. Detection came first. Everything else — the recalls, the regulation, the accountability — came after. That machinery of detection is now being dismantled, piece by piece. Under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — whose "Make America Healthy Again" movement is named for the very thing it is making harder — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shrunk FoodNet, the surveillance network that has tracked foodborne illness for nearly three decades, from eight pathogens down to two. The same upheaval forced out the senior CDC scientists who ran the agency's foodborne-outbreak tracking. The administration's budget would cut the CDC's funding nearly in half, with food safety the smallest sliver of the smallest slice. FDA foreign inspections have fallen to historic lows. The Food Traceability Rule — the one tool built specifically to trace a contaminated food from farm to fork in hours instead of days, written in response to the very romaine and deli-meat outbreaks I've litigated — has been pushed off until 2028. And the Justice Department unit that once prosecuted food companies, the one that put Peanut Corporation of America executives in prison after their Salmonella killed nine people, has been disbanded. Even the data we still collect, we increasingly black out. When the FDA finally releases an outbreak record, the name of the company that poisoned people is often redacted — withheld under a "deliberative process" exemption written for internal memos, not for keeping the public from learning which supplier shipped the bacteria. I am right now fighting to pry loose names the government is hiding in active outbreaks. Taxpayers pay for the investigation, and then are told they may not see who made them sick. "Safe food everywhere" is impossible when we are forbidden to know where the danger is. Here is the logic, and it is worth saying plainly: if you stop looking for foodborne disease, the official numbers go down. Outbreaks you never detect never get counted. And once the numbers are down, you can cheerfully announce that the regulations were never needed in the first place. That is not making food safer. That is making the sick invisible. The bacteria do not retreat because we laid off the people who track them; the children just suffer in the dark, uncounted, unconnected, and — for the companies that hurt them — unaccountable. I would genuinely love to be put out of business. Nothing would make me happier than a country so safe it had no need for a food safety lawyer. Instead, my government is handing me job security and calling it efficiency. The rest of the world spends this day promising to turn data into solutions. We are spending it turning off the lights — and hoping no one notices what crawls out in the dark. ### Lawsuit updates about foodborne illnesses [Reactive Arthritis Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=reactive-arthritis&year=all) [E. coli Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=e-coli&year=all) [Guillain-Barre Syndrome Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=guillain-barre-syndrome&year=all) [Salmonella Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=salmonella&year=all) [Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=hemolytic-uremic-syndrome&year=all) [Listeria Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=listeria&year=all) [Irritable Bowel Syndrome Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=irritable-bowel-syndrome&year=all) [Hepatitis A Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=hepatitis-a&year=all) [Norovirus Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=norovirus&year=all) [Botulism Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=botulism&year=all) [Campylobacter Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=campylobacter&year=all) [Shigella Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=shigella&year=all) [Cyclospora Lawsuit Updates](/news_events/case-news?illness=cyclospora&year=all) ### Lawsuits updates by year [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 1998](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=1998) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 1999](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=1999) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2000](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2000) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2001](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2001) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2002](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2002) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2003](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2003) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2004](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2004) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2005](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2005) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2006](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2006) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2007](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2007) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2008](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2008) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2009](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2009) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2010](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2010) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2011](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2011) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2012](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2012) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2013](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2013) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2014](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2014) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2015](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2015) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2016](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2016) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2017](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2017) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2018](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2018) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2019](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2019) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2020](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2020) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2021](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2021) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2022](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2022) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2023](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2023) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2024](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2024) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2025](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2025) [Foodborne Illness Lawsuits in 2026](https://marlerclark.com/news_events/case-news?illness=all&year=2026) ##### Get Help #### Affected by an outbreak or recall? 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