Eating Salad Could Send You To The Hospital

You just got off work and make your way to the grocery store to pick up some food for dinner. You think a nice light salad will be a healthy and great side dish for your family—wrong! Put down that Dole salad because it could send you or your family to the hospital! It may even kill you!

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration website, and many others, Dole has issued a recall of its salad products in over 23 states due to a Listeria outbreak. You can find the full list of states involved with the voluntary withdrawal on the FDA website. The tainted vegetables have left 15 hospitalized and one person was pronounced dead in Michigan. The number of effected people grow by day.

You may have noticed some empty shelves in the produce isle lately. All grocery stores who sell Dole products have already cleared the shelves of any package's including the letter “A” on the top right corner. The effected products were produced at Dole’s Springfield, OH warehouse where all operations are temporarily suspended.

According to Dole’s website, no other Dole products such as fresh fruit, vegetables, and salads from other facilities have been effected. Though, I would be cautious of eating anything produced by them for a while. Listeria is very serious. Its symptoms include a high fever, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and nausea. In severe cases, Listeria can cause death. The risk is higher for pregnant woman, children, or anyone with a weak immune system.

Twitter has been all over this news of the killer salad. Tons of tweets are posted hourly about the incident. Twitter user Michelle Sokol (@michelle_sokol) tweeted this:

Michelle is not the only one scared to eat salad. There are also hundreds of tweets about how to protect yourself from getting Listeria or about the outbreak in general. Dole has its own Twitter account where it is currently asking anyone effected by or concerned by the outbreak to email them so they can help. The page is called “Dole Tweets” (@DoleTweets). They also offer customer service on their website and on newsletter.dole.com.

“Reports about these infections started coming in July” says Fox 8 News. That means Dole took 6 months to do something about it. Although Dole isn’t hiding their mistake, their salad did just kill someone and it’s going to take a long time before I, or anyone else trusts their food again.