- Bagged salad is being recalled over concerns it is contaminated with the parasite cyclospora.
- The parasite can cause cyclosporiasis.
- Symptoms appear about 7 days after consuming the parasite and include severe diarrhea, loss of appetite, weight loss, cramping, and bloating.
It’s time to check your fridge for bagged salad due to a new recall.
Little Salad Bar Garden Salad, a type of bagged salad containing carrots, red cabbage, and iceberg lettuce, has been voluntarily
When ingested, which is typically through contaminated fruits or vegetables that haven’t been washed, the parasite can cause an infection called
Symptoms of cyclosporiasis usually appear about 7 days after consuming the parasite and include severe diarrhea, loss of appetite, weight loss, cramping, and bloating.
According to the
If the bagged salad made its way into your latest pandemic grocery haul, you should toss it out immediately.
If you ate it and experience symptoms, contact your doctor, as they may want to prescribe antibiotics.
The recall includes all product codes of Little Salad Bar Garden Salads — it’s sold in a red and clear bag of mixed greens and produced by the food retailer ALDI.
The affected products had use-by dates between May 16 and July 4, 2020.
The items were distributed to stores in Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin between May 1 and June 19.
They were sold at the following grocery stores: Hy-Vee, Jewel-Osco, and Aldi.
Those who bought these items should throw them away.
If you have any questions or concerns about the contamination, you can call the Fresh Express Consumer Response Center at (800) 242-5472, the recall notice states.
Cyclospora is a parasite that infects the small intestine when ingested in oocyst form, according to Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar for Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.
Symptoms usually kick in about a week after ingesting contaminated food. The incubation period can vary though, and it can be as short as 1 day to as long as 11 days.
Symptoms commonly include severe diarrhea, fatigue, and body aches, along with gastrointestinal pain like excess gas and bloating.
The infection “is characterized by watery diarrhea sometimes accompanied by fever and abdominal cramps,” Adalja said.
The infection usually is not life threatening, and most healthy adults will be able to recover on their own without treatment.
“The duration of illness is variable,” said Dr. Sheldon Campbell, a Yale Medicine pathologist and professor of laboratory medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.
For some, the illness lasts anywhere from 2 to 7 weeks. Others will experience symptoms that linger for a month, Campbell noted.
“It’s shorter and less severe in persons in poorer countries, where the disease is more common,” Campbell said.
If symptoms persist or if you have a compromised immune system, the infection can be treated with antibiotics (specifically, trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole), which can be prescribed by a healthcare provider.
“Cyclospora is usually a mild illness, but like many other infections is frequently more severe and difficult to treat in frail or immunocompromised people,” Campbell said.
A doctor will need to collect a stool sample to determine if
“It’s diagnosed either by seeing the parasite in the stool with a microscope or by detecting it with a molecular test; PCR, like we’re using a lot for COVID-19 but targeting the cyclospora genome instead,” Campbell said.
Untreated, cyclosporiasis can persist for weeks or months, causing sporadic flare-ups of diarrhea and fatigue.
Cyclosporiasis is primarily spread through contaminated feces and is
The best way to
Whenever you handle unwashed produce, wash your hands with soap and water.
Any cutting boards and utensils used to prepare potentially contaminated products should also be washed and sanitized.
Wash down any areas that may have come in contact with the contaminated items, like countertops, shelves, and the refrigerator.
Adalja says cyclosporiasis is a fairly common intestinal infection.
It’s estimated that the United States sees about
Between May 1 and August 31, 2019, the United States reported over 2,400 cases of cyclosporiasis.
About 10 percent of those illnesses were caused by
The basil was linked to 241 cases of cyclosporiasis across 11 states. Six people were hospitalized and none died.
Past infections have also been caused by fresh produce items contained with cyclospora (think: basil, cilantro, mesclun lettuce, raspberries, and snow peas).
“Produce can get contaminated when sprayed with water contaminated with the oocysts,” Adalja said.
Historically speaking, outbreaks are more likely to occur during summer months.
Little Salad Bar Garden Salad, a type of bagged salad containing carrots, red cabbage, and iceberg lettuce, has been voluntarily recalled, as it’s potentially contaminated with a microscopic parasite known as cyclospora.
When ingested, which is typically through contaminated fruits or vegetables that haven’t been washed, the parasite can cause an infection called