Food Safety Policy Gaps - Up Close and Personal

Comments by Ann Koesterer
presented at the
U.S. House of Representatives Food Safety Caucus
Families’ and Patients’ Forum on Food Safety
Rayburn Foyer, Rayburn House Building
September 22, 2025

Good afternoon. My name is Ann Koesterer and I’m from Rockland County, New York. When the S.T.O.P. organization asked me to speak to you today, I not only felt it was an honor, but I couldn’t help but think about how ironic this was to be speaking to you today, of all days, about how important it is to ensure the safety of our food, to prevent needless deaths and illnesses. Today is an extremely special day for me….it’s my daughter, Katelyn’s, 9th birthday, which two years ago, I thought she would never live to see. Two years ago, Katelyn experienced kidney failure, a stroke, severe pancreatitis, diminishing red blood cells and platelets that required multiple transfusions, respiratory distress, as well as other complications. I thought I would be saying goodbye to my little girl, forever.

What caused this horrible illness that nearly took my child’s life? Was it cancer? Meningitis? Some catastrophic accident? No, it was just about every child’s favorite food. It was a hamburger. Katelyn ate a hamburger that was contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 and developed a severe complication known as Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS). Up until Katelyn’s illness, I, like many people, had never heard of E. coli O157:H7. Up until then, I’d lived in a sheltered world with a false sense of security that read “USDA Approved.”

After Katelyn’s illness, I found that certain comments stuck with me. For example, I’ve heard a number of times: “ E-Coli from a hamburger? I’ve never heard of that before. It mustn’t happen that often.” Unfortunately, that is not the case. CDC estimates that there are hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths every year from food borne illness. It is obvious that the American food system has problems.

I would now like to give you an overview of my daughter’s case to illustrate how systemic problems with food borne illness can happen, and how they can be corrected.

Problem #1: Misdiagnosis

It is very common for medical professionals to misdiagnose food borne illness. When Katelyn first became ill, we immediately took her to the doctor. She was vomiting constantly and had bloody diarrhea and abdominal pain. That doctor told us that it was probably a virus that would pass. The following day, the bleeding and diarrhea increased, so we took her to the local hospital where she was treated for severe dehydration. Again, the doctor told us that Katelyn had a virus, and added that they were seeing a lot of it lately. They said it could take up to 10 days for it to go away, so we were sent home. I remember feeling very uneasy and thinking that there was no way that Katelyn could survive 10 days with the amount of blood she was losing.

Within a day, Katelyn’s condition worsened, so we took her to a trauma hospital. The GI specialist in the ER told us that Kateyln had all of the symptoms of E. coli O157. He admitted her immediately. It had taken six days from the first doctor visit until Katelyn was correctly diagnosed. By this time, she was critically ill—she had developed Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS). We were told by the doctors that there was no cure for HUS. They could only react to her symptoms in order to keep her alive. I couldn’t help but think about the previous hospital we had visited that told us that this was a virus. The doctor had also stated that they had been seeing a lot of it lately. It was becoming apparent that what this first hospital had seen was most likely a food borne illness outbreak, and they were sending people home, untreated, with a contagious and potentially deadly disease.

Problem #2: Poor Public Health Response

While all of this was going on, the Health Department began trying to determine where Katelyn contracted E. coli O157. They questioned us to determine what Katelyn had done in the 10 days before her symptoms began. They wanted to know who she was in contact with and everything she had eaten and drank.

It was very difficult to remember every detail of Katelyn’s life for those 10 days, so one doctor said to me, “This is a hamburger disease. Just remember where she had a hamburger and you will probably find the source.” Well that doctor hit it right on the head. Not only did I remember where she had a hamburger, but I still had some of that uncooked ground beef in my freezer. I contacted the health department and they took the meat for testing.

A week after Katelyn was hospitalized, she had a stroke and was transferred to the ICU. I was in the ICU with her when I received a call from the Health Commissioner. The Health Commissioner informed me that the meat in my freezer had a heavy growth of E. coli O157. She also told me that the PFGE (the genetic fingerprint) from the ground beef matched the E. coli found in my daughter and in a neighbor’s child who had eaten the same meat. We now had two or more related food borne illness cases. In other words, we had an outbreak.

It should have been pretty simple for the Health Department and the State Department of Agriculture and Markets to conclude the likely source of these two cases. There was a clear trail, plus we had a receipt showing that we had purchased this meat from BJ’s Wholesale Club. In addition to this, BJ’s keeps records of everything they sell—it seemed pretty straightforward. I told the Health Commissioner how sick Katelyn was and that we would hate to see another child go through this torture, so I asked her to pursue a recall. She gave me her assurance that it would be done. So what happened next?

Problem #3: Blame the Consumer

A week later an article appeared in the local paper with the Health Commissioner stating that they didn’t know and they may never know the source of the outbreak. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I was told a week earlier by the Health Commissioner that they knew the source, but the public was being told something completely different. In the paper, the Health Department theorized that we must have contaminated the meat in our home, which then caused my daughter’s illness and she then contaminated her friend. Can you imagine my horror? The Health Department was publicly telling my community that I poisoned my neighbor’s child and my own daughter. I said then and I repeat now, “We do not have a cow grazing in our living room.”

My family called the reporter to point out the discrepancy between the Health Department’s statement and reality. We informed the reporter that we were told by the Health Commissioner the previous week that the source of the outbreak was confirmed, and it was BJ’s Wholesale Club. The reporter was also provided the date and the store location where we purchased the meat. The reporter then called the Health Commissioner to confirm our story.

The following day, the reporter printed another article, under the headline, “BJ’s is Not the Source”. In this article, the reporter printed the date and store location where we had purchased the ground beef. According to the article, the State Department of Agriculture and Markets had performed E. coli testing on randomly selected packages of ground beef from the BJ’s store where we had purchased the meat. This was several weeks after we had purchased the meat and the health authorities even acknowledged that it probably was not even from the same lot. However, since they did not find E. coli in these completely unrelated samples of ground beef, the State Department of Agriculture concluded that BJ’s was not the source of the outbreak, and the investigation was stopped. The health authorities theorized that we most likely contaminated the meat in our own home because we opened the package of ground beef, made them into hamburger patties, and then froze them. I was stunned at how poorly this investigation was being handled. I now know that the “Blame the Consumer” routine is a very common fallback for lackadaisical investigations into food borne illness cases. As a result, the contaminated meat continued to be a dire threat to the public, and was likely to still be sitting in someone’s freezer.

Problem #4: Voluntary, Slow and Incomplete Recalls

Several weeks passed. Katelyn slowly began to recover. I tried to put my hurt and fury of being blamed for her illness out of my mind. Then, one day, I received a phone call from the Health Commissioner. She wanted to inform me that BJ’s would be doing a recall, and I should be getting a recall notice in the mail. Apparently, a man had taken ground beef out of his freezer to make hamburgers for his children for lunch, when his wife stopped him. She remembered seeing the date that we had purchased the meat from BJ’s in the local paper. Sure enough, the ground beef her husband was about to cook and feed to their children, (and which was still sealed in its original package) had the same purchase date from the same store. The family contacted the Health authorities and the meat was sent for testing. The test results showed a heavy growth of E. coli O157, with a PFGE (genetic fingerprint) that matched the meat in my freezer, and my daughter’s and my neighbor’s PFGE. With this new information, the State Department of Agriculture asked BJ’s to issue a recall.

Most Americans do not know that companies have the choice of whether or not to comply with a recall request - the government has no mandatory recall authority, and industry routinely recalls as little product as possible. When BJ’s issued their recall, they recalled ground beef from only 131 people that, according to their records, had bought the ground beef around the same time that I did, and only from that one store. Neither the State Department of Agriculture, nor the company, performed a thorough investigation to determine where the contaminated meat had come from, or whether more of it had been shipped to other stores in the chain.

Six months later, the New Jersey Department of Health contacted a New Jersey family who had a 3-year-old boy who had been sick with E. coli O157 and HUS, around the same time that Katelyn was sick. The New Jersey Department of Health told the boy’s parents that their son’s PFGE matched my daughter’s and my neighbor’s PFGE. He was apparently part of the same outbreak. The ground beef that the NJ boy consumed was from the BJ’s in Bergen County, New Jersey. However, the family was never notified of a recall, because BJ’s only recalled the ground beef from the store where I purchased the meat, and only from those people that purchased it within a five day timeframe of when we had made the purchase. Therefore, the original recall—besides being extremely slow—was also incomplete.

Problem #5: Lack of Traceability

About now, you may be wondering why a more complete recall wasn’t issued? A comprehensive recall was not issued because government officials were not able to trace the contaminated ground beef back to its source, most likely the processor. Tracing this meat would have been very difficult since very few records are kept on meat and poultry products. BJ’s, like many retailers, buys meat from multiple suppliers and then regrinds the meat and packages it under their own name. Because no mandate requires the retailer to maintain grinding records, it is almost impossible to figure out which meat processor supplied the contaminated meat. However, instead of pursuing it further, the state just dropped the investigation. Why not? In most cases, there will never be enough evidence to pursue any punitive actions against the producers or distributors, so there’s no financial incentive to find the source, even though further investigation could save the most lives.

I believe that if a traceability system were implemented, from farm to fork, many of our food borne illness problems will eventually begin to go away. Why do I say this? Because with traceability comes accountability, and with accountability comes incentive. Right now, companies very rarely face the threat of litigation because it’s extremely difficult to trace the product back to them, and the companies know this. If they are not held accountable for the safety of the products they produce, there is little incentive to ensure they produce safe products. If an effective traceability system were implemented, you can guarantee that these companies would clean up their act and ensure their processes are being properly monitored, for fear of being sued.

I would like to use my daughter’s case as an example. My daughter’s case was extremely unusual because we had the meat, several positive lab tests, and clear genetic matches. We also had the receipt, as well as BJ’s own records to support the sale. In most food borne illness cases, this amount of evidence very rarely happens. The defective product, which BJ’s sold us, left my daughter with permanent and serious health problems. When BJ’s refused to help with Katelyn’s medical bills, we sued them. What I found interesting was that once BJ’s was sued, they all of a sudden had an incentive to find the supplier—after all, they didn’t want to be left holding the bag. About a year after the suit was filed, BJ’s narrowed down the supplier list and eventually figured out which company supplied them with the contaminated meat. I couldn’t help but wonder: “Why didn’t BJ’s put this effort into finding the supplier when the outbreak first occurred, in order to do a proper recall and protect the consumers?” The answer was rather simple. There was no incentive.

The purpose of highlighting these five deficiencies is to make you aware of the systemic problems that Americans continue to face with food borne illness. These are deficiencies that can be controlled and, by controlling them, can significantly reduce food borne illness and needless suffering. There are currently several pieces of legislation that have been introduced in the House and in the Senate to improve food safety policies. We hope you will support them.

My daughter has been permanently damaged from food borne illness. She has lost her pancreas and is now an insulin dependent diabetic. She takes in excess of 40 pills a day in order to eat, as well as multiple insulin injections. But despite it all—her suffering and our frustration—we are grateful that by some miracle, Katelyn is with us today.

My goal is to ensure the safety of American food, to stop the suffering of those that have contracted these horrible, but preventable, diseases, and to lessen the frustration of families who must go on with radically changed lives. I’ll know that I’ve been successful when one day I hear a person make those same comments about Katelyn’s illness that I always hear, “E. coli O157-from a hamburger? I’ve never heard of that before. It mustn’t happen that often.” And I can finally respond, “You know, you’re right. It doesn’t happen that often - ANYMORE.”

Thank you.