Proposed Ammendments to Michigan Food Laws

Speech by: Sue Doneth
S.T.O.P. - Safe Tables Our Priority
Michigan Department of Agriculture Meeting
Lansing, MI
October 23, 2025

My name is Sue Doneth and I am here today as a consumer and a mother. I am also here as a representative of S.T.O.P. - Safe Tables Our Priority. S.T.O.P. is a national, not-for-profit foodborne illness victims, organization founded after the 1993 Jack-In-The-Box E.coli O157:H7 outbreak. Our founders include parents of children who died or were seriously injured from eating contaminated meat. Since then, our membership has grown to include people impacted by foodborne pathogens from all food groups. Our mission is to prevent unnecessary illness and death from foodborne pathogens and our efforts are in three areas: policy advocacy, consumer education and victim assistance. As an organization, S.T.O.P. is familiar with the 1997 FDA Food Code and we strongly support all states adopting it in its entirety. The only changes we would propose, if any, would be to make the Food Code even stronger.

I understand that the primary purpose of today's meeting is to discuss proposed amendments to Michigan food laws and ways to change the retail food coding system so that it provides accurate information that consumers need. However, I feel that my primary role here today is that of a consumer who has been affected by the very things you are discussing. It is absolutely essential that you hear from people like me and continue to be reminded that these issues you discuss -- these meetings that you hold -- affect people. All of the reports and statistics in the world will not give you a true understanding of what foodborne illness means. When you sit down at your roundtable and hold your discussions, I wish you had a photograph of the estimated 9,000 people who die every year and the over 30 million who are poisoned from contaminated food. My suspicion is that if this were possible, the tone of your meetings would be drastically affected. You must remember that it is not the consumers responsibility to outline for you unsafe practices and argue why things need to be better. Rather, the burden of proof lies with industry and government to convince us that our food is safe and the systems in place to protect us are working.

You are holding these public meetings asking for consumer input. You are asking what it is that consumers want and need to know and how that information should be available. The fundamental problem with this approach is that most consumers don't know what questions to ask of government regarding food safety, It is not because consumers don't care or aren't interested. Many consumers assume that there are adequate systems in place to protect them. Only when problems with the existing systems are revealed, either through an outbreak of foodborne illness or media attention to problems, does the consumer begin to realize that the things they assume are being done are not. For this reason, many consumer don't know what information they need, don't know the questions to ask, and they don't have any idea where they should go for information and answers. Consumers must be brought into these issues at the ground level rather than being invited to participate in fixing inadequate systems. Let consumers participate and add input on what they want to see happening to ensure the safety of their food supply.

I do not believe that consumers are being "misled by information that is revealed through inspection reports from retail food establishments. Consumers are being informed. It never ceases to amaze me that as soon as information is revealed that sheds a bad light on government and/or industry, suddenly the information is "misleading. You should not "scrap a complete system because it isn't working or you feel it is not giving consumers accurate information--you improve it.

You need to hear the gory details of what these foodborne pathogens we talk about do to children, families and communities. The statistics represent people and you must put a face on this problem and not just see words and numbers. When I tell my story, I do it not because I like to talk about it; it is a very difficult thing for me to do. I must tell it, because as you listen you are forced to see the face of a child and only then will you begin to understand.

My first experience with foodborne illness occurred in March 1997. My 10-year-old daughter, Lindsay, became extremely ill with flu-like symptoms. Within 3 days she had deteriorated to the point that we had to rush her to the emergency room. She was screaming in pain, vomiting continuously and was so dehydrated that emergency room personnel had trouble finding a vein to start an IV. I remember very clearly sitting outside the room in the hallway, listening to my child scream for me as she was pinned to the bed and medical equipment hooked up. I left my husband to do what I was incapable of doing. As Lindsay's mother, I just couldn't bear to assist and see her hurting.

Lindsay was admitted to the hospital on that late night in March and she would remain there for 8 days. My daughter was diagnosed with Hepatitis A and my husband and I sat by her bedside day and night watching her writhe in pain, holding a wet cloth to her head as she vomited, and feeling helpless to do anything for her. My daughter innocently consumed strawberry shortcake as a part of her school lunch. Her punishment for this act was to spend a week in the hospital and over a full year recovering from what is described as a "mild, flu-like illness. At one point during her hospitalization, Lindsay stopped communicating with us and curled up in the bed in a fetal position; I feared that my child would die and I had never known such anguish. Silent tears rolled down my face as I stroked my daughters hair and tried to comfort her.

Lindsay's recovery has been slow. She has suffered from severe headaches, stomach pain and chronic back pain. She developed asthma and was forced to quit dance class and soccer. In July 1997, she developed Shingles and spent a week covered in painful sores, taking pain medication just to cope.

My anger and outrage over Lindsay's illness could not be contained. The 300+ victims of Hepatitis A in Calhoun County deserved better. So, I became involved. I joined the S.T.O.P. organization in April 1997, and my life immediately changed. I started talking to anyone who would listen. I attended meetings, gave speeches and traveled extensively telling Lindsay's story over and over again. I have testified before Congress and have met the Vice President and the President of the United States regarding food safety issues. Surely, my involvement was making a difference. I could not prevent my own child from becoming a victim, but certainly I could help save another child from the torture my daughter endured. I know that S.T.O.P.'s work has saved lives; we just don't know who we have saved. We have made a difference and prevented illness and loss of life. It just never occurred to me that my own family still wasn't safe.

In August of this year, my family was again struck by lightning. I came home from a day of running errands to find my oldest daughter, Sara, curled up on the floor in front of the television complaining of severe stomach cramps. She told me that the diarrhea that had started the day before was worse and the cramps were so intense she didn't want to move from the floor. Like any parent, I gave her an anti-diarrhea medication and assumed that the problem would pass. By evening, the cramps were worse and the diarrhea had turned blood streaked.

The cramps would come in waves and I would hold Sara and talk her through each round. I felt as if I were coaching a woman in labor. About 3:00 a.m. I woke up to the sound of my daughter heaving in the bathroom. I ran to the bathroom and saw my daughter on her hands and knees in front of the toilet, violently vomiting. Behind her, on the floor, lay a puddle of pure red blood. I called my parents in tears telling them that I needed to take Sara to the hospital. Sara cried about going to the hospital. She was afraid to move for fear that she couldn't make the 5 minute trip to the hospital without going to the bathroom.

My daughter arrived at the emergency room in severe pain. The cramping and diarrhea was out of control and nothing would comfort her. When the nurse returned from the bathroom with my daughter's stool specimen, it was a basin of pure blood -- Sara was hemorrhaging and I was terrified. I tried to deny the symptoms I was seeing. I tried to deny that my daughter was exhibiting symptoms associated with E. Coli O157:H7 poisoning. Red flags went up in my brain, but I refused to believe that it was possible for my daughter to have E. Coli. After all, I had been working as a food safety advocate for the past 18 months, surely this couldn't be happening.

Sara was admitted to the hospital where she, like her sister had, would spend the next 8 days. I walked through the familiar halls of the hospital and I was flooded with memories of Lindsay's hospital experience just 17 months before. I tried not to cry and fought back the memories.

I learned from the doctor that a 7-year-old boy had been hospitalized the week before with similar symptoms and was diagnosed with E.coli O157:H7. I prayed that Sara wasn't suffering from E.coli poisoning. I tried to forget all that I knew about this killer pathogen. I tried not to see the faces of the children who have died from this pathogen, but that was all that I could see.

For 6 days my daughter's condition continued to deteriorate. I was outraged that it was taking so long to get a diagnosis, although E.coli O157:H7 was suspected. I watched IV fluids, antibiotics and pain medications pumped through my daughter's veins doing nothing to counteract the pathogen invading her body. After my daughter's test results revealed a positive E.coli O157:H7 culture, my heart sank. By the 8th day, Sara was going into kidney failure. She was transported by ambulance to Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor. I was in a state of shock as I climbed into the ambulance watching them load my daughter in the back.

We were greeted at the Children's Hospital by not one, but a team of Pediatric Nephrologists. They hovered over her, poking and prodding and talking between themselves. After more blood results were returned, the head of the Nephrology team sat me down. He asked if I was familiar with something called Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS). I looked at him as the tears rolled down my face and I silently screamed inside. I knew too much about HUS. As a result of my work with S.T.O.P., I not only know what HUS is, but I am all too aware of how life threatening it can be. HUS is the leading cause of kidney failure in children and most do not avoid dialysis and permanent damage. My dear friend, Nancy Donley (President of S.T.O.P.) watched her only son, Alex, die from this syndrome. Alex was a beautiful, red haired boy who died a painful horrible death at the ripe old age of 6. My friend Nancy had taken her only son to the hospital and never brought him home. She held him in her arms when he died just days after his hospital admission. Before his death, Alex experienced strokes, heart attacks, seizures and neurological damage. I flashed back to a day a year before when I stood next to the grave of beautiful Alex Donley with Nancy and cried. I could see and remember the child's pinwheel that marked the grave where his cremated body is buried. Nancy Donley,s 6-year-old baby was cremated after this killer pathogen had essentially liquefied his internal organs. I looked at my own beautiful child's face and tried to clear my mind of these thoughts.

I tried to forget all that I knew and prayed for strength for my daughter. I silently prayed to a red haired angel named Alex to watch over my girl. I watched as tubes, monitors and equipment were attached in a methodical fashion by the nurses. I called Nancy on the phone, barely able to speak through the tears. Despite her own horrible loss, she was able to comfort me. As I talked I knew that she was reliving her own horrible experience and still she comforted me. She said to me, "Sara is going to make it, it simply isn't her time to go.

The first night in the hospital, Sara was diagnosed with Pancreatitis. She was vomiting continuously. There was no food or fluid in her stomach and she vomited basin after basin of pure green bile. The toxins produced by E.coli O157:H7 enter the blood stream shredding cells and attacking organs. Her pancreas was being attacked and the only treatment would be inserting what is called an NG tube. Around midnight, my husband, my mother and I held my daughter down while a nurse threaded a plastic tube up through her nose and down into her stomach. The tube was attached to a small suction machine which pumped the poisonous bile from her stomach. I cannot describe to you the horror of watching your child endure this procedure. She had to try to swallow the tube as it was being forced down her throat -- gagging and vomiting throughout the procedure. I laid my head on her legs at the foot of the bed and tried not hear her screaming for her Daddy to make them stop. We spent that night in the hospital room listening to her gag in her sleep and cry when she was awake. Sara needed to be sedated before the night was over. Late into the night she experienced bouts of hallucinations and I feared that we were seeing the beginning of neurological impairment that often occurs with HUS.

Sara continued to get weaker and sicker. My mother and I stayed in the room with Sara day and night; my brother and my husband slept in a family waiting room down the hall. We spent hour after hour next to her bed praying that she would keep urinating and avoid complete kidney failure. Although her kidneys were only functioning at 15%, they were still working. We waited for laboratory results to be returned and our hearts sank as we watched her platelets and red blood cell counts drop, her creatinine levels increase. We were helpless to do anything to stop the E.coli toxins that were eating their way through her bloodstream doing their damage. I was thankful when she was able to get brief periods of rest, but alarmed as she would slip away from us into a deep sedation.

Sara's laboratory results soon indicated that she would need an immediate blood transfusion; she received two during her hospital stay. I remember sitting next to her bed as she fitfully tried to rest, watching the blood of another person flow from a bag into my daughter's veins. I silently thanked whoever had donated the blood that was sustaining my daughter's life, and at the same time prayed that the blood was clean and nothing had slipped through the screening process.

I knew that my daughter needed the blood to live and there was no time to worry about HIV, Hepatitis, or the host of other diseases that have been associated with blood transfusions. After the transfusions, I desperately asked the doctor to confirm that the worst was over. He quietly told me that, "Things will get worse before they get better, it's a roller coaster ride with this stuff. I expect that she will be on dialysis by morning. I sat in the darkness, listening to the constant beeping of monitors, with tears streaming down my face.

Sara started to puff up from all the fluid she was retaining due to her kidney dysfunction. She gained 11 pounds although she had not had anything to eat or drink in almost 2 weeks. She was fed intravenously throughout her hospital stay. I wondered how these little bottles of fluid could possibly be providing my daughter with adequate nutrition.

Thank God, her kidneys never fully shut down and my daughter miraculously avoided dialysis. Thank God, my daughter recovered. Her heart, lungs, and her brain remain intact. She did not suffer strokes, seizures and neurological damage like many HUS victims do. She did not come home blind and, most importantly, she did not end up in a grave.

I am thankful every day that my daughter made it, but it will never be over for us. Children who recover from this life threatening syndrome must be monitored for life. The permanent damage done to her kidneys is unknown. Sara now suffers from high blood pressure and takes medication daily to control it. We monitor her blood pressure at home and continue to see a Pediatric Nephrologist on a regular basis. The doctor is only able to tell me that Sara is "making a good recovery -- he can't tell me what the future holds. I can only pray that the damage done by the killer pathogen E.coli O157:H7 will be minimal. And the damage is not only done to Sara. As her mother, I will never be the same. I am no longer the person I was and a part of me is gone forever. A naive trust that we all have as a part of living our lives is gone. I do know that I must continue to demand changes in the current food safety systems, and I must continue to work on food safety issues.

S.T.O.P. can recommend some basic things that should be implemented in retail food establishments:

• Implement HACCP within your stores. Designate individual HACCP plans for each department as well as a whole store program, including carts and conveyer belts.
• Build safety requirements into your purchasing contracts with your suppliers.
• Require microbial testing and performance standards. In the case of O157, where a single microbe can lead to death, the performance standard must be zero.
• Visit and inspect your suppliers establishments unannounced.
• Sell meat thermometers at your meat counters. Educate your meat counter personnel on the importance of using a thermometer and have them, in turn, educate the public.
• Double wrap meat and poultry packages. Dripping packages can cross contaminate everything from raw produce to the grocery store cart handle that someone's toddler decides to chew on.
• Develop and enforce a store policy that raw meats are separately bagged at the meat counter.
• Most importantly, incorporate the faces of all the victims of foodborne illness in your decision making process.

The Consumer Education portion of the outline provided by the Michigan Department of Agriculture is very disturbing. The very first paragraph of the consumer education portion reinforces a very wrong message. I quote, "As many as 90 percent of reported foodborne illness can be traced to handling practices in the home. This incorrectly extrapolated statistic from the CDC has been misused over and over again by industry. The CDC has stated that the statistic is wrong (see attached memorandum from Dr. Griffin dated July 21, 2025). This is truly an example of misleading the public. Pathogens don't spontaneously appear in our kitchens. I don't have cattle grazing in my living room and I don't have cow feces on my counter tops. We bring these foodborne pathogens into our homes in the food we purchase, we are not creating the pathogens. The onus should not be placed on the consumer to clean up dirty food to counteract sloppy industry practices. We should not have to cook cow feces out of our meat or try, without success, to wash it off fresh food products designed to be eaten raw, such as strawberries, lettuce and raspberries.

Consumer education is very important, but it must be accurate and must not only contain information about how consumers can help protect themselves, but also information about handling practices and prevention methods adopted by the food industry.

Consumer education includes keeping the consumer informed about recalls warning them about the risks from hazardous food products. The food industry must be held accountable and responsible at every step in the food chain. Consumers are entitled to know where their food comes from, what is being done to it, and notified if something is wrong with it.

The most important thing you can tell consumers is simple -- the truth.