The Cheapest Thing I Have Ever Asked a Regulator to Do Is Not on Any of My Lists. Spend One Hour With Someone It Happened To.
Article By Bill Marler on August 18, 2026
Article Source: https://www.marlerblog.com/case-news/the-cheapest-thing-i-have-ever-asked-a-regulator-to-do-is-not-on-any-of-my-lists-spend-one-hour-with-someone-it-happened-to/
On June 25 I sent a letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It had nothing to do with lettuce. It was about two outbreaks of infant botulism traced to powdered formula — forty-eight babies in seventeen states in the first one, every one of them hospitalized, and four more infants in the second. The Secretary had convened the formula chief executives around a table twice. As far as the public record shows, not one parent of a hospitalized baby had been in a room with him. Before your next roundtable with industry, I wrote, give the families one.
Seven weeks have gone by. As far as I can tell, it has not happened.
I am asking again, and this time about a parasite. CDC counts 13,895 laboratory-confirmed cases of Cyclospora acquired in this country since May, with at least another ten thousand still under investigation. Add up what the state health departments have published and the floor is above twenty-eight thousand. At least 688 people have been hospitalized. Two are dead in Michigan.
It is easy to hear this as a request for sympathy and it is not one. It is an argument about information. Duration and consequence come out of a case count before it ever reaches a desk of a Secretary of Health and Human Services, and a unit of one is silent about whether it meant a bad weekend or eleven weeks. An hour in a room puts back exactly what the briefing binder takes out.
My best example is a man I sued. Dave Theno was brought into Jack in the Box in 1993 to fix what had killed four children, and he stayed sixteen years. I deposed him and I did not go easy on him. Somewhere in all of that he got to know the family of Lauren Beth Rudolph, who was six and who was the first of the four to die, and for the rest of his life he carried her photograph in his wallet. He would take it out in meetings when he was explaining why he wanted something expensive done. Lauren is who we are protecting, he would say. Lauren, and the children she represents, is who I report to.
Dave changed that company and then changed an industry, and he did not do it because of a regulation or a verdict or a line in a report. He did it because he knew a child’s face. He drowned off Lanai in 2017, swimming with his grandson. I spoke at his memorial, which is not something a plaintiffs’ lawyer expects to be asked to do for a man he cross-examined, and I have missed him every year since. What I would give to have him in one of these rooms now.
In one week in 2009. I sat with a family in South Carolina whose daughter was in kidney failure from E. coli O157:H7 she got from cookie dough. She lived. Then I got on a plane to Ohio.
John Strike was a veteran and a grandfather. On April 11, 2009 he ate a cheeseburger at the VFW post in North Olmsted and three days later he was bleeding internally and headed for kidney failure and most of a month in a hospital bed. What he did not know, and what nobody could have told him, was that he had already passed it to his granddaughter when she visited him in the hospital. Abby Fenstermaker was seven. She went into the hospital on May 11, and her parents took her off life support on May 17. She was their only daughter, and my clients were her parents and the grandfather who was still recovering from the hamburger that killed her.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service announced the recall of ninety-five thousand eight hundred ninety-eight pounds of Valley Meats ground beef on May 21, 2009. Abby had been dead four days.
I have never gotten those two rooms out of my head, and I have never once looked at a case count the same way since. That is the entire reason I am writing this.
I am not the only person who has been through that hour, and the best account of it I have read this year was written by somebody not agreeing with me. In May, Kathleen Gillin published a response to one of my pieces. Twenty years ago, her nine-year-old daughter Rylee nearly died from E. coli O157:H7 in spinach and still lives with what it did. Kathleen now serves as the public member of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement board. A few years after that agreement was formed, its leadership invited families harmed by foodborne illness out to California to meet growers, walk the fields and see the practices. Her words for what happened next were that it changed her perspective. She met the people doing the work — field crews, packing crews, auditors, family farm owners — and came away seeing an industry that had been altered by a tragedy it understood in human terms.
She and I do not agree about the leafy greens record. She thinks I give the industry too little credit for twenty years of reform, and she said so plainly. However, we agree completely about the hour.
Notice the direction that hour ran. The industry brought the families to the growers. Two decades later, nobody has brought the families to the government.
Nobody should write a rule because of one family. The hour is not a substitute for the surveillance data; it is a correction to a known distortion in it, applied to the person who has to decide what the data means and how urgently to act on it. Read the numbers, then meet one of them.
This is exactly what plaintiffs’ lawyers do for a living. It is. I have been putting families in front of juries since 1993, and I am not going to pretend I discovered the effect by accident. That is precisely how I know what an hour does.
And if officials should meet the sick, should they also meet the grower who plowed a crop under this summer, and the farmworker who lost the season with it? Yes. All. I have written about those losses and I meant it. An hour with a family in Michigan and an hour on a ranch in Salinas would leave a person better equipped than either one alone.
What I am asking for is smaller than it sounds, and it is worth saying exactly what it is not. It is not a press availability. It is not a family asked to testify, or to perform, or to be photographed on a stage next to somebody who needs the picture. Private. No cameras. No agenda beyond listening. Stop Foodborne Illness has been doing this work for decades and could arrange it inside a week; the walls of their offices carry photographs of the children who did not survive, which tells you they do not need to be taught how to handle it.
The ask is three hours, total, from three people. An hour for the acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs, who told the country last week that it should feel confident about produce. An hour for the new Director of CDC, sworn in six days ago into the largest Cyclospora outbreak this country has ever recorded. An hour for the Secretary, who has now been asked twice.
I have published fifteen things this government could do about this parasite and four I would do first. Every one of them costs money, or rulemaking, or an act of Congress, or all three. This meeting costs a calendar entry. It is the only item I have ever put on a list that requires nothing from anyone except the willingness to be in a room and hear something you would rather not hear.
It is hard. That is the honest objection nobody says out loud, and it is the real one. It is hard to sit across from a mother and have nothing to offer her but attention. I have done it too often, and it has never once gotten easier.
Do it anyway. It is an hour, and it changes what every number after it means.