Beware of Bagged Spinach

Forget what Popeye said Spinach can harm you....

Consumers nationwide should not eat fresh bagged spinach, say health officials probing a multistate outbreak of E. coli that killed at least one person and made dozens of others sick.
Food and Drug Administration and state officials don’t know the cause of the outbreak, although raw, packaged spinach appears likely. “We’re advising people not to eat it,” said Dr. David Acheson of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
Eight states were reporting a total of 50 cases of E. coli, Acheson said Thursday.

The death occurred in Wisconsin, where 20 people were reported ill, 11 of them in Milwaukee. The outbreak has sickened others — eight of them seriously — in Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah. In California, state health officials said they were investigating a possible case there.
The outbreak has affected a mix of ages, but most of the cases have involved women, Acheson said. Further information on the person who died wasn’t available.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Wisconsin health officials alerted the FDA about the outbreak at midweek. Preliminary analysis suggested the same bug is responsible for the outbreak in all eight states.
The warning applied to consumers nationwide because of uncertainty over the origin of the tainted spinach and how widely it was distributed. Health officials did not know of any link to a specific growing region, grower, brand or supplier, Acheson said.

Jacked from MSNBC.com