County Seeks Probe of Cheese Warnings

Alarmed at the mounting toll of deaths and illnesses linked to contaminated Mexican-style cheese, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors asked the grand jury Thursday to investigate whether state and county health officials were slow in telling the public and medical community of the menacing outbreak.

Supervisor Kenneth Hahn said there was a “breakdown in inspection” of the Jalisco Mexican Products Inc. cheese-processing plant in Artesia and said a “flash” warning should have gone out to all pediatricians, clinics and hospitals when the initial link to dairy products was made.

Dr. Shirley Fannin, associate director of communicable disease control for the county, lashed back at politicians for practicing what she called “Monday-morning quarterbacking.”

“During the investigation you cannot . . . panic and start running amok,” Fannin said. “You have to slog it out piece by piece and day by day so you do not bias your investigation early. . . . I really get testy. My staff has taken it seriously from the very beginning.”

The federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta provided the county with preliminary confirmation June 7 that an open container of Jalisco-brand Mexican cheese removed from the refrigerator of a person who had gotten ill was contaminated with the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes.

Yet health officials did not inform the public of the contamination until June 13--after sending Atlanta 20 samples of similar cheese in unopened containers.

“I’m not satisfied with the warning system,” Hahn told The Times. “I don’t think it came fast enough. I think you had a bureaucracy saying, ‘It’s not my responsibility, it’s another agency’s.’ ”

In the week since the outbreak was first publicized, 36 people--many of them pregnant Latino women and newborn infants--have died in California from the disease-producing bacteria linked to Jalisco-brand cheese. Two deaths have been reported in Texas. Other listeriosis deaths and dozens of illnesses are being investigated to see if tainted cheese was a factor.

Meanwhile, in Sacramento, two legislative committees announced Thursday that hearings would be held on the contamination.

Sen. Art Torres (D-South Pasadena) said the Senate Toxics and Public Safety Committee, which he chairs, would hold a hearing Monday in “an effort to clarify the level of public threat which still exists due to the contaminated Jalisco cheese and to evaluate the effectiveness of the current quarantined product removal process.”

Assemblyman Norm Waters (D-Plymouth) said the Assembly Agriculture Committee, which he chairs, would launch a separate probe.

Hahn and Supervisor Michael Antonovich also expressed frustration that some markets were still selling suspect cheese products several days after the Jalisco recall was ordered June 13, when the plant was voluntarily shut down and began removing its products from grocery shelves and restaurants.

“There still are some unanswered questions,” said Antonovich aide Marcia Nay, who specializes in health matters. “Why didn’t we have people working all weekend (after last week’s recall was ordered)? As late as Monday or Tuesday, we were still finding the cheese in some markets.”

Even though a spot check last Friday indicated that close to 900 markets and restaurants might still be stocking contaminated cheese, county health officials gave their employees the weekend off and delayed a full-scale inspection of Los Angeles area food outlets until this week.

“We felt we already had very good compliance with the ban” on the cheese, said Bill Ward, Department of Health Services director for district environmental services.

Fannin said the health department has neither the money nor enough inspectors to blanket 28,000 food outlets.

Asked why the health department shut down last weekend, when reports of illnesses and deaths were increasing, Fannin replied: “We’ve been under a $10,000-a-month overtime cap. We’ve been under a hiring freeze since January. I don’t know how many years we’ve had status quo budgets.”

Health department spokeswoman Toby Milligan said that by Thursday night, health inspectors had visited 16,098 outlets and found 178 not in compliance.

Inspections of 116 establishments on Friday, June 14, the day after news of the tainted cheese broke, found only three still selling the cheese.

But inspections Monday showed no drop in the percentage of stores still selling the cheese, so district managers were instructed to send their inspectors out to all “small mom-and-pop markets and restaurants where Spanish-speaking people might eat,” said Charles Howard, chief sanitarian for the Hollywood/Wilshire district.

As the search was expanded Wednesday to include all markets and restaurants, inspectors visited almost 5,000 outlets and turned up 45 markets and two restaurants still stocking Jalisco cheeses. Officials expect the on-site inspections to be completed by Saturday.

Department officials estimated that 3% of the restaurants and stores in the county--about 840--might still be selling the cheese. They expected that number to go down as news of the contaminated cheese spread over the weekend, Ward said.

In an interview Thursday, Hahn said Mailgrams or overnight letters with bold warnings on the envelopes should have been sent to every food outlet in the county the day a link with the products was established.

“In a political campaign, you could get 400,000 pieces of mail out overnight if you had to,” Hahn said.

Fannin said the county “isn’t willing to invest money” it would take to conduct a massive inspection to see that all 28,000 food outlets had removed Jalisco-made cheeses.

“I guess I’d have to say there is a lot more budget for political mailings than public health matters,” Fannin said.

Early in June, she said, mailers were sent to all the hospitals where babies were delivered informing them of the outbreak and advising them to treat women with symptoms as suspect cases.

Hahn said he will ask the state to require all milk to be pasteurized before it is shipped to cheese plants. “We need a fail-safe method” of ensuring pasteurization of milk, he said.

On a separate motion by Antonovich, the board also ordered an investigation by the county Department of Health Services into a report that the quantity of pasteurized products distributed by Jalisco exceeded the capacity of its pasteurizing equipment. Antonovich said he could not recall the source of the information, but the matter was “worthy of investigation.”

In other developments, the death toll in Los Angeles County from cheese-related listeriosis grew to 25. Health officials said a Latino woman gave birth to a stillborn child in March, but the cause of death was not known until Thursday.

On another front, additional lawsuits were filed Thursday in Los Angeles and Orange counties against Jalisco in connection with the listeriosis outbreak.

In Los Angeles Superior Court, a suit was filed on behalf of a 35-year-old woman who alleged that she became gravely ill after eating the cheese. The woman, Lisa Galvan, is represented by trial lawyer Melvin Belli, who said he plans to file more than a dozen lawsuits representing victims in the outbreak. Safeway Stores Inc. was also named as a defendant in the suit, which alleges that Galvan purchased the cheese there.

Lawsuit Withdrawal

In an unusual development, however, Belli agreed to withdraw the first lawsuit he filed Wednesday against the cheese manufacturer on behalf of Alvaro and Maria Eugenia de la Luz Parraguirre. The couple’s 2-day-old baby died in April at University of California, Irvine, Medical Center in Orange after the mother allegedly ate Jalisco cheese just before giving birth.

Fred Sayre, a former partner of Belli who claims he represents the couple, charged Thursday that Belli filed the lawsuit without ever contacting the couple.

Sayre, who said the couple signed a contract earlier this week to have him represent them, said that on Thursday he contacted Belli’s firm and demanded either a copy of the firm’s contract with the couple or a signed request for dismissal of its lawsuit.

“They gave me the dismissal,” Sayre said.

Belli claims that the couple, using a slightly different name, had asked his firm to represent them. He agreed to withdraw the suit, he said, when he discovered that the same couple had hired Sayre.

On Thursday, Sayre filed a new lawsuit on the couple’s behalf. The wrongful-death suit names as defendants the cheese firm, as well as Alta-Dena and Fred Deboer dairies, which supplied milk to the cheese manufacturer.

In Orange County, a suit was filed in Superior Court on behalf of a Garden Grove infant and his parents seeking more than $1 million in damages. The suit named Jalisco, Stater Brothers Market, the State of California and Orange and Los Angeles counties as defendants.

The infant, Francisco Javier Martinez Rojas, was born June 2 with no heart beat and severe kidney and liver problems and an infection later diagnosed as listeriosis, the suit claimed.

The infant’s mother, Adriana Rojas, 19, had eaten Jalisco-brand cheese at least three times a week, according to her lawyer, Oliver F. Moench of Los Angeles.

Stater Brothers was named as a defendant because it sold the cheese to the family. The suit accused the counties and the state of failing to inspect Jalisco facilities properly, promptly investigate the cause of the outbreak or warn the public.

The infant was released Tuesday from UCI Medical Center and doctors said his prospects for a full and healthy life appeared excellent.

Crocker National Bank also filed suit Thursday against Jalisco Mexican Products Inc. and several of its officers. The suit seeks payment of about $152,000 in loans and an injunction against any sale of the firm’s collateral or transfer of any documents or financial records.

Jalisco released a statement by company President Gary McPherson saying that the firm was “extremely saddened” by the deaths and illnesses.

“To us, the victims of Listeria are not statistics,” McPherson said. “They are people much like our own sisters, brothers, sons and daughters and we grieve with their families.”

The company also announced that, contrary to previous notice, it had discontinued plans to give out partial payroll checks to about 100 employees, who were temporarily laid off.

McPherson said negotiations to get additional funds to pay the workers did not end satisfactorily.

Times staff writers Marita Hernandez, David Holley and Robert Schwartz in Los Angeles and Roxana Kopetman in Orange County contributed to this story.