Epidemic of Listeriosis Nearly Over, Doctor Says

An epidemic linked to contaminated Mexican-style cheese that has killed 84 people in California, half of them in the Los Angeles area, is about over, a top county health official said Thursday.

“Our cheese-related epidemic is coming to an end,” said Dr. Shirley Fannin, associate director of communicable disease control for Los Angeles County. “There has been a significant drop-off of cheese-related (illnesses). We’ve got our fingers crossed.”

Fannin told The Times her observation was based on a staff study this week of the epidemic which has hit hardest at individuals with low immunity levels, particularly those in the Latino community who ate the cheese.

As the epidemic--stemming from potentially harmful bacteria discovered in soft, Mexican-style cheese--was apparently winding down, two of the biggest producers of the cheese were facing dramatically different futures.

Jalisco Mexican Products Inc. of Artesia, which closed June 13 and remains under criminal investigation in connection with the epidemic, probably will never reopen, even if cleared of any wrongdoing, a company lawyer said.

But Cacique Cheese Co. of the City of Industry, which voluntarily shut down its new plant July 10 because its products were under the same cloud of suspicion as Jalisco’s, has been given the green light by state and federal officials to reopen today.

Moreover, investigators said Thursday that they were wrong in initially concluding that Cacique’s cheese contained potentially deadly bacteria. Government officials also might have been wrong to accuse the firm of faulty pasteurization based on a chemical test, they said.

The illness-causing bacterium, Listeria monocytogenes , this year has affected an unprecedented 245 victims in California, 130 of those in the Los Angeles area. Many of those afflicted were pregnant Latino women, and several of them lost either their unborn or newborn infants.

Fannin said that “it has been a week or so” since her office has seen a cluster of listeriosis illnesses connected with contaminated Jalisco cheese, the only cheese known to have been eaten by previous victims of the disease.

In her 10 years as a top county health official, Fannin said, the current Listeria epidemic had the highest death rate of any epidemic she had experienced.

“This was the largest number of Listeria cases in this short a period of time (primarily over the last two months) ever experienced in this country,” she said in a telephone interview.

Jalisco and Cacique were the two dominant California producers of the soft, fresh Mexican-style cheese popular with Latinos here and in several other states with Latino populations.

Discovery of the bacteria in Jalisco’s products in June triggered a recall and a shutdown of its Artesia plant. Subsequently, the state called on the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to begin a criminal investigation of the firm.

Food and agriculture department inspectors, who urged the investigation, told the prosecutor that unpasteurized milk was used in some of Jalisco’s products--a violation of state dairy product standards.

Since then, the federal Food and Drug Administration has been attempting to determine if the bacteria problem at Jalisco was more pervasive than a lack of pasteurization that should have killed the dangerous bacteria. FDA data has been turned over to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Federal testing of Jalisco’s cheese should be concluded this week, a knowledgeable FDA source in Washington told The Times.

After weeks of analysis, the source, who declined to be identified, said that the FDA cannot yet tell district attorney officials with any degree of certainty how the deadly bacteria got into Jalisco’s cheese products.

“The jury is still out,” he said.

Roger Rosen, Jalisco’s Los Angeles attorney, said Thursday that he does not think the firm will reopen.

“We could never overcome the stigma,” he said.

But the news for Cacique was just the opposite.

A top state Department of Food and Agriculture official, Patton Smith, telephoned Gilbert L. de Cardenas, the Cacique president, Thursday morning and told him he could resume production today, a decision cleared with the FDA.

Cheese industry officials are saying privately that Cacique may have been an innocent victim of the Jalisco contamination problem.

At first, the FDA laboratory in Los Angeles said that a cluster of bacteria found in Cacique’s cheese was the dangerous Listeria monocytogenes variety. But last Tuesday, the FDA, in tests on mice in the agency’s Cincinnati laboratory, finally concluded that the bacteria were Listeria inoculi , a harmless strain.

Furthermore, a chemical test originally run on Cacique cheese, which led state officials to conclude that the firm had pasteurization problems, may not have been accurate, industry and state officials now admit.

Although the test, based on reaction of an enzyme in the cheese, has been used for years to make sure that milk is properly pasteurized, it had hardly ever been applied to soft cheese, said officials. Now they are pondering if a soft cheese mold sent them incorrect signals about whether Cacique’s cheese was improperly pasteurized.

“It’s a possibility,” said Smith, the Food and Agriculture Department’s third ranking official, in a telephone interview from his Sacramento office. “I don’t know if the (Cacique pasteurization) tests were accurate at that time.”