How ignored warnings at Boar’s Head plant led to a deadly listeria outbreak

Filthy conditions, aging equipment and haphazard cleaning at the Jarratt, Va., plant may have made some of its products microbial time bombs waiting to explode.

By Rachel Roubein and Joe Heim
September 30, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

In mid-July, as listeria infection cases multiplied across the United States, Maryland health officials who track foodborne illnesses grew increasingly alarmed. The outbreak was spreading at a much more rapid rate than normal for listeria. ... Two people — in Illinois and New Jersey — had already died and more than two dozen had fallen ill in the previous seven weeks. The health officials feared many more would succumb. ... “We were getting a lot of cases in a very short window of time,” said Sophia Wozny, an epidemiologist who tracks outbreaks with her colleagues at the state health department.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified the strain of listeria that was sickening and killing people. But its source remained a mystery. The sooner the culprit could be found, the more deaths and illnesses would be prevented. ... Wozny and her colleagues were in regular contact with local health departments as well as their counterparts in other states and at the CDC. They shared information on cases and pored over questionnaires filled out by those who had been sickened to learn what they had eaten in the weeks before they became ill. As they read the responses, one item kept appearing: liverwurst.

Boar’s Head was the brand cited by many of the respondents. “We know we have to act,” Wozny remembered thinking at the time. “This has gone on too long.” ... A health department worker went to a Baltimore store, purchased an unopened 3.5-pound tube of Boar’s Head liverwurst and delivered it to the state lab for testing. Lab workers ground the meat in an industrial blender to create a “liverwurst smoothie” — a method to ensure that no parts of the product went untested.

A preliminary result showed the presence of listeria, but they needed evidence that the bacteria was alive and infectious. Confirmation arrived days later on July 25. Wozny and a colleague alerted the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees food safety inspections.

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The Jarratt plant that's been tied to the deadly listeria outbreak. (Steve Helber/AP)

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Laura Vozzella contributed to this report.

By Rachel Roubein
Rachel Roubein is a national health-care reporter for The Washington Post covering the Food and Drug Administrationfollow on X @rachel_roubein

By Joe Heim
Joe Heim joined The Washington Post in 1999. He is a staff writer for the Metro section. follow on X @JoeHeim