‘I know firsthand they failed’: Parents decry lack of FDA action on infant formula safety

Asked by POLITICO, CDC would not say whether the agency supported adding Cronobacter to the list, but instead said the agency supported the CSTE process.

“CDC continues to work with state partners on all aspects of Cronobacter surveillance, including improving mechanisms for case reporting, notification timelines, laboratory testing methods, outbreak response processes, and disease prevention,” a spokesperson said.

One very real barrier to moving on this is the fact that state and local infectious disease officials say they have been run into the ground after nearly three years of pandemic response. The idea of adding anything new to the workload is not popular, especially without new funding to help beleaguered health departments. Still, advocates see this as a prime opportunity to fix the lack of reporting for Cronobacter, something they would have liked to have fixed years ago.

“If there’s a unified voice, FDA, CDC, and more importantly, consumers, then it should be added to the list,” Baum said. “We need to focus on the consumers and what their expectations are — and that what they feed their babies is safe.”

On December 11, another formula company, ByHeart, recalled five lots of formula after a third-party test found Cronobacter sakazakii. The company said it had received no reports of illness, but the news rattled parents all over again.

Deborah Rossick, a mom of two in Lakeland, Fla., tracks the news around formula recalls closely now. She documents exactly which cans she uses for her daughter Arya, who suffered a bacterial meningitis infection in October 2021, around the same time the other infants were reported sick after consuming formula made in Sturgis, though as far as the family knows health officials do not consider her case related to the others.

At the time, Rossick said, Arya was on EleCare, a hypoallergenic formula that was manufactured in the Sturgis plant and later recalled. Arya was diagnosed with Salmonella, but her family believes she likely also had Cronobacter, based on blood tests they later reviewed. Arya had such intense brain swelling, she ended up in a coma for nine days and almost didn’t survive. She suffered neurological damage and is now blind and almost completely deaf, has cerebral palsy, a severe form of epilepsy and is in different types of therapy several times a week.

“Had they told the public back in September about the potential contamination, we would have known to have looked for Cronobacter,” Rossick said. “I had searched the internet every single day for anything related to formula. It wasn’t until February that I found out Arya’s formula had been recalled.”