09 Sep 2024 Six years on, spotlight turns again to the polony Listeriosis tragedy

With new developments in Richard Spoor Incorporated Attorneys’ class action lawsuit against Tiger Brands, calls for justice have been renewed…..

The legal team behind a class action lawsuit representing more than 1,000 claimants who suffered due to the outbreak of listeriosis in 2017/18 claim that ‘breakthrough’ evidence that emerged this year makes an ‘overwhelming’ case that food producer Tiger Brands was responsible for the outbreak in its entirety.

Listeriosis was transmitted mostly via contaminated polony.

Six years on from the listeriosis outbreak that killed more than 200 people in South Africa, individuals and families who were affected by the outbreak have yet to receive any compensation for their suffering.

The legal team representing claimants in a class action lawsuit against food producer Tiger Brands alleges that “breakthrough” evidence has come to light, further linking the surge in listeriosis infections to an Enterprise Foods factory in Polokwane, since closed, Limpopo. Tiger Brands was the parent organisation for Enterprise Foods.

The legal team is made up of Richard Spoor Incorporated (RSI) Attorneys and LHL Attorneys. Zeenat Emmamally, an associate at RSI Attorneys, said they received two important pieces of evidence related to the outbreak from the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) this year.

The NHLS is a national public entity that provides health laboratory services in South Africa.

“We’ve received confirmation from them that the strain that was predominantly responsible for the outbreak, the sequence type 6 (ST6) strain, was not found in any other facility or location apart from Tiger Brands’ Enterprise facility in Polokwane,” said Emmamally.

The NHLS also provided DNA sequence data. In January 2024, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the NHLS, provided public access to sequence data via the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database for 403 ST6 isolates (a culture of microorganisms isolated for study) from the listeriosis outbreak.

These isolates were derived from samples collected from human patients, food products and environmental samples from the factory in Polokwane, sequenced by NICD and analysed by multiple methods, including multilocus sequence typing (MLST) and core genome MLST.

Tiger Brands has had access to the sequence data since January, giving its experts the opportunity to perform independent analyses of the data, according to RSI Attorneys.

However, “Tiger Brands … have done absolutely nothing with this new evidence,” Emmamally claimed.

“These two pieces of evidence in conjunction make it a very overwhelming case that Tiger Brands was responsible, not only for the ST6 cases, but for the outbreak in its entirety.”……

DailyMaverick.co.za: Read the full story here