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A federal judge in Minnesota recently dismissed a suit alleging that an infant suffered severe brain damage as a result of ingesting Enfamil infant formula. The judge dismissed the contamination suit stating that a widely used genetic test was insufficient to link the product to illness. An expert for the plaintiff, a former scientist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), stated that the test matched the strain of pathogen found in the infant to the strain found in two other infants who ingested the formula, but the test used only one enzyme to do so, not the CDC standard two or three.
The finding could provide companies with a new way to circumvent foodborne-illness litigation, by questioning the reliability of analyses that use only one enzyme, which is still the standard for many state health departments, according to Faegre Baker Daniels partner Sarah Brew. "Now defendants will be in a much better position to say, 'You may have a one-enzyme match, but that's not good enough,'" Brew said.
