Imagine buying a bag of salad, trying to be even healthier by purchasing the Organic Marketside Spring Mix bag, eating some of the greens, then discovering a dead bat inside the bag.
That’s what happened to two people in Florida who purchased a Fresh Express salad bag at Walmart, and found the deceased bat before alerting the proper authorities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stepped in and ordered tests to see if the animal had rabies. Unfortunately, the deceased nature of the animal prohibited any definitive testing.
Transmission by eating an infected animal is “extremely uncommon”, the CDC said in a statement, but the two people were recommended for treatment out of an abundance of caution.
Neither Floridian showed any signs of rabies and both reported good health, the CDC said, adding that there have been no other “reports of bat material found in packaged salads.”
Currently, the CDC, the Florida Department of Health, and the federal Food and Drug Administration are all working together to find out just how in the world did that bat get inside the bagged salad.
The salads were limited to the southeastern United States and have been recalled from store shelves. In addition, the CDC said that customers who ate the salads already but didn’t consume “animal material” were not at risk and should contact Fresh Express for a full refund. If they did find “animal material” and already consumed the salads should contact their health department for evaluation.
“Consumers who may have already purchased the recalled product should discard and not consume it,” the CDC said in a statement to The Guardian.
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