By JONEL ALECCIA, AP Health Writer<\/p>\n
At least seven people in three states, including young children, have been sickened by E. coli food poisoning<\/a> linked to cheddar cheese made from raw milk, federal health officials said Monday.<\/p>\n California-based Raw Farm<\/a> made the cheese that is the \u201clikely source\u201d of the outbreak, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration<\/a>, though no Raw Farm products have tested positive for E. coli during the outbreak period, the FDA noted.<\/p>\n Illnesses were reported between September 2025 and mid-February, the agency said. Five cases were reported in California and one each in Florida and Texas. More than half of the illnesses were in children aged 3 or younger. Two people were hospitalized.<\/p>\n The FDA recommended that Raw Farm voluntarily remove its raw cheese products from sale, but the company has declined.<\/p>\n The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged consumers to \u201cconsider not eating\u201d the products.<\/p>\n Mark McAfee, owner of Raw Farm, said he refused to recall the products because investigators have not definitively linked them to any illnesses.<\/p>\n \u201cThey have found no pathogens in any of our products,\u201d McAfee said in an interview. He disputed the FDA\u2019s findings that the cases were genetically linked and said that the announcement of the outbreak was premature.<\/p>\n The FDA said interviews with three people who got sick found that all three reported eating Raw Farm brand raw milk cheddar cheese. Analysis of samples from sick patients showed that the E. coli isolates that caused their infections were closely genetically related, investigators found.<\/p>\n Officials are working to gather information from the additional four cases. The investigation is continuing to determine the source of contamination and whether additional products are linked to illnesses.<\/p>\n The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By JONEL ALECCIA, AP Health Writer At least seven people in three states, including young children, have been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[101600,84518,101601,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-222460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-e-coli","tag-raw-milk","tag-raw-milk-cheese-recall","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}