Stephen Smith at the Boston Globe tonight is reporting there has been a third death from the contaminated milk produced at Whittier Farms in Central Massachusetts.
Dead is an 87-year old Norfolk County man. State health officials are declining to give out the man’s name. He died in the hospital, where he had been sent after becoming ill in November.
The Boston Globe also reports the total number of listeria cases now linked to the Whittier Farms operation is now five, up one from earlier reports. Two other elderly men died earlier from the Whittier Farms listeria outbreak.
The newly identified victim, however, will survive.
“A 31-year-old Middlesex County woman was diagnosed with the disease in September while in the hospital to deliver a baby, Dr. Alfred DeMaria, the state’s director of communicable disease control, told the Globe. Investigators connected her to the milk after discovering that she had consumed 2 percent and whole milk made by Whittier.
The 31-year-old woman and her baby are both healthy, as is a 34-year-old woman whose illness was previously linked to the outbreak. That woman, though, suffered a miscarriage after exposure to the bacteria.”
Three dead, a miscarriage and still counting.