E. coli is the one food case worth real money.

If someone in your family has a confirmed E. coli infection right now, there is one medically urgent thing on this page and it is not legal: talk to the treating doctor before anyone gives an antibiotic or an anti-diarrheal. For Shiga toxin–producing E. coli, there is evidence that antibiotics and drugs that slow the gut can increase the risk of hemolytic uremic syndrome — the complication that causes kidney failure. That is a conversation for the physician, not for a website, but it is the reason to make sure they know STEC is suspected.

On the legal side, E. coli is the strongest foodborne illness claim there is, for two structural reasons.

The first is that it gets cultured. Bloody diarrhea sends people to emergency rooms, emergency rooms order stool studies, and a positive STEC result is a reportable condition — so the isolate gets sequenced and uploaded to the national surveillance network. That confirmed organism is the thing that turns an unprovable complaint into a documented case, and in most other food illnesses it never happens.

The second is that when it becomes an outbreak, the federal government does your causation work. Traceback through the supply chain to a specific grower, lot, or plant is exactly what CDC and FDA investigators do, funded publicly, and the resulting record is evidence no individual claimant could ever assemble.

What follows explains how to preserve that position — and is honest about the cases that aren't worth bringing.