Into the busy world of food safety pioneer (and LexBlog client) Bill Marler

Among the recent crop of tainted foods sweeping the nation, the ones contaminated with botulism have to be the worst. Just look at what Wikipedia has to say about its symptoms:

Common symptoms of either form usually include dry mouth, difficulty swallowing, slurred speech, drooping eyelids, muscle weakness, double and/or blurred vision, vomiting, blatter and sometimes diarrhea. These symptoms may progress to cause paralytic ileus with severe constipation, and eventually body paralysis. The respiratory muscles are affected as well, which may cause death due to respiratory failure.

Alarming to think about, especially after recent reports that chili and other canned meats distributed around the country were contaminated with the toxin.

For LexBlog client Bill Marler, handling the botulism scare is just another day at the office. Marler, managing partner of the Seattle-based firm Marler Clark, is a food safety lawyer who has been closely watching the recent outbreak and documenting it (and a wide range of other food safety issues) in his blog.

For the past two weeks, Marler reports that he has been in Australia, “giving a series of talks on food safety in the United States and how the Tort System works.” The three articles he is discussing – “Pure and Wholesome: Is food a risky business?”, “Tracking Foodborne Illness,” & “Class Action Litigation of Foodborne Illness Claims” – are all pieces that he wrote, and all provide a glimpse into the mind of a man who has taken on some of the biggest names in the food business.

Despite being halfway across the world, Marler still finds time to update his blog. From a dispatch on August 12:

Between my Blackberry, my Australian disposable phone and the Internet café down the beach, I have been able to keep up and help direct traffic as we work on the above and investigate the Castleberry Botulism cases, Hawaii lettuce E. coli cases and another outbreak at Souplantation – this time Shigella.

Guess we’ll have to stay tuned to the Shigella Blog – one of Marler Clark’s eleven blogs dedicated to a specific foodborne illness – to find out more on that. Meanwhile, Marler continues to keep the botulism posts coming, and has already written three of them since traveling down under at the beginning of the month. But work isn’t everything, and as the picture above can prove, Bill certainly isn’t neglecting some of the more adventurous elements of island life.

Anybody interested in seeing how a law firm can seamlessly weave technology, food safety and practical legal representation together needs to look no further than to the good folks at Marler Clark. Congratulations on all your hard work, Bill!