Trader Joe's Sends Message to Customers Over Potentially Dangerous Items
Trader Joe's has just under 600 stores across the United States and has become a popular place for shoppers.
However, the company announced a recall for one of its products for a potentially scary reason.
"To Our Valued Customers: A single lot code of Face Rock Creamery's Vampire Slayer Cheese Curds is being recalled because it has the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes."
The product was sold in Northern California, Central California and Nevada stores. This includes stores in Fresno, Monterey, Carson City and others, so it is affecting a large number of customers.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Listeria monocytogenes infection causes symptoms including fever, headaches, seizures and confusion. It can also affect newborns, older adults and those who are pregnant.
This marks the sixth recall by Trader Joe's in 2025 alone, so it has become a rather common occurrence just halfway through the calendar year.
The most recent one prior to this came in April when the company recalled a Sesame Miso Salad with Salmon due to an "undeclared milk allergen."
Walmart and Kroger also dealt with a Listeria outbreak recently, as they recalled three types of chicken fettuccine alfredo pasta.
Trader Joe's is issuing a full refund to any customer who purchased the cheese curds with a use-by date of August 29, 2025.Trader Joe's Sends Message to Customers Over Potentially Dangerous Items first appeared on Men's Journal on Jun 22, 2025
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Medscape
31 minutes ago
- Medscape
Inflammation Link Allergy, Asthma, and Depression?
The prevalence of depression is consistently higher in persons with asthma than in persons without it, according to experts, and a review of 24 studies also found that allergic rhinitis was associated with higher odds of depression or anxiety. Over the past two decades, multiple investigators have looked beyond emotional or lifestyle triggers of depression in chronic airway or allergic conditions, focusing instead on eco-biological ones. This has led to inflammation being identified as the common denominator in all three — allergies, asthma, and depression. As the understanding of how inflammation, as measured by an increase in immune cells, cytokines, and other biomarkers, affects neural signaling continues to improve; potential implications for clinical practice are beginning to emerge, experts say. Evolutionary 'Mismatch' One line of inquiry that implicates inflammation in depression, chronic airway trouble, and allergies, involves the microbiome and how modern living has altered it. 'There's essentially an evolutionary mismatch in the modern world,' Charles Raison, MD, professor of psychiatry and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, told Medscape Medical News in an interview. 'We've made the world so clean we deprive ourselves — especially in early life when allergies and asthma tend to develop — of contact with microorganisms that train the immune system not to fire off at things they don't need to fire off about.' In a review of literature published in 2013 on immune function titled, Inflammation, Sanitation, and Consternation , Raison and his coauthors concluded that measured exposure to certain microorganisms and their antigens could offer both prevention and intervention for depression. 'Our current challenge is to determine who among those with allergies is at highest risk of developing depression, and why,' Christopher Lowry, PhD, a coauthor on the paper with Raison, told Medscape Medical News . Lowry is a professor of integrative physiology and associate chair of faculty affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder. 'Old Friends' Raison and Lowry's collaboration follows on from the 'Old Friends' work of Graham Rook, a coauthor of their review study, and an emeritus professor of medical microbiology at the University College London in London, England. 'The association between allergies and depression is embedded in the 'Old Friends' or Biodiversity Hypothesis which posits that reduced exposures to diverse microbial environments, which is typical of modern urban lifestyles, increases risk of allergies, anxiety disorders, and depression,' Lowry told Medscape Medical News . Because the commensal microorganisms in the gut are one of the major types of microbial 'Old Friends' that can induce anti-inflammatory and immunoregulatory responses, Lowry said, 'Those who lack diverse microbial exposures, including diverse microbial exposures in the gut microbiome, are thought to be at higher risk of inflammatory disease and inflammation-associated conditions.' Similarly, 'we have shown that this response is greater in persons who grow up in an urban environment, without daily exposure to pets, relative to persons who grow up on a farm, with daily exposure to farm animals,' said Lowry, whose research on the immune effects of exposure to animals was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science . Other categories of microbial 'Old Friends,' according to Lowry, are environmental saprophytes found in soil, mud, and unpurified water, and so-called 'Old Infections' such as the hepatitis A virus or Salmonella . Rook has gone so far as to say that these microbial inputs, 'are absolutely crucial in early life, but continue to be important in adulthood and old age.' Raison added, 'These microbes don't cause illnesses, they are the teachers of tolerance, is how we used to say it. When we began to institute a bunch of modern sanitation and medical practices, on the plus side people stopped dying in youth. Huge win. But we didn't see we were tossing out the good with the bad, and we've lost our exposure to these environmental immunoregulatory organisms that suppress inflammation.' In the past 40 years, incident rates for asthma in the US have doubled according to federal data. A third of persons in the US now have an allergy of some kind, these data also showed. Rates of depression are also at their highest, according to a probability-based Gallup survey of 100,000 adults in the US. In 2023, the survey found that 29% of US adults had been given a diagnosis of depression in their lifetime. Microbial Population Health Initiative The 'Old Friends' theory was tested in Finland for the decade between 2008 and 2018, when a population health initiative to increase exposures to diverse microbial environments led to a reduction in hospitalizations for asthma by half nationally and a 50% drop in the number of food allergies reported in Finnish schools and daycares. The results were published in 2021 in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology . Depression rates for this time period in Finland are not currently available. 'This was hot, sexy stuff back 20 years ago, but nobody figured out the magic bullet to end all allergies and asthma, so like a lot of things in mental health, it didn't come too much,' Raison said. 'It's gone through fads, like the probiotic fad. But another question would be, what if you were to re-expose kids to these kinds of microbes that train the immune system not to be so agitated, would you lower rates of depression and suicide in adults? Those studies were never done.' Lowry, however, now studies whether the microorganism, Mycobacterium vaccae ATCC 15483, which has been identified as having anti-inflammatory, immunoregulatory, and stress-resilience properties, can be leveraged to protect humans from the effects of inflammation. In a study that was published earlier this year in Brain, Behavior and Immunity , Lowry and his colleagues found M vaccae reduced biomarkers of neuroinflammation and anxiety-like behavior in animals. It also reduced several indicators of obesity such as plasma leptin concentrations and adipose tissue. 'We hope to conduct clinical trials in the next 2-5 years to determine if treatment with mycobacteria can reduce inflammation and promote stress resilience in humans,' Lowry said. 'Future studies should evaluate if mycobacteria or other 'Old Friends' can prevent or treat anxiety and depression.' Inflammation Is Bidirectional If depression in asthma and allergies is at least partially biological, then there are implications for clinical practice, according to one expert. 'The default for physicians is usually that it's hard to have a chronic disease, and that's why their patients are depressed,' Melissa Rosenkranz, PhD, told Medscape Medical News . 'But if they understand that there is a biology that underlies it, that the immune dysregulation that's giving rise to the disease is also contributing to the depression, and that they can do something about that — if we can target those signaling pathways, then we can be treating both simultaneously.' Rosenkranz is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and is the distinguished chair of contemplative neuroscience at the Center for Healthy Minds. Her field is psycho-neuroimmunology, which focuses on interactions between the mind, brain, and immune system. Whether inflammation is the mechanism of action or a symptom in both asthma and depression is something she and her colleagues have studied. 'It goes in both directions,' Rosenkranz said. 'We've done that research.' Alterations in Neural Signaling Their first and second studies involved scanning study patients' brains before and after their airways were challenged with an inflammatory antigen and comparing those results to the before and after scans of the brains of participants exposed to methacholine, which does not irritate, but does constrict, the bronchial passages, making it difficult to breathe. A third study introduced an inflammatory agent to a micro region of the bronchial passages. 'All three studies showed what was happening in the brain was different in the inflammatory context,' Rosenkranz said in the interview. Specifically, Rosenkranz and her colleagues discovered that the brain's salience network — the part that prioritizes which stimuli, both internal and external to the body, require the brain's attention most — responded differently to emotional information when the immune system had been activated. They found that the more the salience network was engaged during psychological stress, the more the inflammatory response in the airway was activated, even without exposure to allergy triggers. 'Our results identify a specific inflammatory pathway linking asthma-related airway inflammation and emotion-related neural function,' Rosenkranz and her coauthors wrote in their study, published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology . An immune pathway common to both depression and the airway inflammatory response in asthma is the T helper cell 17 (TH17) response, according to Rosenkranz, whose work has shown that the TH17 response is amplified in the lung during stress. Activity in the TH17 pathway is also elevated in people with depression, according to Rosenkranz, and TH17 is also less responsive to common asthma medications and is associated with treatment-resistant depression. 'There are probably multiple pathways through which [inflammation] happens, so I don't want to claim that this is the only one, but I think it's one among a few that may provoke inflammation in the brain,' Rosenkranz said. 'And inflammation has been shown to be part of the pathophysiology of depression. It's also part of the cascade that gives rise to Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.' Rosenkranz's latest study is on how an asthma exacerbation can lead to inflammation in the brain, and whether those changes might set the stage for dementia. 'It's possible that depression is along the same trajectory as dementia,' Rosenkranz said. 'As you get on later in life, you see the cognitive decline. With nearly 10% of the population having asthma, this is a really important public health question.' Rosenkranz said she doesn't want to be an alarmist. 'I'm not suggesting that everybody who has depression has inflammation in their brain,' she said. As the field searches for an immune-signaling pathway that, if targeted with drugs, could improve asthma, allergies, prevent asthma-related depression, and possibly protect the brain, Rosenkranz said that for now, 'Physicians should evaluate the emotional well-being of their patients and work closely with mental health professionals to address mental and physical symptoms in tandem, so that they can best serve their patients.' They need to understand that depression in patients with asthma or allergy could be a symptom of, not a reaction to their diagnosis, she said.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Who are the eight new vaccine advisers appointed by Robert F Kennedy?
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, named eight new vaccine advisers this week to a critical Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel after firing all 17 experts who had held the roles. New members of the panel include experts who complained about being sidelined, a high-profile figure who has spread misinformation and medical professionals who appear to have little vaccine expertise. Kennedy made the announcement on social media. 'All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense,' Kennedy said in his announcement. 'They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.' Formally called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the panel advises the CDC on how vaccines should be distributed. Those recommendations in effect determine the vaccines Americans can access. This week, Kennedy also removed the career officials typically tasked with vetting ACIP members and overseeing the advisory group, according to CBS News. Related: RFK Jr announces new panel of vaccine advisers after firing entire previous team Kennedy is a widely known vaccine skeptic who profited from suing vaccine manufacturers, has taken increasingly dramatic steps to upend US vaccine policy. 'ACIP is widely regarded as the international gold standard for vaccine decision-making,' said Helen Chu, one of the fired advisers, at a press conference with Patty Murray, a Democratic US senator. 'We cannot replace it with a process driven by one person's beliefs. In the absence of an independent, unbiased ACIP, we can no longer trust that safe and effective vaccines will be available to us and the people around us.' Arguably the most high-profile new member, Robert W Malone catapulted to stardom during the Covid-19 pandemic, appearing across rightwing media to criticize the Biden administration while describing himself as the inventor of mRNA technology. Messenger RNA technology powers the most widely used Covid-19 vaccines. While Malone was involved in very early experiments on the technology, researchers have said his role was limited. Malone's star rose quickly after appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2022, where he and Rogan were criticized for spreading misinformation. On the show, Malone promoted the idea that both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could be possible treatments for Covid-19, but said research on the drugs was being suppressed. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have not been shown to improve outcomes from Covid-19. 'Malone has a well-documented history of promoting conspiracy theories,' said Dr Jeffrey D Klausner, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the University of Southern California, who recently told the New York Times he was in touch with Kennedy about his appointments. Kulldorff is a former Harvard professor of biostatistics and an infectious disease epidemiologist originally from Sweden. He said in an essay for the rightwing publication City Journal that he was fired because he refused to be vaccinated in line with the school policy. Like Malone, he rose to prominence during the pandemic as a 'Covid contrarian' who criticized the scientific consensus – views he said alienated him from his peers in the scientific community. He voiced his opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates and, in his essay, complained of being ignored by media and shadow-banned from Twitter. Kulldorff co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for limited closures instead of pandemic lockdowns before vaccines were available. The document became a touchstone for the American political right. Before the pandemic, Kulldorff studied vaccine safety and infectious disease, including co-authoring papers with members of CDC staff, such as on the Vaccine Safety Datalink. He was a member of the CDC's Covid Vaccine Safety Working Group in 2020, but said later he was fired because he disagreed with the agency's decision to pause Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine and with Covid-19 vaccine mandates. He served on the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) drug safety and risk management advisory committee around the same time. He has since enjoyed support from people already within the administration, including the Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr Jay Bhattacharya, current head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Dr Vinay Prasad, head of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which handles vaccines. Meissner is a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He previously held advisory roles at the FDA and CDC, including ACIP from 2008-2012. In 2021, Meissner co-wrote an editorial with Dr Marty Makary, now the head of the FDA, which criticized mask mandates for children. In April, he was listed as an external adviser to ACIP on the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) committee. Notably, Meissner is listed in a new conflicts of interest tool launched by the health department in March. Kennedy had criticized the fired ACIP members as 'plagued with persistent conflicts of interest'. 'He's a card-carrying infectious disease person who knows the burden of these diseases, and he knows the risk and the benefit,' Dr Kathryn Edwards told CBS News. Edwards previously served as chair of the FDA's vaccine advisory panel. Pebsworth is a nurse and the former consumer representative on the FDA's vaccine advisory committee. She is also the Pacific regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses, according to Kennedy's announcement. In 2020, Pebsworth spoke at the public comment portion of an FDA advisory panel meeting on Covid-19 vaccines. There, she identified herself as the volunteer research director for the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), 'and the mother of a child injured by his 15-month well-baby shots in 1998'. The NVIC is widely viewed as an anti-vaccine advocacy organization 'whose founder Barbara Lou Fisher must be considered a key figure of the anti-vaccine movement', according to an article from 2023 on how to counter anti-vaccine misinformation. Levi is a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management who Kennedy described as an 'expert in healthcare analytics, risk management and vaccine safety'. In 2021, he opposed Covid-19 booster shot approval during the public comment portion of an FDA advisory committee hearing. In 2022, he wrote an article calling for EMS calls to be incorporated into vaccine safety data, arguing that cardiovascular side-effects could be undercounted – an article that later required correction. The potential effects of Covid-19 vaccines on heart health have been a focal point of right-leaning criticism. Last month, Levi was criticized for publishing a pre-print paper – a paper without peer review – that he co-authored with Dr Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, a vaccine skeptic. The paper alleged that people who took the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine were more likely to die than those who received the Moderna vaccine. Kennedy described Ross as 'a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, with a career spanning clinical medicine, research, and public health policy'. However, as first reported by CBS News, Ross's name does not appear in faculty directories for either school. A spokesperson for George Washington University told the outlet that Ross did work as a clinical professor, but 'has not held a faculty appointment … since 2017'. A spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University described Ross as 'an affiliate faculty member' at a regional hospital system in the Capitol region. He is also listed as a partner at Havencrest Capital Management, as a board member of 'multiple private healthcare companies'. Hibbeln is a California-based psychiatrist who previously served as acting chief for the section of nutritional neurosciences at the NIH. He describes himself as an expert on omega-3, a fatty acid found in seafood. He also serves on the advisory council of a non-profit that advocates for Americans to eat more seafood. He practices at Barton Health, a hospital system in Lake Tahoe, California. His work influenced US public health guidelines on fish consumption during pregnancy. Pagano is an emergency medicine physician from Los Angeles 'with over 40 years of clinical experience', and a 'strong advocate for evidence-based medicine', according to Kennedy.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Girl, 12, Attacked by Shark Off the Coast of South Carolina — Marking the Second Such Attack in the U.S. in Less Than 1 Week
A 12-year-old girl was attacked by a shark off the waters of South Carolina on Hilton Head Island on June 17 The preteen sustained non-life-threatening injuries to her right leg and was airlifted to a hospital in Savannah, Ga. The attack took place less than a week after a 9-year-old girl was attacked by a shark in Florida days earlierA 12-year-old girl was attacked by a shark off the waters of South Carolina. The attack occurred at around 12 p.m. local time on Tuesday, June 17, near a resort on Hilton Head Island. The girl sustained "a leg injury consistent with lacerations typically associated with a shark bite," according to a statement from Hilton Head Island Fire Rescue that was obtained by USA Today and CBS News. The victim, whose identity has not been shared publicly, received onsite treatment from Shore Beach Services and Fire Rescue staff. She was then airlifted to a hospital in Savannah, Ga., which is located about 40 miles from Hilton Head, CBS News reported. Authorities said the young girl's injuries were not life-threatening, per the outlet. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. In audio from a call obtained by local news outlet WJCL, first responders could be heard telling medical dispatchers that the girl was conscious and breathing, but she had "lost a good amount of blood so far.' They also stated that the preteen's wound was located on the 'lower right leg, right below the kneecap.' PEOPLE reached out to Hilton Head Fire and Rescue and Shore Beach Services for comment on Sunday, June 22, but did not receive an immediate response. The incident in Hilton Head took place less than a week after a child lost her hand during a shark attack off the coast of Florida days earlier. Leah Lendel, 9, was snorkeling with her family in Boca Grande on June 11 when the attack occurred. She was airlifted to a hospital, where she underwent an emergency six-hour surgery. "I was just snorkeling, and then I went up to breathe," Leah said at a press conference on Thursday, June 19, per Fox Orlando. "And then something hard bit me, and then it tried to tug me away." "Then I picked up my hand, and it's all in blood," the young girl continued. There were 47 unprovoked shark attacks worldwide in 2024, according to The International Shark Attack File, which is maintained by the Florida Museum of Natural History. (Of those 47 attacks, four were fatal, per the museum.) Read the original article on People
