Airliner facing fatal foodborne illness litigation after passenger dies from food poisoning

American Airlines is being sued by the family of a man who is alleged to have sustained a fatal bout of food poisoning after consuming an inflight meal.  Seventy-three-year-old Othon Cortes was a passenger on a Barcelona to New York flight on 18 May when he consumed a chicken meal which is said to have been contaminated with Clostridium perfringens.

According to the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, C. perfringens is the third most common cause of food poisoning in the United Kingdom and the United States, with poorly prepared meat and poultry being the principal sources of infection.

Incubation times are anywhere between 6 and 24 hours after ingestion of contaminated food, with periods of ten to twelve hours being most common.  Symptoms typically include abdominal cramping and diarrhoea.  Healthy individuals will usually have fully recovered within 24 hours of symptoms manifesting themselves.  However, very rare, fatal cases of clostridial necrotizing enteritis relating to certain strains of the organism have been recorded.  Most deaths are as a result of dehydration and other complications associated with food poisoning.

It is reported that when Cortes’s flight from Barcelona to New York landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport he began to feel “discomfort and pain that included sharp stomach cramps and sudden thirst and other clear outward manifestation of severe physical illness.”

After boarding his connecting flight to Miami with his wife, Cortes experienced nausea and shortness of breath and suffered a cardiac event that left him unresponsive.  The plane made an emergency landing in Norfolk, Virginia, but Cortes was pronounced dead on arrival.

The lawsuit against the carrier which has been filed in the U.S. District Court in Miami is seeking over $1million in damages.  The family alleges that the chicken consumed by Cortes was “poisoned” with the bacteria C. perfringens and that the airline was negligent in allowing him to board the domestic flight, failing to provide medical attention, and waiting too long to arrange an emergency landing.

While a claim of this nature is never welcome, it couldn’t have come at a worse time for American Airlines:  it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week in an effort to cast off overwhelming debts which it has incurred due to rising fuel prices and labour costs over the last several years.

The perilous nature of the airline’s finances may explain why Cortes’s family have also seen fit to join a German catering company called LSG Sky Chefs, which is subcontracted to prepare American Airlines’ inflight meals, in the proceedings.  However, Sky Chefs insists that it did not cater the flight in question and has filed a motion seeking to have the claim dismissed in so far as it relates to the caterer.