Abbott will pay $670 million in compensation after the use of a low-quality formula for premature infants.

The issue is not with the ingredients, but with the contamination of the plant by the bacterium Cronobacter, which, unlike many others, easily withstands drying, and therefore the dry formula became the route of infection.

Quality control methods for food raw materials often detect E. coli, although so much of this bacterium is not found in production facilities. And all because it is an error of bacterial culture from the last century, which was once adopted as a standard.

A modern laboratory can identify a production problem using simple PCR, and then clarify the type of bacterium and its nature using metagenomic sequencing.

We cannot avoid more than two thousand cases of serious infections from dry formula, but we strictly adhere to the quality standard.

Comment to the Public News Service.