Commonground
Senior Moderator
June 6, 2026 at 8:54 PM EDT
The Broome County jail has been dealing with an outbreak of illness caused by salmonella since May 26. On Thursday, Sheriff Fred Akshar said operationally the facility is “back to business as usual”.
At its peak last week, 320 of the incarcerated population of 450 were sick from salmonella. That is about 71 percent of the incarcerated population. No staff became ill because they are served from a different menu.
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Broome County Medical Director Dr. Lazarus Gehring said he expected the last two hospitalized people to be released by the end of the week. At one point, 10 people were hospitalized.
“This is probably one of the largest foodborne salmonella outbreaks in New York, probably since the turn of the century [2000],” Gehring said.
Gehring said United Health Services provided significant support of testing materials, intravenous hydration packets and a separate ward at Binghamton General Hospital just for the salmonella patients.
“These [salmonella patients] are patients you don’t really want mixed in with other patients,” he said. Salmonella can be spread by consuming contaminated food or water but also through person-to-person contact according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We made the county jail into a hospital, because the hospital, you can’t send 320 patients to a hospital. We did this before, we did this during COVID-19, you shut the hospital down,” Gehring said.
Numerous food safety violations
The investigation into the cause of the outbreak is ongoing but county health director Olivia Catalano said salmonella has already been identified in chicken salad that was served on Sunday, May 25, the day before the outbreak began.
Further testing is being done to confirm it is the same strain found in stool samples from patients. The testing is being done by the Wadsworth Center, the New York state health department laboratory in Albany.
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No one has died because of the jail outbreak as of the press conference on Friday afternoon.
Continued: https://www.wskg.org/regional-news/...salmonella-poisoned-320-in-broome-county-jail
The Broome County jail has been dealing with an outbreak of illness caused by salmonella since May 26. On Thursday, Sheriff Fred Akshar said operationally the facility is “back to business as usual”.
At its peak last week, 320 of the incarcerated population of 450 were sick from salmonella. That is about 71 percent of the incarcerated population. No staff became ill because they are served from a different menu.
-snip-
Broome County Medical Director Dr. Lazarus Gehring said he expected the last two hospitalized people to be released by the end of the week. At one point, 10 people were hospitalized.
“This is probably one of the largest foodborne salmonella outbreaks in New York, probably since the turn of the century [2000],” Gehring said.
Gehring said United Health Services provided significant support of testing materials, intravenous hydration packets and a separate ward at Binghamton General Hospital just for the salmonella patients.
“These [salmonella patients] are patients you don’t really want mixed in with other patients,” he said. Salmonella can be spread by consuming contaminated food or water but also through person-to-person contact according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We made the county jail into a hospital, because the hospital, you can’t send 320 patients to a hospital. We did this before, we did this during COVID-19, you shut the hospital down,” Gehring said.
Numerous food safety violations
The investigation into the cause of the outbreak is ongoing but county health director Olivia Catalano said salmonella has already been identified in chicken salad that was served on Sunday, May 25, the day before the outbreak began.
Further testing is being done to confirm it is the same strain found in stool samples from patients. The testing is being done by the Wadsworth Center, the New York state health department laboratory in Albany.
-snip-
No one has died because of the jail outbreak as of the press conference on Friday afternoon.
Continued: https://www.wskg.org/regional-news/...salmonella-poisoned-320-in-broome-county-jail