Kellogg's Recalls Honey Smacks Cereal After Salmonella Outbreak

A popular brand of cereal was recalled en masse on Thursday after it was linked to dozens of illnesses and hospitalizations. Kellogg’s Honey Smacks cereal had to be pulled from store shelves after a Center for Disease Control investigation found that the cereal was the likely instigator of a salmonella outbreak across the contiguous United States.

Kellogg’s recalled both 15.3 oz and 23 oz packages of Honey Smacks on Thursday, according to the CDC's news release. Salmonella cases linked to Honey Smacks started popping up between March 3 and May 28, but there could be more unreported cases from after that time period.

In all, the CDC reported 73 cases across 31 different states. Cereal-caused salmonella was not limited to one part of the country, with cases being reported on the northern, southern, eastern and western boundaries of the continental United States. New York had the most infections with seven.

The CDC counted 24 hospitalizations as a result of this particular outbreak and zero deaths at the time of the report. Those affected ranged in age from younger than one year old to 87. The CDC recommended customers throw out or return any Honey Smacks cereal with a best-used-by date of June 14, 2018 to June 14, 2019.

Salmonella is a bacteria that causes a little more than a million illnesses in the U.S. every year. The large majority of those illnesses come from food. Within a few days of eating something contaminated, salmonella victims get fevers, diarrhea, and abdominal pain, according to the CDC.

Most people who get salmonella recover on their own within a week, but it does occasionally require treatment at a hospital in more severe cases. There typically are not long-lasting effects after recovery. Of the 1.2 million cases in the U.S. each year, about 450 result in death.