Two Florida customers reportedly discovered a decomposing dead bat in a prepackaged Walmart salad. The unnamed customers have already eaten some of the salad when they noticed the dead bat.
New York Times reported that the greens were packed in a container of Organic Marketside Spring Mix. Upon being notified about the incident, the salad maker Fresh Express, immediately issued a recall on their products.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the recall on their website.
"The item subject to the recall is 5 oz. Organic Marketside Spring Mix marketed in a clear container with production code G089B19 and best-if-used-by date of APR 14, 2017 located on the front label, and UPC code 6 8113132897 5 located on the bottom of the container. The recalled salads were distributed only to Walmart stores located in the Southeastern region of the United States," FDA wrote.
Meanwhile, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a statement, citing that customers were already given post-exposure rabies treatment in case they have contracted it from the cave-dwelling species they found in their meal. CDC noted that they could not directly identify whether the dead bat had rabies since it is already decomposing.
While contracting rabies directly from a bat is rare, CDC said they need not to be complacent. Fortunately, the two unlucky customers have been found to be in good, healthy condition.
Experts from the CDC and FDA are working together to investigate how the bat got into the fresh salad container.
The bat was a Mexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis), which are medium-sized bats with long, narrow wings, making them excellent and fast flyers.
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum cited that Mexican free-tails prefer to roost in caves, but will also choose attics, under bridges or abandoned buildings. They can be found in Mexico and all throughout western, northern, central and southern America.