Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Portuguese airline had to ground a passenger plane. One hundred
and thirty two hamsters escaped from their cages in the
cargo hold. They roamed freely throughout the aircraft.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
There's the next Samuel Jackson movie right there. Hamster is
on a plane. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
The incident occurred on a Tap Airlines airbus three twenty
one neo flew from Lisbon to Azarees, island of Ponta Delgada,
and the hamsters were part of a delivery intended for
a pet shop there. They were spect had multiple.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Germ Gerbils hamsters. Close enough.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Our hamster's big business in Portugal is I mean, does
everybody want a hamster? Why are we sending one hundred
and thirty two hamsters to a pet shop?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Let's ask the news guy, Alec Stone from ABC News.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
At least they were cute. They weren't snakes.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
They weren't snakes on a plane. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I'm wondering if the hamsters perhaps were destined to be
involved with snakes. I mean, that's a lot of hamsters
for one pet shop.
Speaker 5 (01:06):
So that's a lot of hamsters it is, but uh,
I mean I would think like the big pet shops
in the US like pet Smart and pet Co.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
They probably have to move around a lot of hamsters.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Too, right, probably when they get.
Speaker 5 (01:18):
Three on a plane, and I would think it's like
a rat where you worry about them chewing the wires
on the plane.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Oh yeah, wow.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
They're probably gonna nibble on stuff. And if it's your avionics,
you probably don't want that.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Thirty five thousand feet hey sons, just steering wheel, that's
a thing you want.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
And then as it gets electrocuted and flies across the.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Cargo, Oh, then you go, what's that smell? It smells
like something cooking.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
What's first class eating.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Cooking? Here?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Anybody check with the Portuguese Airline to see what the.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
See what the uniform is? It's not chaps, is it?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Because I with the hamsters running amuck, it's really important. Anyway,
the plane was taken out of service. I was gonna
lodge that joke in there somehow, some way. I just
rammed it in there, like, oh boy, anyway, for they
took the planes out of service, kind of to your point, Alex,
where those things are running around chewing on god knows what,
(02:24):
so it could be delayed, what experience, you know, what
happens with this aircraft.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Yeah, it's like, you don't want to rat in the plane.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
I saw a video the other day of I won't
say what airline, but let's just say it is on
the lower fare scale of the airlines where somebody recorded
there was a rat crawling around in the light like
above the seats. You could see the outline the silhouette
of the rat in there.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
And then people were.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
Like, oh, that's not good that it was moving those
are Yeah, was crawling around in there. Uh oh no,
it's gonna chew on things that you don't want it
chewing on.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
No, that is a big, big problem. One hundred and
thirty two of them, by the way, not just to couple.
I want to people carry on zipped for sure, you know, yeah,
one hundred and thirty two.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
And then yeah, when that flight ended, they probably only
found what ninety or eighty because the rest of them,
you know, took a ride on something that was probably
on that aircraft hidden some sort.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
So this is uh, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Chuck asked me randomly about carrots the other day, and
I wondered, if is this part of this e coal
I outbreak, Chuck, is this why you asked me, like, yeah,
do you like carrots?
Speaker 2 (03:31):
They were recalling these these organic carrots and so forth,
And I just I don't understand why people eat them
in the first place. I don't get it.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Well, I mean, they are healthy, little.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Orange pieces of cardboard, and I don't see the appeal
of carrots. I cook them up, maybe throw them in
some stew. That's different. But people that just eat raw
carrots all the time, I think that's an illness of
some sort. You should probably seek treatment.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
You never like to dip them in anything like Yeah,
that's what I was.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
And what's the point of eating something healthy if you're
going to dip it into a unhealthy stuff?
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Just unhealthy healthy tablespoon chickpeas.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
You're right, right, Yeah, I told him, I go, you know,
I drag it through ranch or I'd completely disdissemble, disassemble
the nutritional.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Kind of the healthy part of it.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, but this is real. These
people have died from this, right at least one?
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Yeah, one person has. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (04:20):
So the ongoing fear at this point is that there
are probably still carrots that are out there that are
part of this recall, sitting in refrigerators nationwide because people
have no idea that they've got something that they can
make them really sick or even kill them. So they're
no longer being sold. They were sold until October twenty third,
but the baby carrots, they were the big carrots and
the baby ones. Then the baby carrots have a best
(04:41):
buy date up until November twelfth. And carrots, yeah, they
take a while to go bad. So if somebody went
to like Costco or to Sam's Club and they bought
the big bags of them where you get two bags together,
the thinking is that they may still have them, and
people probably do beyond their best buy date sitting in
the fridge. There have been thirty nine cases eighteen states.
New York, Minnesota, and Washington have had the most. One
(05:04):
person in California, an elderly person died, but now the
lawsuits are beginning. Forty year old Blinda Pratt first defile one.
She was hospitalized. She ate carrots and they had.
Speaker 6 (05:13):
A low grade fever and just thought it was the
stomach clue and it just progressively got worse each and
every day.
Speaker 5 (05:22):
She bought carrots from Sam's Club on September thirtieth and
then got really, really sick. And the thing is that
these carrots are sold under a ton of different brand
names at whatever store you shop at, and they all
come from the same company, but it's a different brand
name everywhere you go. And they were sold at Costco
and at Sam's Club and a Safeway stores and Kroger
stores and Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, just about every
(05:45):
chain that you can imagine, under all these different names.
But they all some of them had the same problem.
And she said it got really bad.
Speaker 6 (05:53):
The radiating back pain that came. I couldn't handle this
stomach cramping anymore. It was making me drip sweat.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
She said.
Speaker 5 (06:05):
It was like getting stabbed in the stomach NonStop for
days and vomiting and everything else.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
She thought she was dying.
Speaker 5 (06:10):
So the carrots came from a company in Bakersfield, Catlifornia,
Grimway Farms. They say they're conducting a thorough review how
they grow them, harvest process to understand how this happened.
But it comes right after the coal I and onions
on McDonald's quarter pounders a few weeks ago. And that
was the onions where it got in probably from cows,
and then got into the irrigation water and then got
(06:31):
E Coli into the onions there.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
This may be the same thing. They don't know yet,
but it's pretty serious.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Is a class action? Wait, this is going to happen.
I don't even know if it's class action. There's going
to be separate lawsuits. I would imagine that, and.
Speaker 5 (06:43):
The numbers are probably going to go up as more
people go, oh, that's right. Like I got really sick
that night a month ago, and I did eat carrots,
you know, and they put two and two together McDonald's.
Even after they knew that was over with with the
quarter pounders, their numbers kept going up because people would
go to their doctor and figure out the link. So
it's sometimes the numbers are delayed. They'll probably go up
(07:05):
as people figure out that, yeah, they ate carrots and
then they.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Got sick and multiple defendants. Right now, it's we're going
to sue the store that sold it to us. So
we're going to sue them, the processing company in California, right,
you know, eventually it's going to go up to how
about we sue the federal agency that's responsible for making
sure our food isn't poisonous to us?
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Right?
Speaker 5 (07:23):
I mean you have to you know, just like an
airline thing where they go after the airline, even though
it was a company that made the plane. It'll be
where the stores are, like, well, we didn't know. How
are they going to know when it comes in?
Speaker 1 (07:32):
And also she bought probably sixteen pounds of carrots. If
it was at Costco. You can't just buy Sam's Club. Yeah,
you can't just buy a little bit. So she had
to throw all those out too.
Speaker 5 (07:44):
By the way, one we apparently bought them. We didn't
get sick. But I got the email from Costco yesterday.
So if you bought them from Costco, they will tell
you and warn you that that you did buy them,
and if you've got them, throw them out.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Yeah wow, interesting all right? Alex Stone, ABC News out
of Los Angeles. Alex, thank you very much.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
Bye, guys.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
See you man.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
I don't mind buying stuff in the four hundred pound
batches as long as I'm in the cookie aisle, that's cool.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Or whatever you buy is not gonna go bad or
be full of e coli.