A live scorpion was sitting in a salad mix that a Chevy Chase, Maryland, couple bought from a Giant grocery store last week, the couple said.
Shanmukha Pranay Rajeev Jerripothula said he and his wife bought a bag of spinach from a local Giant on Friday evening. On Monday afternoon, his wife, Sri Sindhusha Boddapati, opened the bag to make lunch when she noticed something unusual.
“I saw something inside the bag crawling,” she said. “I thought it was a cricket in the beginning, and then I noticed when it was [in] the bottle that it is a scorpion.”
Boddapati was able to capture the scorpion in a water bottle and recorded cellphone video to send to her husband, who was at work. He returned home and took the bottle to the store.
“I told them not to sell the spinach anymore, because it might contain a scorpion,” Jerripothula said.
The grocery store pulled the Giant brand spinach nearly six hours after finding out about the scorpion and being contacted by News4. Giant Food of Landover, Maryland, issued a statement to News4 Washington:
“Customer satisfaction is our highest priority. We regret any inconvenience to our customer. We take the quality of our products very seriously, and we are following up with the supplier to take every step to ensure this isolated incident does not occur in the future.”
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The company did not issue a recall of any product.
According to the Mayo Clinic, only about 30 of the estimated 1,500 species worldwide of scorpions produce venom toxic enough to be fatal. They said scorpion stings are painful but rarely life-threatening. Young children and sometimes the very old are most at risk of serious complications.
Over the weekend, Fresh Express issued a recall of some of its prepackaged salad mix after a dead bat was found inside a container sold in a Florida Wal-mart, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Two people said they found a dead bat in their purchased package, and that they had eaten some of the salad before discovering the animal, according to a CDC statement. But the center added that both people "report being in good health."
