Jill Crowson, a 52-year-old interior designer from Clyde Hill, filed the lawsuit on behalf of her family and possibly hundreds of other customers who unwittingly bought and consumed beef potentially exposed to mad cow disease, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Friday.

She claims that Quality Foods Center, owned by Ohio's Kroger, negligently exposed her, her family and others to "highly hazardous" meat and did not properly notify them that they had bought it.

"I was pretty upset about it," Crowson said. "I've spent all of my kids' lives trying to be a responsible parent for them to keep them safe. I felt badly that the food I served could be harmful to their health."

Crowson's suit is believed to be the first stemming from this country's only confirmed case of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which was detected in a slaughtered Holstein from a Yakima Valley ranch on Dec. 23.