The paper Grocery Bag Bans and Foodborne Illness (Klick & Wright, 2012) claims that
Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to between 5.4 and 15.8 additional deaths.
The logic being that people rarely (if ever) wash their reusable bags and so these end up having a lot of bacteria, which can and does kill.
This paper received a lot of press attention at the time.
Several factors suggesting that their claim is not credible:
Shortly after, there was this reply by Tomás J. Aragón, a health official to debunk the above paper (basically saying that while their hypothesis is plausible and merits attention, their study is not very good and provides no evidence in favor of their hypothesis).
Also, Klick & Wright (2012) seems to have languished in unpublished form and has few citations (2 on Google Scholar at time of writing).
Is there any other evidence for or against their claim?