Blanched onions: Chipotle tweaks cooking after E. coli scare

And this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported five more cases of E. coli in later November linked to Chipotle, which it said might be part of a different outbreak. “It’s not granular enough”, Ian Williams, chief of the CDC’s outbreak response and prevention branch, told Bloomberg. However, it was clarified that these newly-recorded illnesses were not included in the case count of the previously reported outbreak since it is still not known whether or not these cases are related to STEC 026 infections. The cause of the E. coli contagion still hasn’t been found.

Testing random samples of chicken and poultry for contaminants before they are shipped out to stores.

Nobody’s quite sure what, exactly, has been making so many Chipotle customers sick, but the burrito chain obviously needs to do something, quickly, if it hopes to stem the tide of E. coli outbreaks.

Identifying a specific cause for the latest E. coli cases “really can be a challenge with the limited information that may be available from the few cases that occurred”, said Laurence Burnsed, an epidemiologist for the Oklahoma State Department of Health.

“We are now in the process of implementing those programs…”, Chris Arnold, Chipotle communications director, said in an email to CNN, emphasizing that the CDC does not know whether the new cases are linked. This pushed the company to hire IEH Laboratories to overhaul its food safety and cooking methods. “Our menu has remained virtually unchanged for the last 22 years and we only have 64 ingredients in our food”.

“In the end, it may not be possible for anyone to completely eliminate all risk with regard to food (or from any environment where people congregate), but we are confident that we can achieve near zero risk”, he said. There have been no cases of HUS or deaths from this outbreak, although 20 of those who have become ill have been hospitalized.

Earlier this month Chipotle warned that its fourth quarter sales would drop sharply in the wake of the E. coli breakout and other negative headlines. About 153 people were sickened, including 141 students from Boston College. That outbreak includes 27 people in Washington and 13 in OR, along with three each in California and OH, two in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, and one each in Maryland and NY.