Northwest E. coli outbreak linked to Chipotle sickens 39

At least 39 people have been sickened by an E. coli outbreak in Washington state and Oregon, but it doesn’t have anything to do with using “dog and cat meat”. Fourteen people have been hospitalized in those two states.

The chief medical officer for foods and veterinary medicine at the FDA, Dr. Kathleen Gensheimer, said that they have been looking at things such as tomatoes, lettuce, cilantro or a few other types of uncooked food. She added that they have been targeted in such efforts by the information obtained by public health partners. The company has conducted deep cleaning and full sanitization of all restaurants in the area, and conducted environmental testing in restaurants and distribution centers, in addition to those conducted by government officials. And when someone gets sick from eating food in the United States, home of the safest and most abundant food supply in the world, it shines a poor light on the entire food chain.

“If I was the Chipotle CEO, I would be having my food-safety team in my office yesterday asking, ‘What happened and what do we need to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again”, Marler said.

“It really can be challenging”. But the CDC has not yet identified which food stuff caused the outbreak. In a few cases, this can trigger a complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) which leads to kidney failure. “I think if it did, then it would be affecting people here”, Maloy said.

“These kinds of incidents concern all of us and we want to find out what happened, and how to avoid it in the future”, said Stephanie Page, program director for food safety and animal health at the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

“We don’t necessarily know under what kinds of conditions it was grown”, Page said.

Baird Equity Research downgraded the stock to neutral from outperform, and said the situation is taking much longer than it expected to resolve, and attracting a great deal of media attention that may dent consumer sentiment toward the company.

Also, the water used to irrigate crops can become tainted with the manure, which is how E. coli ends up in our fruits and vegetables. At the packing house, pest control is a priority.

More than 40 Chipotle restaurants remain closed in Washington state and the Portland area of Oregon as health officials search for the source of the E. coli outbreak. This comes after two separate outbreaks of Salmonella and norovirus hit Chipotle customers this summer. Oregon health officials say 12 people have E. coli in Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington and Columbia counties.