Excerpt From Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do about It

By Nicols Fox

            Journalists are people who have found a socially acceptable way of satisfying a socially unacceptable degree of curiosity.  They also tend to reject overly facile explanations.  Something that doesn’t make sense can set up an irritation as nagging as a sore tooth.

            I felt that way in 1993 when I heard, along with the rest of the world, of the widespread outbreak of foodborne disease linked to fast-food hamburgers on the West Coast.  It seemed clear at once that there was something missing to the story.  The facts as they appeared in the news reports didn’t add up.  Hundreds were sick, and children were dying from a "urinary tract infection” linked to something they had eaten.  The accounts mentioned Escherichia coli bacteria.

            Members of the genus of E. coli bacteria, I thought I remembered from college biology, are extremely common and regularly found in the human gut.  It seemed strange that they would be linked to a urinary tract infection, and stranger still that children should be dying of something so ordinary.  My curiosity took me to a local library, and my first readings confirmed what I thought I had remembered.  The bacteria are ubiquitous, and generally benign, but they had been linked to various forms of diarrhea, most of the comparatively mild-only recently.  Finding out why the organism was now associated with something as dangerous as what was happening on the West Coast was more difficult, but gradually bits and pieces of a larger picture emerged.  This E. coli went by a name: O157:H7.  And it was a new strain (more properly called a serotype).

 ...A new and potentially deadly pathogen was suddenly in our food supply and was found most frequently in our favorite food: hamburger.  The staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, parents of children who had been made ill or died from their infection, and experts across the country filled me in on a tale more compelling than fiction.  I wrote the first of several articles. 

...The day after Lauren died, a woman from the public health department would call and leave a message, but Roni and Dick’s days were consumed by the devastating task of arranging for their daughter’s funeral.  When Roni returned the call, the woman asked her among other things, whether Lauren had eaten at a fast food restaurant, Roni remembers thinking the question was ridiculous.  Of course she had.  Didn’t everyone in America?  She would talk to the health department four more times.  Not once, she says, did they mention that E. coli O157:H7 had been found in Lauren’s body or tell her what that might mean and what they suspected had caused her daughter’s death.

 ...One of Lauren’s doctors would later speculate that the outbreak, which eventually involved five states, caused 723 illnesses, put 195 in the hospital –55 with HUS-and killed three more children, might have been identified and stopped in San Diego, if only California had a reporting requirement and encouraged testing.

 ...The CDC now estimates that E. coli O157:H7 alone causes as many as 20,000 illnesses a year in the U.S. and leaves between 250-500 dead.

 ...In fact, the incidence of foodborn illness has been growing for some time.  Official estimates are that cases in the U.S. run as high as 81 million cases a year, but recently Dr. Morris Potter pushed that number up even higher.  He suggested in the Harvard Health Letter that every person in the country probably has at least one episode per year-which would put the number at more than 266 million cases a year.  Most of what doctors and the public refer to as “stomach flu” is actually food poisoning.

Copyright Nicols Fox, 1997