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E.
coli Outbreak Investigation Tries to Solve Mystery by Turning Focus to
Nestle Flour Supplier
Source
of Article: http://www.foodpoisonjournal.com/
Posted
on June 30, 2009 by Dan Flynn
Nestle USA’s flour
supplier for its Danville, VA cookie dough plant is now the focus of a
joint investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and
the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
The name of the flour
supplier was not made available.
FDA found the E. coli
O157:H7 bacteria in samples of the prepackaged Nestle Tool House
refrigerated cookie dough, but inspections inside the Danville plant
found no traces on equipment or workers.
As result, FDA is
turning to individual ingredients beginning with the flour in hopes of
finding out how a deadly bacterium from the intestines of cattle came to
be found in raw cookie dough.
The contaminated Nestle
cookie dough is now blamed for infecting 72 people in 30 states with a
strain of E. coli O157:H7 with a common DNA fingerprint. Fifty-one
have been confirmed by advanced testing and additional confirmatory tests
results are pending on the others.
The E. coli outbreak
forced Nestle to recall an estimated 300,000 cases of the popular Toll
House cookie dough, or 3.6 million individual packages.
The victims range in
age from 2 to 65 years old. Most (71 percent) are female, and 65
percent are under 19 years of age. While no deaths have yet been
attributed to the outbreak, 34 have been hospitalized and ten have
developed the often life-threatening hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS).
The number of
infections is also continuing to rise.
Food safety attorney
Bill Marler, managing partner of the Seattle law firm of Marler Clark, is
urging Nestle to immediately begin paying the medical bills and lost wage
claims of all legitimate victims of the outbreak. Marler has already
sued Nestle on behave of victims in Colorado, California and Washington
State.
“True, it will not
completely prevent Nestle from being sued to both uncover why the
outbreak happened and to deal with the suffering of the victims and the
need for possible future medical expenses that might well include life
time monitoring, kidney dialysis and transplant, but it certainly will
not hurt, “ says Marler.
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