Chew On This by Charles Wilson

Author:Charles Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

cook it well

In January 1993, doctors at a hospital in Seattle, Washington, noticed that an unusual number of children were being admitted with bloody diarrhea. Some were suffering from a rare disorder that causes kidney damage. Health officials soon realized that the sick children had recently eaten undercooked hamburgers served at local Jack in the Box restaurants. Tests of the hamburger patties revealed the presence of E. coli O157:H7, a bacterium that can cause severe food poisoning. Jack in the Box issued an immediate recall of the contaminated ground beef. Nevertheless, more than seven hundred people in at least four states were sickened by Jack in the Box hamburgers, nearly two hundred people were hospitalized, and four died. Most of the victims were children. One of the first kids to become ill, Lauren Beth Rudolph, ate a hamburger at Jack in the Box a week before Christmas. She was admitted to the hospital on Christmas Eve, suffered terrible pain, had three heart attacks, and died in her mother’s arms on December 28, 1992. She was six years old.

The Jack in the Box outbreak received a great deal of attention on television and in the newspapers, alerting the public to the dangers of E. coli O157:H7. The Jack in the Box chain almost went out of business amid all the bad publicity. But this wasn’t the first outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 linked to fast-food hamburgers. In 1982 dozens of children were sickened by contaminated hamburgers sold at McDonald’s restaurants in Oregon and Michigan. McDonald’s had quietly cooperated with government investigators, providing ground beef samples contaminated with E. coli O157:H7—samples that for the first time linked the germ to serious illnesses. In public, however, the McDonald’s Corporation denied that its hamburgers had made anyone sick. A spokesman for the chain acknowledged only “the possibility of a statistical association between a small number of diarrhea cases in two small towns and our restaurants.”

Every day in the United States, roughly 200,000 people are sickened by something they ate, 900 are hospitalized, and 14 die. More than one quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year. Most of these cases are never reported to authorities or properly diagnosed. The widespread outbreaks that are detected and identified represent a small fraction of the number that actually take place. And there is strong evidence that the number of people getting sickened by food has gone up in the past few decades. Much of this increase can be blamed on recent changes in the way American food is produced.

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