Rajneeshpuram by Russell King

Author:Russell King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2021-12-07T08:00:43+00:00

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In the second week of September, thirty-four-year-old Geraldine Baker of Bend, Oregon, went into labor. While being admitted to the Mid-Columbia Medical Center in The Dalles, she mentioned that she had been suffering from intense gastrointestinal distress for the past day or two, ever since she ate from the salad bar at a restaurant in The Dalles.

Baker’s son was born extremely dehydrated and in septic shock—a condition so dire that the obstetrician estimated he had no more than a 5 percent chance of surviving. Tests revealed that Baker was infected with S. Typhimurium, and she had passed it on to her son in utero. The infection nearly killed him.

September 9 marked the first day that anyone in The Dalles experienced the sort of severe gastrointestinal distress associated with salmonella poisoning. Over the next ten days, that number would climb to eighty-eight potentially affected people. All of them either worked at or had eaten at two restaurants in The Dalles. At one of those restaurants, everybody who got sick had eaten the same foods from the salad bar: macaroni, potato, four-bean, or pea salads. Some of those experiencing symptoms remained at home and recovered without medical intervention, but some went to the hospital, had their stools analyzed, and were diagnosed with salmonella infections.

Just as public health officials in Wasco County realized they were in the midst of a food-borne salmonella outbreak, a second, much larger wave of infections commenced on September 19 and continued through October 10, affecting at least 586 people. Most cases were traced to a group of ten restaurants in The Dalles, eight with open salad bars. As the second wave crested, state health officials urged all restaurants in The Dalles to close their salad bars while local health officials and investigators from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta worked to determine the outbreak’s cause. As soon as the salad bars closed, the outbreak tapered to a stop.

The public health investigation was far more challenging than for a typical outbreak since the infections could not be traced to one particular food item. Salad bars seemed to be a common factor, but infected patients had not all eaten the same foods. At one restaurant the infected patients may have eaten blue-cheese dressing. At another it was lettuce. At a couple of restaurants the common source was potato salad. This suggested to investigators that the problem was not in the food itself, but in the way it was being handled by restaurant employees, who accounted for more than 10 percent of the infections. In November, Oregon health officials released a preliminary report finding that improper sanitary practices among food handlers had caused the September outbreak.

But that explanation did not satisfy some of the investigators who had been working the case for over two months. One odd quirk of The Dalles outbreak was that people who received takeout orders or used the banquet facilities of the affected restaurants weren’t infected. If there were improper food handling in the kitchens, it was limited almost exclusively to the salad bars—which defied common sense.

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