So far, they think that the pathogen got into the food aond into customers through a vegetable, but they haven’t been able to connect that vegetable to all of the diners yet.
I learned last year while attempting to report food poisoning from a restaurant that there isn’t much that your local authorities can do if you didn’t visit a doctor’s office or hospital during your illness so they could take samples. (Yes, we mean blood and feces.) If you’ve eaten at one of the affected restaurants and come down with symptoms up to ten days later, check with your doctor and make sure that you mention this specific outbreak.
It’s hard to get away for a trip to the doctor when bloody diarrhea is keeping you busy, since that’s a basic symptom of E. coli infection. The actual number of illnesses is probably much higher, but people who weren’t sick enugh for hospitalization most likely won’tbe cuo
The youngest victim identified so far has been 5 years old, but the strain in this outbreak is a different one from the strain that affected Jack in the Box restaurants decades ago, causing kidney problems in small children that were sometimes deadly. That can be a result of E. coli infections in general, but this strain hasn’t made any kids sick. Yet.
Chipotle’s E. coli outbreak threatens sales, emboldens critics [Reuters]
PACIFIC NORTHWEST RESTAURANT CLOSURE UPDATE [Chipotle]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist