November 2004

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Wednesday that the recent State Fair in Raleigh was the source of an E. Coli outbreak that has potentially infected 107 people–41 of whom have tested positive for the bacteria. A majority of the infected are children, 11 of whom have already developed a serious…

David Sinclair of The Pilot reports that a 13-year-old Moore County girl who was among 35 people with confirmed cases of E. coli infection is back home from the hospital.
Katie Maness, who is an eighth-grader at The O’Neal School, was released from UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill on Saturday, her mother, Becky Maness said. She had developed a condition that severely affected her kidneys.
On Monday, state health officials announced that they have collected enough information from the ongoing E. coli disease investigation to identify the State Fair as the source of the outbreak.
Of the 35 confirmed cases, 32 of them had visited the State Fair before they became sick, including Maness.Continue Reading Girl With E. Coli Home From Hospital

Medi-Lexicon reports: New protein structure is a first step toward preventing E coli diseases.
Scientists from the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have determined the two-dimensional crystal structure of a membrane protein involved in the process by which the Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria infects a human. This protein structure is a first step to better understanding how an E. coli infection begins, which may lead to information on how to block it.
“E. coli is responsible for urinary tract infections, one of the most prevalent diseases in the U.S.,” said Brookhaven biologist Huilin Li, the lead researcher on the study, described in the November 2, 2004, online edition of the Journal of Molecular Biology. “Between 50 and 80 percent of U.S. women will experience a urinary tract infection at least once during their lifetimes.”Continue Reading Identifying the Path to Infection

Montanans, remember this name: John Munsell.
Munsell, owner of Montana Quality Foods meat packing plant in Miles City, has just dropped a bomb of a lawsuit on the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that, if successful, could bring about the most significant changes to America’s meat-inspection system since the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 tried to limit the amount of crap one could legally shovel into a sausage.
Munsell’s family-owned operation was shipped beef contaminated with E. coli from the multinational ConAgra corporation as early as January 2002, but when Munsell notified the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the government responded by making him rewrite his Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point plan 14 times and pay for additional testing while suspending him from grinding his own beef for four months.
Convinced he could prove the contamination originated at another source, Munsell even penned an e-mail to a USDA district office manager in Minneapolis in which he wrote, “If you and I, realizing all the details now, cover this up and do nothing about it and somebody gets sick as a result, then you and I need to share a cell in Alcatraz.” (see “Watching the inspectors,” Aug. 7, 2003). It later turned out that as Munsell had suspected, ConAgra’s beef was indeed contaminated, and the end result was a 2002 recall of nearly 19 million pounds of ConAgra beef–one of the largest beef recalls in history–and plenty of red faces at the USDA.Continue Reading Fighting big beef

In a bit more coverage of the North Carolina State Fair E. coli outbreak, the News Observer also reported today that the fair has been identified as the source of the outbreak which has sickened as many as 112 people. But the exact exhibit or vendor where the bacteria originated is not known, although two petting zoos are under consideration, as well as food vendors.
E. coli, which causes severe diarrhea and can lead to kidney damage, is prevalent in healthy farm animals such as cows, sheep and goats, and is transmitted to people through contact with their feces. Most often, however, E. coli infections are caused by tainted food.
Britt Cobb, the state agriculture commissioner, said the fair has worked with investigators to trace the source of the infection. Some fair patrons have noted that hand-washing kiosks at one of the petting zoo exhibits required a 25-cent deposit. But other stations were free.Continue Reading E. coli traced to fair

State health officials today announced that they have collected enough information from the ongoing E. coli disease investigation to identify the state fair as the source of the outbreak. Health officials stressed that while a specific exhibit or concession within the state fair cannot yet be identified, the disease investigation can now focus on the most likely sources. In addition, state agriculture officials continue to assist with public health efforts.
“More than 90 percent of the E. coli cases we’ve investigated during this outbreak were contracted during the time period of the state fair,” State Epidemiologist Jeffery Engel said. “We have also determined that a large majority of the people who tested positive for E. coli during this time period indicated that they had attended the state fair. As our investigation continues we will attempt to determine the exact source or sources of the outbreak.”
At the time this news release was written, health officials were investigating 112 cases. A number of cases reported earlier have been dropped from the investigation because genetic testing conducted by the State Laboratory of Public Health determined that those cases are not associated with this specific outbreak.Continue Reading State Fair identified as source of E.coli outbreak