Seems folks are completely shocked that such a thing has happened in any restaurant. If you think it doesn't happen other places, probably every day of the week, your head is buried in the sand.
Just a few notable episodes...
1993
E. coli O157:H7 in undercooked hamburgers from Jack in the Box. Four children died and nearly 700 others became sick in the Seattle area and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. The outrage resulting from the deaths placed strong political pressure on Washington and resulted in new regulations from the USDA to reform century-old practices in the meat industry. The new regulations, titled Pathogen Reduction and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Systems Final Rule, required a mandatory HACCP inspection system and microbial testing in meat processing plants.
1994
Salmonella in ice cream from Schwan's Sales Enterprises of Marshall, Minnesota. The outbreak was confirmed to have sickened 740 people in 30 states and is suspected to have sickened over 3,000 additional people in as many as 41 states. The contamination occurred when raw, unpasteurized eggs were hauled in a tanker truck that later carried pasteurized ice cream to the Schwan's plant. The ice cream premix wasn't pasteurized again after delivery to the plant.
1996
E. coli O157:H7 in unpasteurized apple juice from Odwalla. The company was using blemished fruit and ignored warnings from in-house safety experts and specialized in selling unpasteurized juices for their supposed health benefits. 70 people in several U.S. states were stricken, mostly in the West, and in Canada. The outbreak took the life of one child, a 16-month-old girl from Colorado.
E. coli O157:H7 in lettuce sickened at least 61 people in Illinois, Connecticut and New York in May and June 1996.
1997
Hepatitis A on frozen strawberries from Andrew & Williamson Sales Co. of San Diego, California. The strawberries were grown in Baja California, Mexico and processed by A&W. Thousands of students from Arizona, California, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, and Tennessee may have been exposed to the virus from eating strawberries in school lunches. Over 2.6 million pounds of strawberries were recalled.
1997 E. coli O157:H7 in ground beef from Hudson Foods Company of Rogers, Arkansas. Burger King was the largest client. The plant was in Columbus, Nebraska. The company recalled over 25 million pounds of ground beef it had manufactured, in the second largest recall in history.
1998
United States listeriosis outbreak was the third-deadliest outbreak of foodborne illness. There were 14 deaths and 4 miscarriages or stillbirths in a Listeria outbreak in hot dogs and cold cuts. Some sources put the death toll as high as 21.
2006
E. coli O157:H7 from Taco Bell in South Plainfield, New Jersey and Long Island. 39 people in central New Jersey and on Long Island were sickened and suffered from hemolytic uremic syndrome. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at first believed the E. coli O157:H7 to be in the green onions. The FDA on December 13, 2006 said it could not confirm that scallions were the cause of the problem, as previously suspected, and that it was not ruling out any food as a possible culprit. It was later suspected that infected lettuce was the cause.
2006 North American E. coli outbreak. E. coli O157:H7 in bagged spinach packaged by Natural Selection Foods and most likely supplied by Earthbound Farm in San Juan Bautista. 3 dead, and 198 people reported sickened by the outbreak across 25 US states, and 1 person reported sickened by the outbreak in Ontario.
This is a very small sample of a huge and never-ending list of outbreaks.
To blame just one restaurant is ludicrous. Any single food item could be handled by dozens of folks in many warehouses, rail cars, or trucks before it arrives at a serving facility, only to be handled again. Folks are lazy about hygiene. It's surprising there aren't more of us sick. Even customers have a responsibility to at least wash their hands. I'm disgusted to see how many men leave public restrooms without washing their hands. So even customers could be the origin of an outbreak.
WAYNO.
