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Rare meat ?most likely? cause of E coli outbreak

BY TRACEY DUGUAY [email protected] ?If you cook your meat properly, the problem goes away. The world we live in is not sterile. No one adds the stuff on purpose, but it?s in the animals to begin with.
BY TRACEY DUGUAY

?If you cook your meat properly, the problem goes away. The world we live in is not sterile. No one adds the stuff on purpose, but it?s in the animals to begin with. Cooking is pretty much the best invention of humankind. It kills viruses, it kills bacteria?it kills all the kind of stuff.?
Marc Richard,
Canadian Food Inspection Agency
spokesperson

After weeks of extensive testing, undercooked hamburger served at the Adventure North Hockey Camp last month is the ?most likely cause? of the E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak, according the Sudbury & District Health Unit.

Ed Gardner, manager of the Environmental Health Division of the heath unit, says they can?t prove it conclusively because there wasn?t any meat left over from the hockey camp to test. However, following DNA tests on samples taken from meat recalled from Costco, the victims of the camp outbreak, and another case in the community, all of the samples from the three sources had the same ?fingerprint.?

?It?s good evidence that it?s not a random event,? Gardner says. ?It doesn?t just happen randomly that you get a unique fingerprint like this.?

Thirty-four people were investigated for symptoms associated with this illness. Of these 34 cases, 27 were camp-related and another three were the
result of illness being spread by people infected at the camp. Additionally, the health unit also investigated four cases in the community that came to light as a result of Costco voluntarily recalling hamburger packaged and sold from the store on July 11, 2004. Twelve of the 34 cases test positive from the deadly strain of E. coli bacterium.

?Whenever you have an outbreak, not everyone gets tested. You can?t force someone to be tested, so if they went for testing, we would have got the results,? Gardner says, explaining why only 12 of the 34 cases tested positive.

?If you don?t get a sample back within a week from the time they?re symptomatic with this bacteria, the likelihood of getting a positive sample is
very low. You have to get it while they?re really ill, but when someone?s really ill, they?re not very co-operative about giving you a stool sample.?

E. coli 0157:H7 can cause abdominal pain, vomiting and bloody diarrhea.

The foodborne illness is commonly known as the ?hamburger disease? because the most common source of infection is undercooked hamburger meat,
although it can also be found in untreated water, unpasteurized milk or milk products, raw fruits and vegetables and unpasteurized apple juice and cider.

Now that the outbreak has been traced back to contaminated meat sold at Costco, the normal process is for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) to try to establish a ?trace back? to where the meat actually became contaminated.

?Once the health authorities have clearly established a link to the bug in ill people and in some food, that?s when we come into action,? explains CFIA media relations officer Alain Charette.

?The link has to be clearly established and it has been [in this case].?

Unfortunately, the CFIA has reached a dead end in their investigation because they can?t track back the source of contamination of the Costco meat even though the local wholesaler has gone beyond reasonable expectations to co-operate.

?They went beyond most retailers because they had the list of customers and called them individually. That is more than what usual retailers involved in a recall do,? Charette says.

?What happened is Costco ended up obviously with some contaminated meat but we could not find information that leads anywhere upstream from
here.?

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