A subject more usually associated with groans or yawns–an item on a school lunch menu– became a national health issue Wednesday as school and health officials across the country scrambled to check warehouses and lunchrooms for tainted frozen strawberries processed in California, including some 1,320 suspect cases sent to Chicago’s public schools.
After calls to hundreds of lunchroom managers and, at one point, talk of scheduling mass inoculations for children, school authorities said berries consumed by Chicago children since December apparently were not contaminated with the hepatitis A virus.
The scare began after schoolchildren and adults in Michigan fell ill with hepatitis A after eating strawberries thought to be from a contaminated lot. California officials then announced plans to inoculate several thousand students who might have eaten berries tainted with the virus associated with the liver disease.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who were in contact with Chicago school officials, said a final judgment cannot be made about whether local children and others nationwide were exposed to the virus until federal authorities, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, complete an investigation.
Though an undetermined number of the Chicago school system’s 424,000 students have eaten the berries, some as recently as March 7, the Chicago Public Health Department had no reports of any student contracting hepatitis A that could be linked to the strawberries.
At the same time, local health officials noted that the virus, which typically appears after an average of 25 to 30 days, can emerge six weeks after exposure. Symptoms, which include fever, nausea and jaundice, can mimic other illnesses such as the flu.
“In extremely rare cases, it can contribute to liver failure,” said Dr. William Paul, medical director of communicable diseases for the Health Department.
“But 99 percent are self-limited illnesses,” meaning the victim gets better without medication and suffers no lasting problems. Chicago annually sees “on the order of a hundred to a couple of hundred” reported cases, he said.
Following a series of private meetings at the Pershing Road headquarters, Chicago school officials announced Wednesday afternoon that none of the 1,320 cases of frozen sliced strawberries was from the same lot that apparently infected 150 students and adults in three school districts in south central Michigan.
Still, Chicago schools chief Paul Vallas said he would have the remaining 934 cases in frozen storage dumped, even if federal authorities declare them safe for consumption.
“Whether we get clearance or not, we’re not going to serve the strawberries,” Vallas said. “Given the controversy over the strawberries, we’re just not going to take a chance. It’s a smart thing to do.”
The strawberry scare touched 15 states–including Wisconsin, Iowa and Indiana–and the District of Columbia because they had received shipments under a federal lunch program from three vendors that had purchased the strawberries from the same processor, the San Diego firm of Andrews and Williamson.
Last week, the CDC concluded that the Michigan outbreak was associated with the consumption of the frozen strawberries processed by the San Diego firm.
Five other states received strawberries from the same lot, but Arizona, California, Georgia, Iowa and Tennessee have not reported any illnesses.
Federal officials ordered all states that received Andrews and Williamson strawberries from the vendors to suspend serving the fruit pending further investigation.
In Los Angeles, students in 18 schools will receive shots of immune globulin, which is not a cure for hepatitis but reduces or eliminates symptoms if administered within 14 days, as a pre-emptive measure.
Amid the flurry, the head of Andrews and Williamson was forced to resign, and federal officials were considering criminal charges against the company.
The firm’s parent company, Epitope Inc., said it would recall 13 lots of frozen strawberries shipped in December. “While it is not certain that the lots being recalled are contaminated, we want to eliminate all possible risk to consumers,” said Adolph Ferro, chief executive of Epitope.
The strawberries were imported from Mexico and were processed, packed and frozen by Andrews and Williamson for a USDA school lunch program that serves 25 million children across the country. The program demands domestically grown produce.
Mexican government agricultural officials in Baja California denied responsibility for the outbreak of hepatitis, saying processing in the U.S. was probably to blame.
In Chicago, school officials had been notified March 27 by the Illinois State Board of Education about possible contamination and had notified all school lunchroom managers Friday not to serve the berries. Chicago was the only district in Illinois to have received the suspect berries.
No public acknowledgment of the situation was made until the reports of the ill children in Michigan.
“It’s definitive that we don’t have contaminated strawberries,” said Marjorie Schaffner, chief of staff for operations for the Chicago schools.
Local school officials would not release results of their survey of which schools served the strawberries nor will the school board send letters to parents about the strawberry scare, saying that other authorities instructed them not to do so.
“We follow the lead of the Health Department,” said Sue Gamm, director of specialized services. “We don’t want to fan flames where there is no flame to fan.”
Tim Martin, chief operating officer, added: “Everybody should be concerned, by all means, but . . . we have no reason to believe anyone has gotten it,” referring to hepatitis.
But some parents said the school board should issue an informational letter.
“They should send a doctor to the schools to check on the children to see if they have hepatitis,” said Ismael Vargas, 27, who has two children enrolled in Finkl Elementary School, 2332 S. Western Ave.
Shel Erlich, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Unified School District, said officials were interviewing staff and students at the 18 schools where frozen strawberry desserts were served to determine how many people might have been exposed to the hepatitis A virus.
