– The number of school food outbreaks reported to federal officials soared 56 percent in the 1990s.
– In a notorious case tortillas from a South Side factory were implicated in the illness of 1,200 students.
– It’s often difficult to trace spoiled food because companies are allowed to keep their suppliers secret.
The outbreaks were swift and violent, and for hours afterward, the children had headaches and stomach cramps. The hospital nurses who arrived at the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota found 1st graders crouched in pain and vomiting two and three times in succession.
Of the 469 youths sickened by their school lunch burritos, 36 were treated at the local emergency room. Firefighters were called in to hose down the playground.
More than a thousand miles away that day, elementary pupils in Upson County, Ga., and Port Salerno, Fla., got sick after eating burritos packed in the same squat brick plant on Chicago’s South Side, run by RHSCO Enterprises Inc.
For four months in 1998, as the illness outbreaks were being linked to RHSCO, the company shipped 80,000 frozen burritos a day to schools and other institutions across the country.
In one of the most far-reaching school food outbreaks in the last decade, more than 1,200 children in at least seven states were sickened.
But even today, details of the case remain hidden from public view, as does much of the rapidly changing, multibillion-dollar industry that feeds America’s schoolchildren.
In the sprawling school food industry’s darkest precincts, frozen meals are confected in grimy factories, meat is ground in contaminated packing houses and half pints of milk are traded like poker chips, records and interviews show.
The issue is of special importance because food-borne pathogens that may cause only mild indigestion in healthy adults can sicken and kill young people, whose immune systems are still developing.
Part detective mystery and part gritty business primer, the story of the tainted burritos touches on every facet of the school meal, from the factory bins where raw flour is pumped to make tortillas to the distribution chain that moves the frozen entrees to the child’s cafeteria tray. Court and government records expose glaring faults in the government regulatory system, from the initial inspection to the issuing of a recall, and they show how questionable operators can slide from one subcontract to another, while school officials scramble to protect their students.
The number of school food outbreaks reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rose by 56 percent in the eight years from 1990 through 1997, the most recent period for which complete national data are available.
Case reports gathered by the Tribune from health agencies in 10 large states suggest the number of school outbreaks has continued to climb.
During the five years from 1990 through 1994, for example, Illinois authorities reported only three school food outbreaks, in which 66 children were sickened. But during the next six years, the average annual number of school food outbreaks more than tripled, and the number of youths affected increased tenfold, state records show.
The U.S. population of school-age children rose 9 percent during that period, and government food safety agencies became more vigilant about investigating and reporting outbreaks. But the large increase in school food illnesses baffles epidemiologists and school officials.
Across the U.S., from 1990 through 1997, the number of outbreaks and illnesses in the general population increased at a less rapid 36 percent, CDC records show. And outbreaks were no more frequent in nursing homes, prisons or other institutional settings, where, as in schools, epidemiologists can easily track patients.
Court, corporate and government records reveal a fragile food safety system struggling to cope with a rapidly changing marketplace.
Powerful distribution companies ship frozen school entrees quickly from coast to coast, and private contractors put them on menus in several cities at once, giving national reach to plants that produce unsafe meals. The distributors draw frozen entrees from a netherworld of scantly inspected subcontractors whose identities are rarely if ever disclosed to school officials.
“I have to rely on the distributor, and I don’t know that the distributors know that much,” said Mary Kate Harrison, food purchaser for the Tampa, Fla.-area Hillsborough County school district, which was affected by four recalls of contaminated food in 1998.
Plant inspections and illness outbreaks are handled by a complex tapestry of federal, state and local food safety agencies that often do not share critical information with one another, government case files show. The food safety agencies rarely inform schools when they cite plants for serious health violations or even when they temporarily shut down plants because they are unsafe.
When the worst happens and school lunch suppliers send out contaminated meals, the federal government’s recall system offers a flimsy safeguard for children. Industry-backed confidentiality rules block state and county authorities from getting company shipping records so they can trace the food to protect children from further harm.
“To assure that the recalled product is removed from circulation, it is critical that state officials know its distribution,” said Francis C. Okino, chief of the Illinois Department of Public Health’s Division of Food, Drugs and Dairies.
It’s all heat and serve
Although America’s food supply is considered among the world’s safest, rapid changes in the school meal industry have occasioned new health risks.
When Hillsborough County epidemiologist Elliott Gregos began tracking central Florida outbreaks two decades ago, “schools were preparing most all their food from scratch,” Gregos said.
“Schools basically don’t prepare anything anymore. It’s all heat-and-serve,” he said. “Everything comes frozen or canned.”
Factory-frozen and “pre-plated” meals, manufactured to meet the portion size, nutrition and cost requirements of school lunch contracts, have allowed authorities to trim cafeteria jobs and streamline their food budgets. But when harmful pathogens invade these modern food trays, they are liable to affect more children, records and interviews show.
“The scope has changed,” Gregos said.
Among the largest cases are the 400 Sacramento, Calif., children in six schools who were poisoned by staphylococcus aureus in spaghetti in 1996, and the 213 students at 23 Michigan schools who got sick in 1997 after eating strawberries tainted with hepatitis A.
But the reported cases represent only a fraction of the actual total. Ill people often do not seek medical care, health officials rarely collect food specimens for diagnosis, and only some test results are communicated to health officials. Though Americans experience an estimated 76 million food-borne illnesses a year, fewer than one in 5,000 of those cases–only 15,000 a year–are reported in the CDC outbreak database.
Breakdowns riddle the government-run food safety system.
When U.S. government-donated hamburger tainted with the E.coli 0157:H7 bacteria sickened 18 students in 1998 at Risen Christ Catholic School in Minneapolis, the U.S. Agriculture Department could not trace the beef because of record-keeping flaws in the complex distribution chain that stretched from slaughterhouse to school. “USDA cannot positively say what beef was used in the hot dish, and which plant it came from,” an internal Minnesota Health Department report said.
When Georgia-based supplier Zartic Inc. recalled 556,000 pounds of school lunch hamburger in 1998 because a sample tested positive for listeria, Zartic officials notified hundreds of distributors about the problem. But Zartic had no idea which schools the distributors were serving–such records are considered confidential, Zartic Chief Operating Officer Jack Harris said.
The names of some schools that served the hamburger surfaced in press reports, and officials from Clayton, Ga., to Pittsburgh, said in interviews with the Tribune that they received no notice of that recall.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, authorities are considering several measures, such as adding more inspectors, to reform America’s food safety system and thwart a possible assault on the country’s farm crops, livestock feed supplies and production plants.
White House homeland security director Thomas J. Ridge has said the Bush administration also is taking a fresh look at the idea of merging the nation’s fragmented network of 15 food safety agencies under one office, an idea long advocated by U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-III.).
Under the current system, the lines of jurisdiction between federal agencies are confounding, and investigators are often stymied when they try to track meat, grain and produce as it winds through the production chain from farm to grocery.
The story of the tainted school lunch burritos offers a wrenching lesson in the shortcomings of the current system.
The hidden chef
A grimy plastic window shields Oscar Munoz’s headquarters from 47th Street. A side door leads to a second-floor office with two secretaries and a religious calendar.
This is the command post of the school lunch subcontractor no school official seemed to know about. As his company produced the white-flour tortillas suspected in school lunch outbreaks, Munoz served as a hidden chef to hundreds of thousands of young people, and an exemplar of a new American industry.
Munoz declined to answer a reporter’s questions. “When I want publicity, I pay for it,” he said, with weary, onyx eyes.
Born in the central Mexican state of Jalisco, Munoz described himself in a March court deposition as an uneducated man who lived above his tortilla factory.
But in a notification filed with the Kankakee County assessor’s office, Munoz said he lived in a sprawling $550,000 house on a 12-acre, landscaped parcel near the Indiana border. Ringed with a wrought-iron security fence, that home features an indoor Olympic-size pool and two-story guard tower. There, Munoz registers two Mercedes sports coupes. Munoz and his family own some 800 acres of Kankakee County land and last year received more than $28,000 in federal farm subsidies.
Using confidential land trusts and unregistered corporate names, Munoz controls at least three Chicago apartment buildings, a dining hall, a meat plant that was abandoned by its former owners, two taco restaurants, and a now-shuttered grocery that was cited for sanitation violations and for selling outdated baby food, according to land, court and city Health Department records.
In 1998, federal prosecutors filed a civil lawsuit to seize some $212,000 in a bank account Munoz established, saying in court papers that authorities had probable cause to believe the money was “derived from narcotics trafficking.”
Among the evidence was the testimony of an unnamed informant who told authorities that he or she had watched as Munoz counted drug money stashed in duffel bags in the basement of a Little Village restaurant, prosecutors wrote.
Munoz was not charged with any crime as a result of the investigation, and he filed court papers saying he and his money had no connection to drug dealing. He settled the forfeiture case by agreeing to let the government keep $63,000–made up of cash deposits “structured to evade cash transaction reporting requirements,” federal prosecutors said–while releasing the other $149,000 to Munoz.
Although Munoz wouldn’t allow a reporter inside his 47th Street tortilla plant, the factory was described in a 1999 Illinois Department of Public Health inspection. Flies were everywhere, the state inspector wrote. Corn spilled from broken bags onto the wet, broken floor. Toxic chemicals, sacks of cement and cans of paint sat nearby. Bakery equipment had been patched with cardboard, string and tape. The ceiling peeled, the basement reeked of mold and the electrical cords hanging over the corn-grinding kettle were covered with dust.
The white-flour tortillas suspected in the school illness outbreaks were produced in a second Munoz plant, housed in an unmarked former electrical equipment factory a half mile north, at 1850 W. 43rd St.
Inspections from 1996 and 1997 noted sanitation deficiencies there. But that plant was not inspected by any food safety agency during the eight months in 1998 when it produced the tortillas linked to the outbreaks.
At the school lunch plant, called Munoz Flour Tortilleria, Inc., tanker trucks bearing flour from North Dakota eased into the loading dock, court, corporate and government reports show. Pneumatic tubes pumped the flour into 200,000-pound rectangular storage bins before the tortilla ingredients were fed into hoppers where the dough was formed, sliced and pushed through holes in revolving plates. Dough balls sluiced down stainless steel canals to cabinets where they were left to rise. Pressed doily-thin in 8-inch discs, tortillas flopped through a three-tiered revolving oven.
Munoz entered the school lunch business at a propitious time. During the 1990s, a series of 43 recalls of contaminated, adulterated and misbranded hot dogs sent safety-conscious school food directors hustling to find a safe alternative–another hand-held entree that would appeal to kids.
Taco Bell Corp. launched its first frozen burrito line for schools in 1996, and within a year it was supplying nearly 15,000 schools across the country.
But the frozen school lunch burrito, which combines a variety of ingredients gathered from several sources, can pose its own safety problems. In 1997, burritos from Estrada Foods of Colorado were linked to more than 300 school illnesses in three states, federal food safety records show.
In January 1998, Munoz teamed up with food industry up-and-comer Robert Hicks and his RHSCO plant, which was selling $8 million of frozen Mexican entrees a year to schools, prisons and supermarkets, court records and inspection reports show.
The first outbreak came about four months later. In May 1998, 11 South Bend, Ind., children were sickened. Then nine in Philadelphia.
When federal agencies released records to the Tribune under the Freedom of Information Act, they followed industry-driven guidelines and deleted portions that would show where the outbreaks occurred, how many children were affected and who the food’s distributors and subcontractors were.
The Tribune’s account was drawn from the files of 20 local health and food safety agencies.
By August 1998, the incidents began to gather momentum, those records show. That month, outbreaks roiled 66 Tampa-area schools, sickening 651 children.
In September, 81 students were sickened at five schools in and around the agricultural town of Immokalee, Fla.
Ten days later, five girls held in the Kansas City, Kan., juvenile detention center got sick after eating RHSCO “Correct Choice” correctional services burritos.
Four days after that, 30 children at the Lincoln and Denkmann Schools in Rock Island, Ill., experienced cramps, vomiting or headaches after eating the food, Illinois Department of Public Health records show. “It was frightening–beyond any experience I had ever seen,” said Carol Longley, director of food service for the Rock Island school district.
Simultaneous outbreaks at Turtle Mountain and in Florida and Georgia followed in six days.
A day later, on Sept. 17, a half dozen 3rd graders at the Hamilton Crossing, Ga., elementary school got sick about an hour after eating RHSCO burritos.
At some point between May and September, at least one outbreak also occurred in Iowa, court and government health agency records indicate. RHSCO attorney Lloyd said in an interview that Hicks did not take immediate steps to halt shipments or recall the burritos because none of the initial reports of illness received by the company offered conclusive evidence that RHSCO’s frozen entrees–and not some other food–made the children sick.
It was not until Sept. 18, after more than a thousand children had been sickened, that the Agriculture Department requested that Hicks recall the suspect burritos.
“Instead of pointing fingers, RHSCO started recalling product,” Lloyd said. “These are not people who shirk their responsibilities.”
In theory, recall works
Agriculture Department rules are designed to help companies remove tainted food from commerce as quickly as possible. But federal law does not allow department officials to force plants to recall food.
The company and its government monitors work, in theory, as a closely choreographed team.
Agriculture Department agents gather company distribution records to ensure that potentially dangerous food is identified and returned. Department investigators interview people who got sick, collect and analyze food samples and notify local and state health departments of the problem. Department field personnel, who have access to internal company distribution lists, then conduct “effectiveness checks” to make sure the firm made every reasonable effort to locate, retrieve and dispose of the product.
But in practice, as RHSCO’s case shows, this carefully woven safety net can function like a sieve.
The Agriculture Department did not learn how many pounds of burritos RHSCO had shipped to its school lunch customers until five days after the recall, case files show. A week later, department officials learned the burritos had been sold to the general public, not just schools and institutions, and belatedly issued a press release warning people not to eat them.
In hastily arranged conference calls, government epidemiologists said they suspected children were sickened by the tortillas used to wrap the burritos, not the meat and bean fillings, internal government case records show. “USDA feels that early information points to the tortilla as being responsible,” Florida Department of Health epidemiologist Michael Friedman wrote in a Sept. 21 e-mail to colleagues.
But Agriculture Department officials allowed schools to keep serving the tortilla shells, which came from Munoz’s factory.
Three weeks after the recall, Hillsborough County, Fla., school cooks used the tortillas to wrap their own burritos. Outbreaks in eight schools there sickened 58 children.
In internal memos to their superiors, Agriculture Department officials downplayed the extent of the burrito illness outbreaks. Despite knowing of the massive Florida and North Dakota cases, the department Recall Committee’s summary report said that only “several children” were ill; an Oct. 2 report to the undersecretary for food safety cited just the cases in Kansas and Georgia.
Hicks did not know exactly which schools had received RHSCO food, because that information was not disclosed to him by his roughly 200 distributors. To ensure that everyone who bought the burritos was notified of the recall, Agriculture Department field personnel conducted 286 “effectiveness checks” of schools, nursing homes and other institutions. A department report said no problems had been found.
It was impossible to verify that claim because department recall records released under the Freedom of Information Act were heavily blacked out, in accordance with industry-backed laws that protect the confidentiality of food distribution records.
But in Illinois, where the Tribune obtained effectiveness check records that were not blacked out, 14 of the 31 institutions that received the burritos were not informed of the recall by RHSCO’s distributors. Another 10 were notified up to 10 days later.
Ten days after the recall, a team of investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration visited RHSCO’s burrito plant, seeking information on the plant’s operations and suppliers.
Internal RHSCO records suggested the company’s burritos may not have been properly frozen before leaving the factory, the FDA team reported. Hicks said those records were “only an indicator” and shipping documents could clarify the issue, the report said. “When we asked him for actual shipping records, he refused.” RHSCO attorney Kurt Lloyd said Hicks couldn’t give the records to the FDA because the USDA had them.
On Oct. 5, Hicks faxed federal officials a memo saying he was “totally disgusted” with the way the recall had been handled.
“I have got to ask the million dollar question, WHO IS IN CHARGE?” he wrote.
Sifting through garbage
The investigation that led government scientists to Chicago’s South Side was a classic example of shoe leather epidemiology.
In Turtle Mountain, investigators from the CDC and North Dakota agencies spent two days sifting layers of garbage in a 26-foot deep pit at a local landfill to recover a cache of half-eaten school lunch burritos. Many were still in their Styrofoam containers, records show.
But none of those samples–or any other sample recovered from cafeteria trash cans and school freezers around the country–tested positive for a known pathogen.
Government epidemiologists built a computer matrix listing the ingredients in the food the ill students ate. The fact that students continued to get sick when school cooks used only the white flour tortillas shipped by RHSCO “suggest[s] that the etiologic agent was in the tortillas,” a CDC report concluded.
“There were no other common ingredients identified in the burritos implicated in all of these outbreaks,” Gregos, the Hillsborough County, Fla., epidemiologist, wrote in his report. “It is therefore reasonable to conclude that it was some component or contaminant in the tortillas which was responsible for this outbreak.”
To determine if there was a problem with the tortillas, investigators from the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC and the Illinois Department of Public Health arrived at Munoz’s 43rd Street flour tortilla factory days after the recall. A helpful employee showed them around the plant, which appeared clean. They tested samples of food and found no pathogens.
In their report, FDA inspectors noted small problems: Cleaning compounds, liquid pesticide and bulk lemon extract were improperly stored in a common area with tortilla ingredients. They came across 20 five-gallon containers of a Mexican-made “anti-adherent” solution that should not come into contact with foods. Munoz told inspectors it was simply being stored there and wasn’t used in preparing the tortillas.
In the summer of 1999, state health inspectors returned to Munoz’s 43rd Street tortilla plant to find Munoz was using numerous chemicals and preservatives not declared on the tortilla labels. There were flies in the warehouse and production area. The air in the employee lunch room was “smelly” and difficult to breathe.
The plant was not inspected for at least two years after that.
Hicks and Munoz severed ties, and two months after the outbreak, Hicks’ company sued Munoz’s over the multimillion-dollar costs of the burrito recalls.
Hicks said in court papers that his onetime subcontractor produced tortillas that were “unsafe for human consumption.”
Lawyers for Munoz’s company responded that the tortillas were tested several times by government agencies and never proved unsafe, and claimed that RHSCO failed to properly store the shells. RHSCO’s attorney said Munoz could provide no evidence that he had cleaned the bins that stored his flour, which could have contracted a harmful mold.
In a March deposition for that lawsuit, Munoz said Hicks talked to him a few times about the illnesses. “I knew that the kids will eat burritos and they vomit, but I did not know that they were from Munoz flour,” Munoz said through a court interpreter.
Munoz offered his view of the incidents: “The kids vomit, but they didn’t get sick.”
Bad record no barrier
Even without Hicks, Munoz and the RHSCO plant were not done with school lunches.
Munoz began supplying tortillas to companies owned by school food veterans Jorge and Lisandra Reynoso, and he lent them at least $189,000, Cook County land records and interviews show.
A company controlled in part by the Reynosos eventually bought the old RHSCO plant at 636 W. Root St. for $1.3 million in 1999. The couple already had a plant on Blue Island Avenue that shipped some 60,000 burritos per day to schools in five states.
The Reynosos’ burrito business illustrates how a contractor with a record of unsanitary practices can produce food from a factory that is unseen by school officials and unmonitored by the multistate companies that manage increasing numbers of American school cafeterias.
On their invoices and letterhead, the Reynosos used corporate names including Que Tal? Inc., a company that actually had been dissolved since 1996, and La Morenita. They ascended in the school lunch industry by partnering with the multibillion-dollar private contractors that run school cafeterias around the U.S.
The two biggest, subsidiaries of Sodexho Alliance and Compass Group PLC, currently hold contracts worth $55 million to manage Chicago cafeterias.
But in Chicago, as around the country, neither company reads the inspection reports of government food safety agencies that monitor their suppliers, and nothing in their contracts says they should, company officials said. And so it is not surprising that no one in charge of children’s safety noticed the litany of citations at the Reynosos’ Blue Island Avenue school lunch plant.
Last year, a city Building Department inspection cited the plant for 56 code violations, including rat infestation, junk, filth and peeling paint inside the freezer.
Federal inspectors visited the plant for about a half hour a day, Jorge Reynoso said. That October, an Agriculture Department inspector ordered the destruction of 19 60-pound boxes of smelly, off-color meat. In December 2000, a city inspection noted “a large pool” of raw sewage spilled on the basement floor from a rusted pipe.
That month, federal inspectors condemned 480 pounds of green-gray, sour-smelling meat that spilled from blood-soaked boxes; 300 additional pounds of dirt-streaked beef; and five open boxes of school lunch sandwiches that were stored beneath a dripping fan.
Five days before Christmas, a federal inspector noted rust in the bean cooker and a black greasy substance dripping from an exhaust fan onto the tamale cooker. A “strong odor was present.” There was mold and hanging caulk on the cook room ceiling and the freezer floor was “black with ice, dirt and grease.”
The next day, La Morenita’s license was suspended for five days by Chicago health inspector Franklin Jenkins. Then the plant resumed production.
When the Agriculture Department finally forced La Morenita to stop packing burritos on Dec. 29, the company’s food remained in circulation through warehouses that had stored the food in freezers for distribution to schools. Three times during January 2001, the Agriculture Department detained a total of 10,170 pounds of adulterated and mislabeled food linked to La Morenita, records show.
None of these enforcement actions were communicated to Chicago school officials by Sodexho or Compass, the private companies that served La Morenita food to the city’s children.
In late January, a sample of burritos destined for the Chicago schools tested positive for the potentially deadly listeria bacteria. It took 13 days before the U.S. Agriculture Department confirmed the presence of the bacteria, and another three days before department officials forced the Reynosos to announce a recall of the tainted school burritos on Jan. 26, records and interviews show.
Agriculture officials never determined how much food was infected with listeria because of “inadequate record keeping by the firm,” a USDA memo said. Distributors who held hundreds of cases were not notified of the recall.
For a few months this year, the Reynosos stopped selling burritos to school lunch programs.
But, through the Root Street plant, they got another chance. Using a new corporate name, they lobbied Chicago school officials to help them become a subcontractor again.
In April, Chicago school food service director Sue Susanke wrote a short letter to Sodexho saying a Reynoso company’s foods may “once again be menued for use in the Chicago Public Schools.”
This fall, the company resumed feeding Chicago students through a Sodexho subcontract. Sodexho spokeswoman Jeanette Jurkiewicz said her company was unaware that the Reynosos had any problem at the Blue Island plant. “To our knowledge, they had no prior record of food safety incidents,” Jurkiewicz said.
“They are under no obligation to notify any of the parties they supply product to” of the government enforcement actions, said Linda Galarti, Quality Assurance director for Compass, which no longer uses companies linked to the Reynosos.
Her brown hair shrouded in a sanitary net, Lisandra Reynoso insisted in an interview that her school food entrees have always been safe and wholesome.
The real problem, Reynoso said, is America’s strict food safety laws.
“The more we battle these so-called pathogens, the more problems we’re creating,” she said.
She let the smoke of her cigarette curl against the window of her office, obscuring a view of Chicago’s Stockyard district bungalows and a shuttered fish packing plant.
“Our immune systems here are in pathetic shape,” Reynoso said. “We’re not able to deal with elevated levels of bacteria that people in other parts of the world can deal with because we are in such a sterile environment,” she said.
“I think we’re harming ourselves and our children by weakening ourselves.”
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The rise in food-borne illnesses in schools during the 1990s–and their causes
The Tribune examined records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1990 and 1997, the most recent year complete nationwide data were available. To account for year-to-year variability when making comparisons, the records were divided into two four-year periods (the same method used by government analysts). More than 9,300 people were reported sick from outbreaks of food-borne illnesses at schools during that time.
MORE PEOPLE SICKENED DURING SCHOOL OUTBREAKS
The number of people sickened increased 73 percent over the two periods, while the average number of outbreaks increased 56 percent.
%%
PERIOD YEAR NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO WERE SICK OUTBREAKS
1 1990 1,212 25
1 1991 548 15
1 1992 997 15
1 1993 676 15
1990-93 avg. 858 17.5
2 1994 1,692 29
2 1995 436 9
2 1996 1,772 32
2 1997 2,026 39
1994-97 avg. 1,481 27.3
%%
Note: CDC reports do not distinguish children from adults, and some school outbreaks sickened a small number of teachers and staff. A small number of outbreaks could have resulted from food prepared at a parent’s or teacher’s home. Analysis of state records suggests that about one in five of the school outbreaks reported by the CDC could have been at colleges.
DETERMINING THE CAUSES OF ILLNESSES
The cause of most school outbreaks never is determined. When a cause is known, it most often turns out to be a bacteria, some of which can lead to illness very rapidly (indicated by +).
%%
CAUSE OF OUTBREAK
Unknown: 63%
Confirmed: 37%
% OF KNOWN CASES BACTERIA ONSET
25% Salmonella, all types 12-72 hours
17% Norwalk-like virus* 24-48 hours
16% +Staphylococcus aureus 2-4 hours
15% Clostridium perfringens 8-22 hours
9% Shigella sonnei 12 hours-2 days
9% Hepatitis A* About 28 days
8% +Streptococcus spp (3%) 2-36 hours
E. coli 0157:H7 (3%) Varies
Campylobacter jejuni (1%) 2-5 days
+Bacillus cereus (1%) 2-4 hours
*Virus, not bacteria
Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Food and
Drug Administration
Chicago Tribune/Lauren Cabell, Phil Geib
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COMING MONDAY: How Chicago Schools often fail with food safety.
