United States: A minimum of 104 people have fallen ill, including thirty-four people who have been admitted to hospital in an outbreak that has been traced to E. coli-contaminated onions used in McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers, according to federal health officials on Wednesday.
Some have been confirmed in fourteen states, as reported by the US CDC.
Hospitalizations and Fatality
One person has died in Colorado alone, and four other individuals have been found to have a potentially fatal acute kidney condition.
Overall, there are more than thirty cases in Colorado, nineteen in Montana, thirteen in Nebraska, ten in New Mexico, eight in Missouri and Utah, six in Wyoming, three in Kansas, two in Michigan, and one case each in Iowa, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin.
The cases of illnesses were reported from September 12 to October 21. At least seven of the respondents who suffered food-borne diseases indicated that the food they took was from McDonald’s while on the move.
Source of Contamination
The CDC ruled out slivered onions, used to garnish Quarter Pounders, as the cause of contamination.
Taylor Farms, a California-based producer-growing company, also recalled onions that could have been contaminated with bacteria.
Tests by the US Food and Drug Administration detected a type of E. coli bacteria that produces a dangerous toxin in one sample of the onions, but it did not match the strain that made people sick, officials reported.
The US Food and Drug Administration lab tests found a Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bacteria in one of the onions but different from that which infected people, officials said, as ABC News reported.
During the initial phase, Quarter Pounders were removed from the menus of many states during the early days of the outbreak.
McDonald’s officials said Wednesday that the company identified an alternate supplier for the nine restaurants that temporarily stopped serving the burgers with onions.
Over the past week, those restaurants resumed selling Quarter Pounders with slivered onions.
As FDA mentioned, there does not appear to be a continued food safety concern related to this outbreak at McDonald’s restaurants,” ABC News reported.
The kind of bacteria causing menace to which the type of bacteria mentioned in this outbreak belongs resulted in 74,000 annual infections in America and 2,000-plus hospitalizations besides 61 deaths, according to the CDC.