Many food and health advocates say that the system isn't set up to protect the public: Barbara Rogers and Dinah Saunders agree.
"I thought my daughter had the flu at first," says Barbara, "but her tempera-ture continued to climb; she was shaking and had severe abdominal pains so I took her to the hospital." It wasn't until her second trip to ER that 25-year-old Lauren was diagnosed with E. coli infection."My daughter wants to be thin - she is always on a diet and mainly eats salad, and that includes a lot of fresh spinach," says Barbara. "We always kept a few bags in the fridge and I know that she ate a lot."
"It was a Friday evening at the end of August," she says, "but Lauren was lying under the covers with a coat on, shivering. I called my doctor's office and they told me to take her to hospital. ER was packed. Lauren's temperature was spiking but they just told her to take a Tylenol and if it got any higher, to come back the next day. Sure enough we were back the next morning; now Lauren was throwing up and the pains in her stomach were worse.
< border=0 alt="free case evaluation">This time they admitted her but it took a whole day. Lauren had blood tests every three hours and at first the doctors thought she had sepsis, or possibly E coli. (E. coli is the abbreviated name of the bacterium in the Family Enterobacteriaceae named Escherichia (Genus) coli (Species); E. coli is everywhere in the environment and is for the most part harmless, but there is a rare strain of E.coli that can cause severe damage and can be lethal.)
"As soon as I heard this, I am looking up sepsis and E. coli on the Internet and it says both infections could be fatal. I was about to have a nervous breakdown...
Lauren stayed in hospital for six days and she was filled with strong antibiotics. This was back in August and they are still checking her today because her kidneys may be damaged. Thank God I have medical insurance but I still have to pay 30 percent - her bill to date is approximately $33,000.
And this is really weird: my neighbor also wound up in hospital. Talk about a coincidence. He also ate washed and bagged spinach and bagged salad. When you buy packaged greens, there is also spinach in there, so E coli could have also come from mixed salad greens."
And it begs the question: how many incidents go unreported?
"Apparently the hospital told my neighbor the same thing they told us about my daughter: it started out as a bladder infection then worked its way into the kidneys and they both ended up with an E.coli infection. I was constantly asking the medical staff how this could have happened and nobody had an answer.
How am I supposed to prove it was caused by spinach? I need an attorney to help because I didn't keep the empty bags of spinach; the news didn't break until about one week later. By that time, the trash collectors had come and gone. The hospital didn't know at that time either. I thought my child had the flu and if I waited any longer, who knows what could have happened to her?
Fortunately, Lauren is much better but it took a long time to get back to normal. I don't think she will ever eat spinach again. But she still wants to be thin."
Chico, CA: Dinah Saunders (not her real name to protect her privacy) and her family are (or were) big spinach eaters and always had a few bags of washed baby spinach in the fridge. They are all health and diet-conscious. "But I had been sick with diarrhea for a few weeks and didn't know what was causing it," she says. "As soon as I heard about the E.coli outbreak, I threw out the bags. "I should have known better because I was an agricultural biologist in the 70s and I was born and raised in Salinas."
"I called Earthbound, the company that I had purchased the spinach from. I explained to them my problem and told them I threw out the spinach. Someone at the company was very gracious and took down a lot of information. She said I would get a refund but I haven't received anything so far."
Investigators have found the suspected E.coli strain in the gut of a wild pig and the same strain of E.coli was earlier found in cattle grazing on land surrounding a spinach field in the Salinas Valley. So far, 204 people have been reported ill after eating contaminated spinach, three of whom died. The contaminated spinach has been traced to four farms located in San Benito and Monterey counties.
Currently, more investigations are being conducted to determine whether wells used to irrigate the spinach might also contain E. coli. This is the 20th time that lettuce or spinach has been blamed for an outbreak of illness since 1995, and food safety advocates are calling for stringent regulations. They believe that a single agency should be in charge of food safety. Clearly, the Food and Drug Administration doesn't have enough jurisdiction. It has told the produce industry over and over again to get the problem under control, but inspection and safety programs for produce are not currently in place like meat and poultry in the Agriculture Department. Isn't it about time?