Some critics believe that the deaths from the E. coli infection could have been prevented if the CDC had learned of the contamination sooner.
The first indications that an E. coli outbreak was occurring happened on Friday, September 8 at just after 4:00 p.m. when a microbiologist in Wisconsin sent an urgent message to the CDC alerting them to the E. coli problem. The message was sent via PulseNet, which is a national computer database used to warn health officials about dangerous outbreaks. However, everyone from CDC had already gone home for the weekend by that time (after 5:00 p.m. in Atlanta) so the message waited on a computer over the weekend.The PulseNet warning was noticed on Monday morning. However, another two days were needed for analysis and a third day was required to alert the public about the bagged spinach warning. By this point five days had passed since the alert from Wisconsin had been sent.
If the alert had been received before Monday morning, it is possible that fewer people would have been made sick by the outbreak and perhaps some of those deaths would not have occurred.
One of the deaths, a toddler who had eaten a spinach smoothie a couple of days before he died, happened on the day Natural Selection Foods recalled its spinach, a week after health officials in Wisconsin knew there was a problem.
The CDC claims that PulseNet works fine and had there been a large scale outbreak, workers at the CDC would have notified each other of the problems via telephone.
The E. coli contamination occurred when a spinach field was exposed to E. coli bacterium. However, officials are still not absolutely positive about what caused the field to be exposed to E. coli. The belief is that wild animals, possibly pigs, tracked contaminated cow manure into the spinach fields. The contaminated spinach then went undetected through Natural Selection Foods and onto supermarket shelves.
Samples taken from a wild pig, stream water, and cattle on a ranch have all tested positive for the same strain of E. coli that affected hundreds of people nationwide.
As a result of the contamination, bags of fresh spinach were recalled and consumers were warned to be extra careful when eating fresh fruit and vegetables.
Meanwhile, farmers in Salinas Valley, California, have been told by supermarkets that they have until the middle of December to create rules that will prevent further E. coli contamination. Natural Selection Foods is now using a Test and Hold technique, also used in the beef industry, in which every shipment that goes into the company's plant is sampled and does not go any further until the tests come back clean.
Since starting the program, the company has discovered contaminants that have resulted in product being destroyed.
The strain of E. coli that made people sick is known as E. coli 015787, a new and particularly strong strain of the E. coli bacterium. It naturally lives in the guts of farm animals, including cattle. The bacterium becomes harmful to people when produce at a farm comes in contact with contaminated feces from those farm animals. The produce is then sent to the processors and then off to the stores where it may cause illness in people who ingest it. Children, seniors, and people with weak immune systems are at highest risk of becoming sick after eating contaminated food.