Look out guys!!!!
I eat like 6 bags of that bagged salad a week!

LOOK!!!!!

For other people, it’s just a child strolling through the mall. But for 11-year-old Amber Brister, a trip to the mall is a very big deal. Amber is out of the hospital, and happy to be shopping again with her mom and sister.

Amber was a healthy child until last September, when she had a frightening brush with death.

Amber Brister: My stomach hurt really bad and I just didn’t feel good.

Her mother Lori Olson says suddenly and out of the blue, Amber became violently ill.

Lori Olson, Amber's mother: She had kidney failure. She had to have a tube inserted through her abdomen and she was hooked up to a dialysis machine for 24 hours a day for about 18 days.

Amber was gravely ill. She couldn’t eat solid foods, had to be fed intravenously, and needed four blood transfusions. Lori said the doctors told her there was a real chance amber could die.

Lori Olson: It was horrible. When she started the dialysis, there was one point that she was in so much pain they gave her morphine and it didn’t even help. It was a really awful thing to watch.

The same week Amber was fighting for her life, across town in Minneapolis, 54 year-old-old Roi Dahl was also having serious medical problems.

Roi Dahl: It scared the hell out of me. I cried.

He had been sick for days, but says he figured it was just something he would get over. But then came the pain—he says he was doubled over, unable to move, and hemorrhaging.

His family rushed him to the emergency room where doctors tried to stop the bleeding.

Dahl: The first night I was there they were holding their breath whether I was going to make it through the night or not. And the next day, they wanted to take out my entire colon and put a colostomy bag on me. And they still weren’t sure what was wrong.

Ten similar cases hit Minneapolis hospitals in three days, and no one was sure what was causing it. A public health investigation was launched.

Teams began calling patients to find out what they had eaten.

Dr. Steve Swanson of the Centers for Disease Control and the Minnesota department of public health suspected a food borne illness.


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Dr. Steve Swanson: We were actually contacting people who were ill and interviewing them while they were still in the hospital.

Because of the symptoms, Swanson thought it might be an outbreak of E.coli 0157 bacteria. E.coli comes from animal or, sometimes, human feces and is usually associated with undercooked ground beef. But health officials found the victims hadn’t eaten ground beef --- but they all had eaten something that you might never suspect of giving you food poisoning—bag salad.

Dr. Swanson: It’s a remarkable fact that most are not aware of that next to ground beef, lettuce is the most commonly implicated food item for E.coli 0157 infections.

Dr. Swanson and the CDC issue a public health warning about contaminated bag salad. Roi Dahl saw it and realized he still had part of the partially eaten bag in his refrigerator.

Dr. Swanson: He called me from the hospital and spoke with me, and said he believed that he was one of our outbreak victims. We then mobilized some people to get over to his house and to get the lettuce before it had decomposed too much. We sent it to our laboratory.


Minnesota Department Of Health / Steve Swanson
An electron microscope iamge of E.coli O157:H7 attached to alfalfa sprouts. These images are not part of the outbreak reported on Dateline, and are enhanced with color (e.coli would not be necessarily purple in color). They offer detail of what the bacterium appears like when viewed with electron microscopy and attached to sprouts.
-----

It was Roi Dahl’s leftover lettuce that cracked the case. At the lab, scientists showed us how they were able to extract and isolate E.coli 0157 in the lettuce, then, using DNA markers, they compared it to the strain of E.coli that sickened Dahl, Amber Brister and the others. It was a perfect match.

Dr. Swanson: It’s the first time ever in an outbreak of E.coli 0157 from lettuce that the outbreak strain has ever been found in the lettuce. That’s the proverbial ‘smoking gun.’

Dole Foods issued a voluntary recall for the ‘American Blend’ and ‘Classic Romaine’ bag salads implicated in the outbreak, but not before at least 26 people in three states had gotten very sick. Dr. Swanson believes there were probably many more victims.

You must be kidding..... I too eat several bags of the stuff...

Muse2NOPharaoh said:

Do you think you have E. coli too?

2the9s said:

You wishhhhh!

2the9s said:

i have a pet E. coli.

I saw this on Dateline...I usually use this stuff to wash my produce...it's all natural and works great!




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sinisterpentatonic said:

I just bought a new E. colizer for my stereo system.

Illustrator said:

So you can listen to Sheila E. coli.

Just stop eating fruits and veggies!

The risks far outway the benefits at this point!

My wife and I found a giant moth in a bag salad once

ThirdandFinal said:

But like aren't these bags supposed to be pre washed or whatever,

STOP with the E Coli jokes.

It's confusing!

I always wash the stuff, too, but I never thought about e coli. I just thought about the salad sitting wet in a bag and getting kinda musty.

Anyway a little e coli is better than mad cow disease, isn't it? I guess that person got pretty sick, but isn't e coli usually not quite that bad?

I dunno.

I just know that I literally LIVE on the stuff. So I hope it's not like a matter of HOW MUCH ya eat, yanno?

Probably the more you eat of anything the more likely you are to get a bad batch.

But I don't think you should stop eating salad. Other foods are even more dangerous, and if they're not dangerous short term they're dangerous long term (candy bars, for example).

I think some veggie soap & a salad spinner would ease your mind.

Also remember that these stories are isolated events, only 26 people got sick. I can only imagine how many got sick from McDonalds in the same time!

NDRU said:

Rite thats what I was trying to tell my sister n law.

She was being all dramatic and like

OMG I'M NEVER NEVER eating that stuff again! YOUR NUTTS.

But yanno, she smokes like 3 packs of Newports a day.

luv4all7 said:

nobody's ever gotten e coli from a Newport

NDRU said:

2the9s said:

she wants to live the colostomy life

luv4all7 said:

A lot of people don't quite see the big picture like your sister in law, like here in Berkeley, where everyone washes down their organic produce with a few bong rips, or smoke healthy cigarettes like American Spirits.

Not that I'm totally healthy, I'm just saying...