Japan's E. coli crisis underscores need for US operators' vigilance

Nation's Restaurant News, Sept 16, 1996

Children died from horrific foodborne infections as countless people shunned suspect restaurants. Nationwide, consumers not deterred from dining out insisted that hamburgers and other foods be well cooked.

Epidemiologists linked foodservice practices to the widespread and deadly outbreak, and grieving parents blamed woefully inadequate government safeguards. That scenario may sound like a recounting of the E. cold crisis that claimed the lives of four children on the West Coast in 1993 while afflicting some 500 people and nearly destroying one of the industry's largest fast-food chains, but it's not.

Instead, it is the frighteningly similar -- only worse -- account of what has happened this year in Japan, where since June at least 11 people have died from E. cold 0157 infections, and some 10,000 have been taken ill, including more than 6,000 children in the Osaka suburb of Sakai.

The parallels between the 1993 outbreak and Japan's current crisis are more than superficial, since both had foodservice connections and the same virulent E. cold strain was involved in both. But the Japanese have yet to determine conclusively the source of their epidemic, let alone devise a comprehensive defense against future occurrences.

Three years ago the American food businesses that were embroiled in the deadly crisis at least were lucky enough to pin down the source of the problem. They responded swiftly as government regulators worked with the private sector to begin implementing new, if long overdue, food-safety systems. Today our restaurant industry feels largely protected from such outbreaks by new levels of awareness, new quality-assurance and testing measures, and revamped food-handling practices.

Some chains -- including the one that took the brunt of the consumer and litigation backlash because of its direct involvement in the outbreak -- have become models of food safety. What's more, the federal food inspection system is in the throes of a major overhaul.

Just this summer a new coalition of more than 13,000 foodservice establishments suppliers and associations formed the Chicago-based Industry Council on Food Safety to promote education on the issue. Aramark executive vice president John Farquharson -- a trained sanitarian, former National Restaurant Association president and former chairman of the NRA's Educational Foundation -- was named ICFS president.

Indeed, it was our federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health to which Japanese officials this year turned for advice on combating deadly bacteria. But the tragic crisis in Japan should remind American restaurateurs and food producers about the need for perpetual vigilance against a threat that, if ignored, still could take lives here and shatter the public's confidence in foodservice.

The deadly E. cold 0157 microbe for example, is not merely a risk posed by undercooked, tainted hamburger. It can be spread by contaminated water, raw fruits and vegetables, and indirect human transmission. Indeed, one of the children who died in 1993 had not eaten an infected hamburger but simply had played with a child who had.

At least one study of raw produce in a major wholesale distribution center in this country has shown that E. cold residues from fecally contaminated irrigation sources can remain on the skins, rinds and leaves of many fruits and vegetables. In fact, cases have been reported of cross-contamination of melon flesh by hotel kitchen knives that first contacted unclean outer surfaces of the fruit. And some restaurant chains whose units otherwise prepare their own fresh produce have adopted special commissary methods for cleaning raw spinach because of its particular susceptibility to harboring dangerous microbes.

In Japan radish sprouts or kiaware, often used in that country in Asian and eclectic restaurants, were suspected of being a source of the E. cold infections, but that was never proved. Japanese health officials, who may never pinpoint the outbreak's actual source, nonetheless suspect that unsanitary practices in school foodservice facilities were at least partly to blame. A school dish containing raw liver was implicated directly in one fatality but was not believed to be responsible for all the illnesses.

Besides the risk of deaths and business disruptions, there are other potential ramifications of such outbreaks, including terrorism by opportunists. In Japan a man, since arrested for extortion, apparently was inspired by the crisis to threaten 7-Eleven Japan Co. with E. cold contamination of its stores unless he received $1.1 million.

In addition to causing many of the nation's sushi eaters to switch to broiled fish, Japan's national obsession with the E. cold threat even has prompted hotels and restaurants to refuse reservations from people from the heavily affected town of Sakai. And Sakai residents who commute elsewhere to work have been fired from their jobs by fearful employers, while children from Sakai became objects of fear and derision.