By Randy Huffman
Chief Food Safety Officer
Maple Leaf Foods
Several Food Safety events have been making the news lately, but I would like to draw your attention to the devastating outbreak currently underway in Europe caused by E. coli O1O4:H4.
At time of this writing over 4200 cases of illness and over 50 deaths had been linked to this outbreak, which would rank this as one of the largest ever food borne outbreaks, and certainly likely to be the most deadly E. coli outbreak in global history.
Early reports indicated produce, including cucumbers and tomatoes imported from Spain, was the origin. A week later the focus shifted to German-grown organic bean sprouts as the cause. This case proves that determining the actual cause of a cluster of related food borne illnesses can be very difficult. As more has been learned about the commonalities of the various cases related to this outbreak (that are now in many countries around the world including Canada and U.S.) it appears that the actual root cause is associated with the original source seeds used in the sprout production setting.
The critical statistic at this early stage of this outbreak is that over 890 patients have developed Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) and the final count is not in yet. HUS is a debilitating complication typically associated with E. coli O157:H7 illnesses and other E. coli that have the Shiga-toxin producing genes. This particular strain, E. coli O1O4, has those genes for Shiga-toxin production, but also appears to have some other unique virulence factors (genes) that may make it even more deadly. This early count of nearly 900 patients with HUS is very disturbing and unusual as this illness will have a high mortality rate and also is a cause of lifelong chronic kidney disease. So, the bottom line, many of those patients with HUS will never fully recover. To emphasize the severity of this situation, I provide the following quote from a colleague of mine from Washington D.C., who conducted clinical human research on E. coli O157 early in his career and more recently was Associate Commissioner of the U.S. FDA, Dr. David Acheson:
“HUS is one of the most devastating complications of food borne illness that I know of. HUS is a combination of kidney failure, anemia and loss of ability to form blood clots due to low platelets and results in a dire situation with, as we have seen so far in this on-going outbreak, a significant mortality rate. In the almost 25 years that I have been dealing with Shiga toxin producing E. coli like the O104 strain and the infamous O157:H7 strain, I have never seen HUS rates even close to this outbreak.”
Dr. David Acheson, MD
Former U.S. FDA Associate Commissioner and Chief Medical Officer of Food
Much remains unknown about this outbreak at this time, but one thing is certain, these statistics will get worse with this event due to the number of cases identified with HUS, and it will most certainly create new challenges for the public health community. More importantly for the manufacturing and food service / retail sectors of the food supply chain, it serves as a stark reminder of the importance of every player in the food chain.
For Maple Leaf Foods, we believe this event, and other similar large-scale food borne outbreaks, serves as important validation to our teams of the need to always meet our Maple Leaf Foods Food Safety Vision of “Always Producing Safe, Great Tasting Food, Produced in a Safe Work Environment”.