Scientists who investigated the latest E. coli outbreak and nailed down its cause say the fact that these cases were linked and solved so quickly makes it a noteworthy win.
The number of cases in the E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounders has risen to 90, the CDC said in an update on Wednesday.
His mom, Lera Davidson, rushed him to the emergency room at St. Mary's Regional Hospital when the bloody diarrhea continued. The doctors took a stool sample and sent it to a lab for analysis, and they gave him IV fluids and painkillers for the cramps. They kept him in the ER nearly all day, he said, but eventually sent him home.
Scientists at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who worked with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to investigate the latest E. coli outbreak and nail down its cause say the fact that these cases were linked and solved so quickly makes it a noteworthy win. "We see maybe one or two of these STEC cases in a month, and we had an unusually large number. So right away, we were all concerned," Hartshorn said.
The Mesa County team started making calls to people with STEC infections the week of October 7, about three weeks before the CDC announced the investigation.Within two days, it became apparent that most people they were contacting had eaten at McDonald's. The health department dispatched its environmental health team to the local restaurant, but they didn't find any red flags.
Alayna Younger, an epidemiologist who manages the state agency's four-member Enteric Disease Interview Team, is responsible for assigning those interviews, and she was the first to sound the alarm about an usually large number of STEC cases, according to her supervisor, Rachel Jervis, who calls herself a "scientist ... of diarrhea" on LinkedIn.
Jervis said they also reached out to neighboring states to ask if they were seeing case increases. "Some had similar experiences; some didn't," she said. In the case of the STEC outbreak linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounders, however, it was Younger and her team of epidemiologists manning the phones in Colorado who first linked the cases, a testament to the tried-and-true methods of epidemiology.
Davidson tried to answer the Mesa County workers' questions for Silas because his condition had gotten worse, with episodes of bloody diarrhea every minute or so, and he was too sick to help much. But when she was initially interviewed, she didn't know that her son had eaten at McDonald's. Still, the number of official cases is an undercount. There will be people who got sick but not sick enough to go to the doctor, so they were never tested. Or perhaps they were treated without getting a stool test.
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