Tainted Meat Linked to California Cattle

Some of the tainted fast-food hamburger meat blamed for the death of at least one child and the illnesses of more than 300 people in Washington state is believed to have come from cows in California, a health official said Friday.

Dr. John Kobayashi, Washington state’s chief epidemiologist, said federal health and agricultural investigators haven’t pinpointed a specific herd or slaughterhouse, and they don’t know yet at what point the contamination occurred.

“It appears most of the cattle for the implicated lot of hamburger meat we’re looking at comes from the Central Valley in California,” he said.

The raw beef was supplied to the Vons Cos. of Arcadia, which processed it into frozen patties for Jack in the Box restaurants in Southern California; Washington state; Boise, Ida.; Nevada; Hawaii, Mexico and Hong Kong.

A 2-year-old Tacoma, Wash., boy died Jan. 22 and at least 300 people--most of them children--have become sick in Washington state this month after eating contaminated and undercooked hamburgers at Jack in the Box restaurants, officials say.

A 2 1/2-year-old girl died Thursday from infection with the same strain, E. coli 0157:H7, but she didn’t eat at Jack in the Box and officials weren’t sure how she contracted the bacterium.

Outbreaks of E. coli poisoning also have occurred recently in San Diego and Las Vegas. In Nevada, officials said, most of the 175 cases of unusual intestinal disease reported in the last month could be attributed to E. coli , and 100 of them were traced to Jack in the Box.

Because of concern about possible contamination, all Vons ground-beef products are being tested, a company official said. In some Vons stores in California, ground beef products were pulled from the shelves Friday and stored in freezers because all the tests were not completed, said spokeswoman Mary McAboy.

These products “are from one particular batch of ground beef, and we haven’t finished testing on this batch,” she said. A majority of the Vons stores do not have this shipment of ground beef in stock, she said.

“This is simply a precautionary measure,” McAboy said. “Multiple tests have been done on our ground beef and they’ve all come up negative. . . . We just don’t have the final test on this particular batch. We’ll have fresh ground beef (today) to replace what was taken off the shelves.”

Jim Greene, a spokesman with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said inspectors were checking 13 slaughterhouses and processing plants that probably supplied the meat to Vons.

Health officials believe that the meat became contaminated with the bacterium, found in the intestines and feces of cows, during slaughter.

Humans become infected if they eat beef that has not been thoroughly cooked. Symptoms include bloody diarrhea and severe abdominal cramps. Infection can lead to kidney failure, seizures and neurological damage.

In another development, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy Friday defended the USDA’s meat inspections and blamed undercooking for the outbreak of poisoning caused by the bacterium.

At his first press conference, Espy said in Washington that he would travel to Washington state Tuesday to meet with Gov. Mike Lowry and testify before the state Senate about the outbreak.

Reacting to the food-poisoning outbreak, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned states that all ground beef should be thoroughly cooked, just as if it were contaminated with dangerous bacteria.

The agency advised states to raise the minimum cooking temperature of ground beef to 155 degrees Fahrenheit from the former federal recommendation of 140 degrees. Washington state already requires 155 degrees.