The Ottawa E. coli case that prompted the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit to bar restaurants from serving raw kibbeh may not have been caused by the ground beef dish after all.

Eric Leclair, head of the health information co-ordination unit at Ottawa Public Health, told Claire Brownell of the Windsor Star that while a child became ill with the potentially life-threatening type of E. coli after eating the home-prepared dish last February, there’s no way to know for sure whether the food was the source of the illness.

“There’s no confirmation, per se. The actual food itself was prepared in someone’s home. It wasn’t bought as kibbeh, it was just bought as meat,” he said. “There was no real solid connection between them.”

In fact, it’s almost impossible to verify the source of any food-borne illness with certainty. Six people reported food poisoning to the Windsor health unit between April 1 and June 30, 2012, but  inspectors ruled the complaints unsubstantiated after investigating the establishments that served the food, according to information obtained by The Star through an access to information request.

That information was not easy to obtain. In early July, after the health unit imposed restrictions on the sale of raw kibbeh, The Star asked Medical Officer of Health Allen Heimann and health inspection department manager Mike Tudor for records of complaints about food-borne illness in the second quarter of 2012 and filed a freedom of information request after they declined to provide them, citing privacy reasons.

Almost five months later, after The Star appealed the health unit’s decision to deny the records, the organization revealed a few pieces of information about the complaints during a mediation session co-ordinated by the Ontario information and privacy commissioner. Four were about handwashing and four were from restaurant customers who said they found something unsanitary in their food, in addition to the six complaints from people who believe they became sick after eating tainted food.

Dana Young, a lawyer representing the health unit, said she was reluctant to provide details about the complaints — such as what unsanitary objects people said they found in their food — because they might identify the restaurant or the person making the complaint. Young and a group of high-ranking WECHU staff members agreed to compile a chart with generic information about the complaints, which was completed and in the mail on Friday, according to the mediator.

Health unit CEO Gary Kirk said he was concerned about releasing inaccurate information to the public. Unless a person who gets sick from tainted food keeps both a sample of the food and a stool sample for testing, it’s impossible to know for sure whether that food caused the illness.

“If we were to name the establishment where these complaints were lodged, we might mistakenly impugn someone’s reputation, because the follow-up didn’t indicate where there was a problem,” he said. ”That’s at the heart of our concern.”

Yet that’s exactly the type of unsubstantiated complaint held up by the health unit in support of banning an entire traditional dish from restaurants. When asked why the WECHU believes that particular complaint warranted such drastic action, but considers similar complaints in Windsor too unreliable to release to the public, Tudor, the health inspection department manager, said kibbeh was on the health unit’s radar anyway.