Providing donuts for volunteers in a barn may be a key in an outbreak linked to 45 E. coli O157:H7 illnesses. According to King 5, Handwashing stations (which are never enough) weren’t available and hand sanitizer units were empty. A recipe for disaster, as they say.

The Whatcom County Health Department is trying to figure out what caused Toby Hager and 44 others to fall ill after a dairy festival in Lynden.

Hager described how he helped set up a maze in this dairy barn before the Milk Makers Fest last month.

“We were to pick up hay bales and set them up in a certain way for a map for a maze,” he said.

As a reward for their work, Hager and the rest of the Lynden High School Ag Tech class were fed donuts in the very same barn.

He said the hand washing stations were not turned on. He found only a pump of hand sanitizer.

“Just the one hand sanitizing station that was on a pole that, as I said before, was empty,” Hager said.

The next day the 15-year-old fell ill.

“He came home from school and complained he had a really bad headache,” said his mother, Amy Hayes-Shaw.

Soon he passed blood and started vomiting. Finally in the hospital doctors told his family he had contracted E. coli.

“I freaked out,” his mother said. “I was horrified. Because I remember Jack-In-The-Box and I remembered Odwalla.”

Just like the patients in those outbreaks, Hager suffered acute kidney failure. He went through surgery and dialysis twice.