Be the bug.
That’s what I tell people when they recite the different-cutting-board mythology as somehow, raw vegetables – grown in dirt and water from who knows where – are immune from E. coli and other bugs.
And talk about the bugs.
That raises awareness and helps people from getting sick.
But the UK, and their piping hot cooking technology, doesn’t believe in saying much.
Stuffed shirt approach.
While the paper below summarizes the outbreak four years later, it says nothing about the responsibility of health types – on the public dime — to make their information public.
Between December 2010 and July 2011, 252 cases of STEC O157 PT8 stx1 + 2 infection were reported in England, Scotland and Wales. This was the largest outbreak of STEC reported in England and the second largest in the UK to date.
Eighty cases were hospitalized, with two cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome and one death reported. Routine investigative data were used to generate a hypothesis but the subsequent case-control study was inconclusive. A second, more detailed, hypothesis generation exercise identified consumption or handling of vegetables as a potential mode of transmission. A second case-control study demonstrated that cases were more likely than controls to live in households whose members handled or prepared leeks bought unwrapped [odds ratio (OR) 40, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2·08-769·4], and potatoes bought in sacks (OR 13·13, 95% CI 1·19-145·3). This appears to be the first outbreak of STEC O157 infection linked to the handling of leeks.
A large Great Britain-wide outbreak of STEC O157 phage type 8 linked to handling of raw leeks and potatoes
Epidemiology and Infection / Volume 144 / Issue 01 / January 2016, pp 171-181