The food poisoning of over 100 children and teachers at the Red Bay Primary School last week is very serious.

Just supposing someone, especially a child, had died?

Quite rightly the Department of Environmental Health (DoEH) has recommended the Mary Miller Hall, which includes the kitchen facilities, remains closed until results of all the tests have been finalized.

The Mary Miller Hall provided meals to Lighthouse School and George Town Primary School.

But did the food poisoning actually come from the kitchen facilities? I have not heard of any reports of food poisoning at these other schools.

Mis en Place, MD Sean Collins said that a Department of Environmental Health representative was on site in the kitchen facility and was able to gather samples of the two lunch items served. This was chicken tenders and fried fish served with French fries and coleslaw.

“All six of our staff posted in the Red Bay kitchen also ate lunch and had no symptoms of illness,” Collins reported.

A gas leak from an ice machine was discovered in the serving area at Red Bay but according to Mis en Place the small amount of Freon being leaked into the environment from an ice machine would not cause the symptoms experienced by the people who fell ill.

Red Bay Primary was served with 224 chicken tender meals and 30 fried fish meals. So we can presumably rule out the fish contained poisoning.

On the Foodsafety.gov website it illustrates how difficult it is in finding the sources of foodborne disease outbreaks.

Under the heading “A Complex Mystery” Laura A Bettencourt, Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer for the CDC’s Enteric Disease Epidemiology Branch. writes:

I work in a group at CDC that investigates foodborne illnesses in the United States — illnesses like salmonellosis and E. coli infection. One challenge we face during an outbreak investigation is trying to figure out the source of the outbreak.

When a group of people consume the same contaminated food, an outbreak of illness can occur. This group may be people who ate a meal together or people who happened to buy and eat the same contaminated item from a grocery store or at a restaurant.

When people get sick from food, they often assume the cause was the last thing they ate before they started feeling ill. That’s often not the case. For many foodborne illnesses, it can take anywhere from several hours to several days before people start to feel sick. The cause could have been something they ate several days ago, something they might not even remember eating.
The contaminated food usually looked, smelled, and tasted perfectly fine, making it sometimes very difficult to determine exactly what made them sick.
If safe food production and handling practices were not followed, the food could have become contaminated at any point, from the time the food was harvested or produced until it was eaten.
People who get sick with a foodborne illness don’t always see a health care provider. When they do, the providers don’t always test for bacteria that cause foodborne illness. These test results are very important, because CDC and other groups need the results to detect outbreaks.
Because people are often not interviewed until weeks after they became sick, they may have trouble remembering what foods they had eaten or what spices and condiments they may have added to their food.

So, how do we figure out which foods are making people sick? Some of the things we do are:

Use technologies, such as “DNA fingerprinting” of bacteria from ill people to help determine which ones might be linked to a common source of infection.
Interview people who have gotten sick to find out what foods they recently ate.
Interview people who haven’t gotten sick to compare what foods they recently ate to the sick people.
Study information from previous outbreaks to see which foods have often been a source before.
Compare the types of bacteria found in food or ingredients during the outbreak to the types found in people who are sick.

How does this affect you? One thing to remember is that only a tiny fraction of foodborne illnesses are reported as part of an outbreak. While it’s important to keep track of food recalls to avoid getting sick, it’s equally important to follow the basic food handling rules: Clean, Cook, Separate, and Chill. And, if you suspect that you have a foodborne illness, report it to your local health department. Often calls from concerned citizens like you are how outbreaks are first detected.
SOURCE: http://www.foodsafety.gov/blog/complexmystery.html#

It is therefore going to be a very hard job for our DoEH to find but find the cause they must.

And how long is it going to take?

It is going to be a lot easier to find what was not the cause than what was. I am beginning to doubt whether it was the food. An outside source? One of the food handlers? A utensil?

There are many suspects and Sherlock Holmes or that detective fellow on “Death in Paradise” might be stumped for the answer.

Thank goodness no one died.