The Klaus family has lived the fast-food industry's nightmare: people getting sick from \o7E. coli\f7.
A few days after picking up a dinner of hamburgers and chicken nuggets at a Wendy's drive-in, the Salem, Ore., family received a call from county health inspectors inquiring whether they had eaten food from the chain.
JoAnn Klaus already knew something was wrong: Her 4-year-old son, Evan, was hospitalized with diarrhea and dehydration, and 23-month-old Scott had similar symptoms.
As the brothers received blood transfusions to save their lives, health inspectors scoured the local Wendy's looking for any source of the \o7E. coli\f7 bacteria that had attacked the boys. They discovered that restaurant employees cleaned lettuce with equipment that was used to handle raw hamburger meat.
The boys are still paying the price for their meal. Now 11 and 8, Evan and Scott see a kidney specialist annually. Scott takes medication for high blood pressure, and doctors say he may develop kidney problems in adolescence.
Cases like this still haunt the fast-food industry. In the last few months, hundreds of diners have been sickened by \o7E. coli\f7 transmitted through lettuce served by fast-food chains Taco Bell and Taco John's.
Without improvements in food handling, especially of produce, new outbreaks of \o7E. coli\f7 and other food-borne diseases will shake the public's confidence in the fare served at restaurants, industry executives say.
"People might start to say they shouldn't eat anywhere," said Brian Dixon, vice president of marketing for Taco John's.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 52% of the 9,040 outbreaks of food-borne illness reported between 1998 and 2004, the latest year for which numbers are available, were linked to restaurants and other commercial food establishments.
Irvine-based Taco Bell, a division of Yum Brands Inc., sells more than $6 billion of tacos, chalupas and burritos annually through its 5,800 U.S. restaurants. Industry analysts believe the chain's sales plunged in the Northeast during the outbreak late last year. Yum, which also owns KFC and Pizza Hut, said Taco Bell's sales fell 5% in the fourth quarter of 2006, when the outbreak occurred, and that the incident cost the chain $20 million in operating profit.
The outbreak occurred at Taco Bells in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, but reverberated across the nation.
