The earliest signs of the nation’s E. coli outbreak surfaced two weeks ago, when the health department in New Jersey discovered a cluster of sick people carrying a single strain of that bug. This wasn’t just any E. coli; it was O157:H7, a dangerous strain that produces toxins that destroy the lining of blood vessels. As of Friday, 98 people have been infected in 22 states; almost half of them have been hospitalized, and 10 have developed kidney failure. The culprit: romaine lettuce.
But tracking down the contaminated lettuce has proved challenging. At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told consumers to avoid prechopped romaine lettuce. Then it expanded the warning to any romaine grown in Yuma, Arizona, after discovering that eight sick men in an Alaska prison ate lettuce that arrived in intact heads. (In the winter, Yuma grows most of the leafy greens eaten in the United States, so many that the town holds an annual Lettuce Festival.) Investigators traced those heads to a Yuma business called Harrison Farms, but they haven’t been able reconstruct the path of the chopped lettuce that made people sick from Washington state to Louisiana to Connecticut.