ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, May 16, 1996 TAG: 9605160163
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOSTON
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Health officials say at least 224,000 people - two of them from the Roanoke Valley - got sick two years ago from eating bacteria-tainted Schwan's ice cream, making this the biggest documented case of food poisoning traced to a single source.
The outbreak, which was highly publicized at the time, involved ice cream made at a Schwan's plant in Marshall, Minn., and sold door-to-door nationally, including by Schwan's distributors in Bedford. It was traced to tanker trucks that were used to haul both ice cream mix and raw eggs.
In a report in today's New England Journal of Medicine, doctors from the Minnesota Department of Health and other agencies reported on their investigation of the episode.
Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, Minnesota state epidemiologist, called the Schwan's outbreak ``a harbinger of things to come'' because of the potential for spreading a single tainted ingredient to millions of people through nationally distributed foods.
The team calculated that nearly 3.4 million people ate some of the 1 million gallons of ice cream shipped from the plant in September 1994, and 6.6 percent of them got sick. This works out to 224,000 cases of food poisoning.
However, David Jennings, a Schwan's spokesman, said: ``We have seen nothing that even remotely approaches that number.''
LENGTH: Short : 39 linesby CNB