Probe into outbreak continues
Posted on Saturday, August 30, 2008
LOCUST GROVE, Okla. — Arkansas health officials are following the cases of four Arkansans who might be part of an E. coli outbreak that Oklahoma investigators said Friday likely came from a rare strain of the bacteria.
The investigation has centered on the Country Cottage restaurant in Locust Grove, Okla., where most of the ill people said they had eaten between Aug. 15-23.
The four Arkansas cases haven’t been confirmed, “but all were associated with this restaurant,” said Dr. James Phillips, branch chief of infectious diseases for the Arkansas Department of Health.
The outbreak claimed the life of 26-year-old bank employee Chad Ingle of Pryor, Okla.
All together, 116 people — 87 adults and 29 children — have become ill. The number of people hospitalized had risen to at least 50, said Larry Weatherford, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Health.
“We’ve said for the last couple of days that there is a clear connection between the illness and the restaurant. We’ve not been able to pinpoint the source, as of yet,” Weatherford said. “We’ve not been able to narrow it down to whether it was an ill person or a contamination of food.”
Evidence points to the contamination occurring inside the restaurant and not before the food supply reached the restaurant, he said.
In Arkansas, Gelia Ruple of Vilonia said her father’s doctors had diagnosed him with a kind of E. coli that antibiotics won’t help. Earlier, the doctors had only suspected that David Waddle, 61, of Cabot had E. coli and were treating his severe symptoms with antibiotics. He also has suffered kidney failure, she said.
Waddle ate at Country Cottage buffet on Aug. 17 and by the next Sunday went to the emergency room at Siloam Springs Memorial Hospital.
Phillips said he couldn’t discuss a specific case, citing federal patient privacy laws, but said it is possible that the E. coli organism may no longer be in the body of a severely ill patient by the time test cultures are taken.
Oklahoma health officials have identified a rare strain, E. coli 0111, as being responsible for the outbreak.
Phillips said he was not surprised the rare strain is causing severe illness. That’s because strains often mutate and become more virulent, he said. The E. coli strain that usually causes severe diarrhea and kidney failure, 0157: H 7, wasn’t responsible for those kinds of symptoms until a 1993 outbreak involving Jack in the Box restaurants in the western United States, he said.
Meanwhile, efforts by the townspeople of Locust Grove to support Country Cottage and owners Dale and Linda Moore continued Friday.
As of 3 p. m., clerks at the Pirates Git-N-Split convenience store had collected 234 signatures on a petition started a day earlier. The petition urges the Moores to reopen the Country Cottage.
The owners voluntarily have closed during the investigation.
“I know these people. They’re good people,” said Jona Robison of Locust Grove, the 100 th person to sign the petition. “And — they’re crushed.”
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
