Crypto News: E. coli comes for Quarter Pounders

Hi, it's Gerry in New York. McDonald's just became the latest fast-food restaurant to be linked to E coli. Such events can be damaging for companies, but especially devastating to people who get sick. But first...

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McDonald's is the latest dining chain to be linked to an E. coli outbreak. The company will likely recover over time. The bigger impact may be on the people who got sick.

On Tuesday, federal health officials said the fast-food chain's Quarter Pounders were connected to an outbreak in the US that sickened 49 people, mainly in Colorado and Nebraska, killing one.

McDonald's says the source of some of the illnesses may be linked to slivered onions used in the burgers and sourced by a single supplier. Among other steps, it has paused distribution of the onions in the affected areas and temporarily removed the Quarter Pounder from restaurants in several states.

"We take food safety extremely seriously and it's the right thing to do," said Cesar Piña, McDonald's North America chief supply chain officer.

Such events can have a real business impact on restaurants. When an E. coli outbreak was linked to Mexican chain Chipotle in 2015, the company temporarily closed all 43 of its restaurants in Oregon and Washington to try to identify the source and sanitize the spaces, and saw a big drop in profits.

To get some perspective on this latest outbreak, I called Mansour Samadpour, chief executive officer of IEH Laboratories, which does food safety testing and consulting. He reminded me that things used to be much worse.

"There was a time in the 1990s when every month we had an E. coli outbreak," he told me. Then, more than two decades ago, the US Department of Agriculture pushed the beef industry to do better testing of its ground meat, leading to a decline in cases. "That was huge," he said.

E. coli is a bacteria that's normally found in the intestines of people or animals, and is often harmless. When people do get sick, symptoms can include severe stomach cramps, diarrhea and vomiting, and typically begin three to four days after swallowing the bacteria. Some people can develop serious kidney problems. In the McDonald's outbreak, one child has been hospitalized with complications of hemolytic uremic syndrome, a condition that damages blood vessels and can lead to kidney failure.

Health officials say if you have severe symptoms of E. coli infection after eating a Quarter Pounder hamburger at McDonald's, you should seek health care and tell your provider about what you ate.

Eventually, restaurants typically recover from E coli outbreaks, Samadpour said. McDonald's will likely to do a risk assessment and look at their suppliers to see what they can do to prevent this from happening again. The people who are most impacted, he added, are the consumers who became ill.

"Just imagine if you have a child" who has been sickened by E. coli, Samadpour said. "This is not an easy infection. They have to make sure they get the care they need and hopefully they recover." —Gerry Smith

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