“Hard to believe they are the only ones to get ill if the food was bad.”
We never discovered which restaurant we visited that weekend was the one responsible for dosing me with E. coli food poisoning, so there was no telling how many other people did or did not become ill from the same source of E. coli which nearly killed me. Also, my spouse did not become ill from E. coli, and we ate nearly the same restaurant foods those days.
Likewise in the instance of these two people. It may be they were only two people who were served the portion of the food that was contaminated with enough E. coli to cause more than some mild diarrhea in an adult who was also not immune-compromised.
There was another occasion when both of us were subjected to food poisoning, and we knew exactly when, where, and how we were poisoned. After work one day, we went to the movie theater. neither of us had eaten anything since breakfast, so we were both too hungry to wait for dinner after the movie. Instead, we bought a large bucket of popcorn to share and some drinks. The only thing we had to drink or eat in common since early the day before was the bucket of popcorn. We sat down and started to eat the popcorn. About thirty minutes into the movie, we were both became extremely ill with some of the most painfully explosive diarrhea imaginable. We missed the rest of the movie and part of the next movie in our respective rest rooms dealing with the ugly consequences of this violent food poisoning.
Once we were able to settle down enough to leave the movie theater, we stopped to complain to the employees and then the manager about the food poisoning from the popcorn. They were completely uncooperative and even insulting, suggesting we were making up the whole affair. We tried to warn the Health Department, but could not reach them until after the weekend. They refused to even take a report of the incident or conduct any investigation whatsoever. So, the public remained completely unprotected regardless of whether or not anyone else had the presence of mind to report the food poisoning as we did.
We never returned to that movie theater again.
Just because these two people were the only people to claim food poisoning, does not in anyway mean they were the only two people to be exposed to the E. coli or may not have actually been the only two people to have been served food with a sufficient E. coli contamination.
Most restaurants share food suppliers who bring their “fresh food” in by truck. It makes it really hard to assume that one restaurant is responsible, unless there’s something real specific and unsanitary in their cleanliness or food prep, or a lot of people eating there got sick at the same time.
I had a similar experience with food poisoning, knowing which item caused it and the local public health department being totally uninterested in my report. This was in Ca, by the way.