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The Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday that it has traced green onions behind outbreaks in Tennessee and Georgia to three Mexican firms.
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Posted on 11/21/2003 8:09:43 AM PST by Dane
Exactly. raw and clean green onions are excellent.
Now the next passage is pure speculation on my part.
An employee or somebody along the way in the chain to the Chi-Chi's, well how can I say this, put the green onions up where the sun doen't shine. You know the reason why straws are individually wrapped. This shipment of onions makes it to this particular Chi-Chi's and voila, Hepatitis A epidemic.
If true, I don't care HOW MUCH cooking of said product "gets rid" of the problem. I'm not eating ANYTHING fertilized with "people poop". (When you consider the number of Mexicans urinating on side of North Carolina Interstates; you might want to keep an eye on the water supply, as well.)
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The Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday that it has traced green onions behind outbreaks in Tennessee and Georgia to three Mexican firms.
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In Mexico, human waste is routinely used as fertilizer. However, it is not legal to import such produce to the US. Unfortunately, "illegal" doesn't mean much anymore, unless you're trying to post the Ten Commandments in a public building.
Right, and now we have Michael.
A serious question. Are scallions and green onions the same?
According to Richard McGarvey, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the source of the outbreak was a Chi-Chi's restaurant in Beaver County, near Pittsburgh.
The Chi-Chi's restaurant in Beaver County voluntarily closed on Nov. 2, McGarvey said. Chi-Chi's is a chain of Mexican restaurants, with locations throughout the mid-western and eastern United States.
"The infection has been stopped. There's not more people getting ill because of Chi-Chi's," McGarvey said.
Now, McGarvey said, the Pennsylvania Department of Health is trying to determine the exact cause of infection.
According to Paul McGovern, an instructor of medicine in the Department of Infectious Disease at the Medical School, hepatitis A is transmitted through either contact or ingestion, but it's "mostly food borne."
"There's a fecal-oral route," he said. If a person with hepatitis A and poor hygiene handled food, traces of infected fecal matter might contaminate the food.
McGovern also added that green onions have been linked to previous outbreaks of the disease, because "they're difficult to clean."
According to their Web site, Chi-Chi's has voluntarily removed green onions from all of their locations as of Nov. 12.
"Twelve workers had hepatitis A," McGarvey said. But "they got ill at the same time everyone else did," meaning that they were not likely to be the source of contamination.
The Department of Health is interviewing people who ate at the Chi-Chi's, McGarvey added, and "trying to cross-match the two" to find out exactly what food caused the outbreak.
However, he warned, "in about 40 percent of the hepatitis outbreaks that have happened, we aren't able to determine the source."
Infected food, rather than poor hygiene, leaves more room for the outbreak to spread, McGovern said.
"If it's foodstuff that may not have been delivered only to the Chi-Chi restaurant, but to other restaurants in Pennsylvania, then there's a chance" of the outbreak spreading beyond the Pittsburgh area, McGovern said.
However, he added, "it's premature to say whether it is or it is not going to spread because the investigation has not been completed."
According to McGarvey, the outbreak has not yet spread. "At this point, we have not seen other hepatitis cases in Pennsylvania," he said.
are the best on fr
But the question is now why only the one restaurant infected by the green onions. Those farms probably send out tons of green onions. Why the outbreaks which can be directed towards individual restaurants.
As I stated in my sickening(I was thinking out of the box) reply #42, it could be some sick individual or terrorism on a small scale.
I live near a town that has been inundated with Mexican immigrants. Every Christmas, many of them make the trek to Mexico to see their relatives. And every year, following Christmas vacation, there is an outbreak of hepatitis in the local schools. No one speaks of this because to do so is racist and insensitive. The school nurse is even on the hush-hush. She makes it sound like a child turning yellow and being severely ill is just your routine childhood illness. Of course, this particular school has the largest white flight of open enrollment OUT of the district than any other school in the state.
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