Germany’s E. coli Nightmare

Too Often, Politics Trumps Safety

By Douglas Powell, PhD

My friend Jim called on a Friday afternoon. Jim is a dairy farmer located on the edge of a town in Ontario, Canada, called Walkerton, and he said a lot of people were getting sick. The community knew there was a problem several days before health types went public.

On Sunday, May 21, 2000, at 1:30 p.m., the Grey Bruce Health Unit in Owen Sound, Ontario posted a notice on its website to hospitals and physicians to make them aware of a boil water advisory and inform them that a suspected agent in the increase of diarrheal cases was E. coli O157:H7.

There had been a marked increase in illness in the town of about 5,000 people, and many were already saying the water was suspect. But because the first public announcement was also the Sunday of the Victoria Day long weekend, it received scant media coverage.

It wasn’t until Monday evening that local television and radio began reporting illnesses, stating that at least 300 people in Walkerton were ill.

At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, May 23, the Walkerton hospital held a media conference jointly with the health unit to inform the public of the outbreak, to make people aware of the potential complications of the E. coli O157:H7 infection, and to warn them to take the necessary precautions. This generated a print report in the local paper the next day, which was picked up by the national wire service Tuesday evening, and subsequently appeared in papers across Canada on May 24.

These public outreach efforts were neither speedy nor sufficient. Ultimately, 2,300 people were sickened and seven died—in a town of 5,000. All the gory details and mistakes and steps for improvement were outlined in the report of the Walkerton inquiry (www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/walkerton).

The E. coli O157:H7 was thought to have originated on a farm owned by a veterinarian and his family at the edge of town, someone my friend Jim knew well, a cow-calf operation that was the poster farm for Environmental Farm Plans. Heavy rains washed cattle manure into a long abandoned well-head, which was apparently still connected to the municipal system. The brothers in charge of the municipal water system for Walkerton, who were found to have been adding chlorine based on smell rather than something minimally scientific like test strips, were criminally convicted.

But the government-mandated reports don’t capture the day-to-day drama and stress that people like my friend experienced. Jim and his family knew many of the sick and dead. This was a small community. News organizations from around the province descended on Walkerton for weeks. They had their own helicopters, but the worst was the medical helicopters flying patients with hemolytic uremic syndrome to the hospital in London. Every time Jim saw one of those, he wondered if it was someone he knew.

I’m not an epidemiologist, but as a scientist and journalist with 20 years of contacts, I usually find out when something is going on in the world of foodborne outbreaks.