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 The burrito chain will shut its 1,900 U.S. restaurants on Monday for
a meeting with employees to review a rapid overhaul of practices
that it hopes will eliminate outbreaks of E. coli, Salmonella and
norovirus.
But there is no easy way to know whether the fast food chain's
safety record is any better or worse than that of other major
restaurant chain.
Food safety investigations in the United States begin - and often
end - at the local level, and some states limit the disclosure of
implicated restaurants, keeping diners in the dark.
Federal public health investigators get involved only when
multi-state outbreaks are identified. A publicly available national
database identifies tainted foods and pathogen culprits, but it
would not help a consumer who wants to know whether one restaurant
chain has a better safety record than another.
"There is not a surveillance system that exists nationally that
answers that question," said Matthew Wise, who leads the team
investigating multi-state outbreaks at the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC).
Roughly 48 million people, one in six U.S. residents, are sickened
by tainted food each year and nearly 3,000 die.
Food safety advocates say more information would help. The
development of a national database of safety scores broken out by
chain could motivate restaurants to improve and maintain high
standards, said Darin Detwiler, senior policy coordinator for STOP
Foodborne Illness.
"We just want to know about the bad apples so we can avoid them,"
said Detwiler, whose young son died in a 1993 Jack-in-the-Box E.
coli outbreak that killed four children and sickened more than 700
people.
But Jeffrey Duchin, a Seattle, Washington public health official,
said a national system for tracking restaurants by outbreaks could
give consumers the wrong impression about where they can safely eat.
"Just looking at the ones that might have been reported with an
outbreak that was detected would be a very biased sample," Duchin
said.
In Chipotle's case, sales slid about 36 percent in January after
falling by 14.6 percent in the fourth quarter. And the company said
last week that a federal criminal probe linked to a food safety
incident at a California restaurant has now widened into a national
investigation.
Founder and co-Chief Executive Steve Ells boldly pledged in December
to make Chipotle the safest place to eat. Asked later how the
company would demonstrate it had met the goal, a spokesman said that
executives were "less concerned about how we might rank that, and
more concerned about reducing risk to a level near zero."
NATIONAL CHAINS, LOCAL FOCUS
The first Chipotle outbreak hit diners of a Seattle restaurant in
late July. Health officials learned of the E. coli illnesses in
early August and linked them to the Chipotle outlet within days. But
by that time, the alarm was over: The incubation period had passed,
and no additional patients were expected, health officials said.
Local officials reported the outbreak to the state, which performed
DNA testing to identify the E. coli strain. The Seattle cases only
came to the CDC's attention because the agency happened to have a
team at the Seattle health department in August on another matter,
Duchin said.
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"It didn't seem like anything remarkable at the time," he said.
Last month, Seattle's public health department began publishing more
details about routine foodborne illness cases on its website in
response to public demands for more information, spokesman James Apa
said.
He said the information released includes the names of restaurants
linked to routine outbreaks, a departure from the department's
previous practice of naming restaurants only when there is an
identified, ongoing danger to the public. The change was under
discussion before Chipotle's problems.
In Minnesota, where Salmonella and E. coli outbreaks were linked to
Chipotle outlets, officials do not always publicly release the names
of implicated restaurants, partly because of a belief that it might
discourage operators from cooperating with investigations, said Kirk
Smith of the Minnesota Department of Health.
In September, Minnesota officials decided to announce their
investigation of Salmonella infections linked to Chipotle because,
they said, there were a large number of cases and many affected
people do not seek healthcare or get tested.
NATIONAL SURVEILLANCE
The CDC's National Outbreak Reporting System (NORS) gathers data on
food and waterborne pathogens from states according to the type of
pathogen and the setting of infection, such as hospital cafeterias,
nursing homes or restaurants. Names of establishments are not
included or sought.
NORS is a database rather than an investigative tool, used by the
agency to identify outbreak patterns.
Apart from NORS, the CDC participates in foodborne illness
investigations when they involve outbreaks in multiple states, said
Wise, who oversees those efforts. About 25 such outbreaks are
identified each year, mostly involving food producers.
Even though multistate cases account for just 3 percent of all
outbreaks, they are responsible for half of all food poisoning
deaths. No deaths have been reported in the Chipotle outbreaks.
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen and Tom Polansek in Chicago; Editing
by Jo Winterbottom and Lisa Girion)
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