The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expressed frustration with sloppy record keeping in the meat grinding operations at the Hannaford Supermarket chain while its investigators attempted to find the origin of contaminated beef that caused a multi-state outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium that started last October.
In the agency’s final update on that outbreak, which was issued this week, there was no mention of the impediment – only a recap that the lab-confirmed outbreak caused by store-ground hamburger sickened at least 20 people in seven states, including six each in New York and New Hampshire and four in Maine.
Some of the tainted ground beef could potentially still be in customers’ home freezers, but the number of new illness has dropped off sharply, with the last one confirmed in mid-December.
Here’s a detailed list of recalled ground beef distributed in Hannaford stores in the Northeast. Please check your freezers to see if you have this product in your home.
Besides the issue of incomplete grinding logs that prevented investigators from going upstream in the food chain to see where the threat originated, the Hannaford outbreak was significant because the strain of Salmonella Typhimurium that caused infection was resistant to several commonly used antibiotics.
Nearly half of the food poisoning victims in this outbreak were hospitalized and no one died. But antibiotic resistance increases the risk of hospitalization and possible treatment failure.
