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Ed Yeates ReportingThere's a nationwide warning today about bagged spinach --throw it out! People across the country are not eating fresh spinach today, in restaurants or at home. That's because E. coli infections have now been reported in 20 states, including Utah.
At lest one person has died, 94 are sick. Others have been hospitalized.
People who like spinach don't really like boiling the life out of it, so the only option is to throw it out. Utah grocery stores today continued pulling bagged spinach from shelves Out of ten states now, Utah and Wisconsin are reporting the most cases of E. coli infections.
Robert Rolfs, M.D., State Epidemiologist, Utah Health Dept: "They do a genetic fingerprint on it so we know they are all the same. That's what makes this something we should look at."
At Utah restaurants and fast food outlets, spinach is temporarily off the menu. Subway has a high demand for the green stuff in salads and on sandwiches.
Linda Ward, Subway: "They can't have it today. We've had to send all of our spinach back to our distributor. The spinach we picked up yesterday we had to throw away."
And throw it away is what everybody was doing, not because it's necessarily bad, but because as of yet, a specific contaminated brand has not been identified.
Robert Rolfs, M.D: "For maybe one in twenty, on average, people will have the serious complication where it will damage their kidneys. And for some of them, they can have kidney failure and end up on dialysis or needing a transplant."
The FDA estimates 30-million people eat spinach in this country. But for now, as this probe continues, they're encouraged not to eat it raw.
Robert Rolfs, M.D: "Until we get to the bottom of this and find out how widespread it is, find out what brand it is, where the contamination is, for the short term, I'd suggest people not eat raw spinach."
So far, Utah has eleven reported cases of E. coli -- three in Salt Lake County, two in Tooele, two in Utah County, one in Bear River, and three in Weber and Morgan Counties. Seven were serious enough to be hospitalized.
