Just about thirty-four years ago today six-year-old Lauren Rudolph was about to eat an undercooked, E. coli O157:H7-tainted hamburger at a San Diego area Jack-in-the-Box. She would die just after Christmas.
Lauren would be the first of four children to die. Eventually, over 700 people were sickened across five states. Nearly 200 people were hospitalized, many suffering life-altering complications.
The common denominators; hamburger with a pathogenic bacteria, that at the time was perfectly legal to sell, and hamburger that was not fully cooked to kill the bacteria before it killed the customer. Changes were made. Post 1993 the USDA determined that E.
coli O157:H7 would be considered and adulterant in ground beef and the FDA Food Code provided new guidelines for food safety practices in retail and food service establishments. According to the Food Code, ground meats such as hamburger would now be cooked to an internal temperature of at least 155°F (68°C) for 15 seconds to ensure harmful bacteria are killed. Un addition, the USDA recommended cooking ground beef to a slightly higher internal temperature of 160°F (71°C) to ensure all bacteria are effectively eliminated.
The combination of banning E. coli O157:H7 in ground beef and increasing cook temperatures, drove the number of E. coli O157:H7 case linked hamburger consumption down – significantly down.
Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS), a particularly nasty outcome of the infection, used to be called “The Hamburger Disea.