Food Poisoning Law Blog

Update to the entry below: There are now 21 confirmed cases of hepatitis A associated with the Chipotle restaurant in La Mesa, California.

The number of hepatitis A cases associated with Chipotle in La Mesa, California has risen to 18. Health officials are still looking for the source of the outbreak.  According to the San Diego County Health Department, all 26 food handlers identified to date by the restaurant have tested negative for active hepatitis A infection. Given the long incubation period for hepatitis A (10 to 50 days), this is not conclusive evidence that a food handler did not contaminate food eaten by those who have tested positive for hepatitis A. The negative test results do make it a little more likely that the source of the outbreak is a food product that was contaminated before it got to the La Mesa Chipotle restaurant.  The long incubation period for hepatitis A will make it extremely difficult to pinpoint a specific food product that is the source of the outbreak.

Even if the source of a hepatitis A outbreak is never found, other microbiological evidence along with epidemiological evidence can be sufficient to find a restaurant liable for money damages. In this outbreak the microbiological proof consists of the tests run to determine the people were sickened by hepatitis A.  But just knowing that the people have hepatitis A does not link the illnesses to Chipotle. Health officials made the connection between the illnesses and the La Mesa Chipotle with epidemiological evidence. 

Epidemiology is part detective work and part statistical analysis. It involves trying to piece together potential sources (stores, restaurants, and food products as well as water and animal exposures) and determine if they are the source of the illness that the microbiologists were able to identify.  Epidemiologists develop and test hypotheses to determine if there is a common link between the people with the same foodborne illness. They question foodborne illness patients in order to determine if they ate at the same place, ate the same food, got sick at the same time, lived in the same area, etc. They also visit suspected outbreak sources and do further testing. By a process of elimination, epidemiologists rule out other sources until they can settle on a common link.

In this case, epidemiologists discovered that the people with hepatitis A had eaten at the La Mesa Chipotle within a specific time period.

For more information about proving a foodborne illness case, please see our previous entry, “Proving Foodborne Illness: How Lawyers Evaluate Defective Food Product Cases.”