Chipotle has said it will reopen the 43 restaurants it closed in the US Northwest amid an E. coli outbreak that left about 40 people feeling sick.
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Others said they will never go back to the restaurant.
Tests of food at the Mexican food chain have come back negative for E. coli, and officials have concluded there’s no ongoing risk.
Rather, it’s to the contrary, they said. “Any products that were unique to the Northwest, believe me, was tested”, Dr. Scott Lindquist, of the Washington Department of Health, said. The company says none of its employees in Washington or OR had E. coli infections, an indicator that food was contaminated before it entered the restaurants.
Chipotle has said the OR and Washington restaurants will open “in the coming days”. “We are leaving no stone unturned in terms of finding ways to improve upon our practices”.
“It looks like it came from somewhere in the distribution line”, Modie said.
But is Chipotle’s response all that aggressive?
(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson). Pedestrians walk past a still-closed Chipotle restaurant Monday, November 9, 2015, in Seattle. All of them have been deep-cleaned, sanitized and supplied with all new ingredients. “And that’s what drives me insane”.
That was good news to Eddie Black, 60, who said he usually eats at Chipotle two or three times a week.
The Oregon Health Authority had advised Chipotle to throw out all of the food at its restaurants in the state and sanitize each facility before reopening the restaurants.
Of the more than 1,000 potential cases each year in King County, only a handful are confirmed as food-related outbreaks, he said.
Most people don’t realize just how common outbreaks of foodborne illnesses are, and the public is dangerously unprepared to deal with them, according to an Associated Press report. In Washington, one man got sickened by E. coli after eating at Chipotle on October 24, reports said.
Lindquist said he expects Chipotle will reopen the 43 restaurants it closed in Washington and OR by Wednesday OR Thursday. Several food items were collected from Chipotle’s locations and sent for testing to the FDA lab. Meanwhile inside, a uniformed crew wiped down countertops and equipment.
Health officials say they haven’t determined a cause of the outbreak that started last month.
But the department said from now on they will do a better job of notifying the public about these outbreaks. With Chipotle recently engulfed in controversy surrounding a recent E. coli outbreak, Detwiler could not help but notice the irony.
A Seattle attorney who specializes in food-safety cases and whose daughter was a frequent customer of the Chipotle in the earlier case was upset when he heard about that outbreak.
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“Unfortunately, change is incremental in all human endeavors”, Marler said.
