© George Nazmi Bebawhi/ShutterstockIn 2015 and 2016, E. coli-tainted flour sickened dozens of people in the United States, most of whom had eaten raw dough or batter while baking.
The seemingly innocuous pantry staple can harbor strains of E. coli bacteria that make people sick. And, while not a particularly common source of foodborne illness, flour has been implicated in two E. coli outbreaks in the United States and Canada in the last two years.
Pinning down tainted flour as the source of the U.S. outbreak, which sickened 63 people between December 2015 and September 2016, was trickier than the average food poisoning investigation, researchers recount November 22 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Usually, state health departments rely on standard questionnaires to find a common culprit for a cluster of reported illnesses, says Samuel Crowe, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who led the study. But flour isn't usually tracked on these surveys. So when the initial investigation yielded inconclusive results, public health researchers turned to in-depth personal interviews with 10 people who had fallen ill.
Comment: (Nov. 22) While Qureshi was ordered to sign the Sex Offender's Register last year, the medical tribunal in Manchester concluded that erasing his name from the MedicalRegister 'would be disproportionate, punitive and not in the public interest'. He was instead suspended for a year: