Released: September 19, 2006

Killer bacteria hunted in California fields

Source: By Dan Vergano and Judy Keen, USA Today

Elizabeth Rhodes, a 22-year-old senior at Morehead State University in Kentucky, loves spinach. “I put it in everything,” she says. When she became violently ill in the early morning of Aug. 31, she didn’t suspect the spinach she’d had a couple of nights earlier. “I noticed that the spinach tasted different, but I thought it was just the dressing,” she says.

A friend insisted on taking her to the emergency room. “But it was more scary once the nurses were like, ‘This is the worst we’ve seen; she’s really bad off,’ ” Rhodes says. “And this was after they had given me morphine and I was still in such pain.”

Rhodes was one of 114 people in 21 states who have been sickened since Aug. 23 in a deadly outbreak of E. coli that claimed the life of a Wisconsin woman. Federal officials are inspecting farms in California’s Salinas Valley, nicknamed “America’s Salad Bowl,” in an urgent search to find the source of a deadly bacteria.

The cases include 18 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome, which causes kidney failure, and 60 hospitalizations, the FDA announced Monday night.

There’s no evidence that bags of spinach believed to have carried the deadly E. coli 0157:H7 bacterium were tampered with, says Susan Bro of the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA is advising people not to eat fresh spinach “until further notice.”

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