'More could have been at risk' - E.coli inquiry

Mar 10 2008 By Madeleine Brindley, Media Wales

HUNDREDS more children could have become infected with the potentially lethal E.coli O157 infection if cold meats supplied by William Tudor had not been taken off school menus in the first few days of the 2005 outbreak.

School meals were identified as the possible source of the outbreak two days after the first cases of E.coli poisoning in children emerged.

And by the end of the first weekend of the outbreak - September 18, 2005 - it emerged that the roast dinners at the affected first schools, in Merthyr Tydfil and Rhondda Cynon Taf, had been made from cold cooked meats served to children with warm gravy.

The first documented source of an E.coli outbreak in the UK in 1987 was found to be cold sliced turkey.

The following day emergency prohibition orders were issued against school supplier John Tudor & Son because of the significant risk of cross contamination from using one vacuum-packaging machine at the Bridgend Industrial Estate factory. The business was shut down a day later.

However, the E.coli public inquiry has previously heard that Bridgend environmental health officers had continued to allow Tudor to trade in the years and months before the outbreak despite the butcher having only one vac-packer and the presence of other considerable risks of cross-contamination.

Dr Roland Salmon, the director of the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre Wales and a consultant epidemiologist with the National Public Health Service for Wales, today said: "The actions to remove the food borne source taken when they were could plausibly be said to have prevented hundreds of further cases."

He also told the start of the penultimate week of the E.coli public inquiry: "Cooked meats are a food stuff that are firmly in the frame for this germ. Once we had established that the roast dinners were not a raw joint of meat cooked in a school oven, but a cooked joint from a central source, this started to make sense.

"This was larger than other outbreaks I'd dealt with in the meat supply chain and, from evidence we have already heard, the total of infringements and poor practice that was apparent [at Tudor's] was greater."

Even though cooked meat was removed from the school menus and Tudor's factory was shut down early in the outbreak, more than 150 people, mainly children, were affected. The outbreak, which lasted four months and was Wales' worst and the second largest in the UK, killed five-year-old Deri Primary School pupil Mason Jones.