The Palm Beach Post reports this morning that Amber Dycus, 38, of Loxahatchee, Florida, went to the hospital after four days of illness. The doctors told her she was in acute kidney failure, hours from death. She endured six days of intensive care, multiple blood transfusions and, so far, 196 bags of plasma.

There are more treatments to come, and no signs yet that her kidney function is approaching normal. She feels lucky to be alive, but also very afraid - afraid of eating out, afraid of catching germs, afraid of never getting better.

Dycus desperately wants to know what did this to her. Her lawyer, Craig Goldenfarb, thinks the public ought to feel the same way.

A health department inquiry has resulted in the brief closure of a Royal Palm Beach restaurant where Dycus often ate. Inspectors found roaches, improper food temperatures, slime in the freezer and a dishwasher with almost no sanitizer in it. After a thorough cleaning and a tuneup on the dishwasher, the restaurant, Hilary & Sons, has reopened.

But was it really the source of her illness? A series of missed opportunities, miscommunications, delays, and no small measure of scientific uncertainty means there may never be a conclusive answer.

At Palms West last month, Dycus was diagnosed with hemolytic-uremic syndrome. It's an often fatal condition that happens when toxins cause red blood cells to shear apart and clog capillaries, shutting down the kidneys and leading to a buildup of waste in the blood.

It's associated with outbreaks of dangerous E.coli O157 food poisoning.

Normally, when E.coli O157 is suspected, the health department is notified immediately, so that a public health investigation can be launched.

Dycus said her doctors told her she must have eaten contaminated beef. She's grateful to them, and the nurses at Palms West, whom she says saved her life. But one thing they did not do was notify health authorities. A spokeswoman for Palms West said she could not comment.

It wasn't until Dycus contacted a lawyer, and her lawyer called the media, that a health inquiry began. By then, a month had passed, the foods Dycus had eaten had long since disappeared, and the ability to tell exactly what sickened her had become nearly impossible to discern.

Courtesy Nailsea Court

Who knows what goes on in these petting zoos in the U.K., Canada or the U.S., but it appears to be a mess. That’s why kids get sick every year.

A feature in tomorrow’s (today’s) Sunday Times alleges that E. coli O157 was found at a popular children’s petting zoo where dead animals were openly left to rot for weeks.

An undercover reporter who spent several weeks working as a volunteer at the unlicensed zoo discovered:

- Corpses of animals left to decompose near where visiting children play.

- Staff alternating between working with the animals and helping out in the visitors’ cafe, wearing the same clothes and shoes.

- Cafe food stored next to dirty parrot cages.

- No hot water for handwashing except in the cafe kitchen. One worker said there had been no hot water in the toilets for five years.

- Animals suffering with painful diseases and fed inappropriate food such as chocolate, lollipops and marshmallows.

-A swab taken from the faeces of a pig in a petting area showed E coli O157 in laboratory tests.

Last year several outbreaks at petting zoos across Britain caused a number of children to require medical treatment.

Tweddle Children’s Animal Farm, which opened in Blackhall Colliery, Co Durham, five years ago, is open seven days a week, all year round, and offers family season tickets to encourage repeat visits. Its website claims it is “bursting with animal fantasticness [sic].”

The farm has a range of exotic animals, such as monkeys, ostriches, buffalo, camels and lemurs. Yet it has no zoo licence, which is a legal requirement. Only regularly inspected zoos can have a licence.

The owners, Denise and Peter Wayman, could now be prosecuted under the Zoo Licensing Act and possibly under the Animal Welfare Act.

Mum-of-two Nina McLaren and her best friend Jodie Davies, both from Flint, became seriously ill after spending four days in the Spanish  resort of Benidorm last month.

In total, 14 holidaymakers contracted E.coli O157 after  stays in Benidorm during November.

Now travel lawyers at Irwin Mitchell, along with the Health Protection Agency, have launched an investigation into the source of the bacteria.

27-year-old Jodie told the Daily Post:

“The whole ordeal has been so distressing and painful that I really do wish we had never gone on holiday at all, it feels like we haven’t had one.  … To learn that there were so many other people that fell ill with the same thing is a real worry. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone so it’s a relief to hear that there is an investigation into where the source was.”
 

Today’s USA Today has a feature story today about meat served in the U.S. school lunch program and asks why certain batches of meat were excluded from a Salmonella-related recall and outbreak last year. What stands out is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture initially refused to match suppliers with positive test results as part of an analysis of 146,000 tests for bacteria including salmonella and E. coli.

USDA spokesman Bobby Gravitz wrote in an e-mail to USA Today that divulging their identities "would discourage companies from contracting to supply product for the National School Lunch Program and hamper our ability to provide the safe and nutritious foods to America's school children."

The newspaper appealed the USDA's decision. On Monday, the department released the names of the companies.

Although one company, Beef Packers Inc., appeared to stand out for the wrong reasons – in 2007 and 2008, its rate of positive tests for salmonella measured almost twice the rate that's typical for the nation's best-performing, high-volume ground beef producers, USA TODAY found -- the company kept getting government business. Since 2003, Beef Packers has garnered almost $60 million in contracts.

That sounds eerily familiar to what happened in the 2005 E. coli O157 outbreak in Wales that killed five-year-old Mason Jones (left) and sickened another 160 kids eating their school lunches, where buyers were quick to look the other way to save a pound. A public inquiry into the outbreak concluded the procurement process was, “seriously flawed in relation to food safety.”

One way to push food safety through the system is to demand continuous improvement from suppliers in terms of lowering the number of pathogen positive results. Any consumer-oriented company is going to insist on evidence of such steps or they will take their business elsewhere. Those overseeing school lunches for U.S. kids should demand the same.

What also stands out is that despite the focus on food safety of the feature and an additional heart-wrenching story about a child sickened 11 years ago through the school lunch program, a third story about a company trying to provide low-cost, healthier, natural (whatever that means) school lunches makes no mention of – food safety. The story cites a sample lunch that may now contain fresh lettuce and tomatoes in a wrap, rather than the canned or cooked variety of fruits and veggies. Fresh is great, but introduces an array of microbial food safety and supplier management issues that isn’t even mentioned. Sorta ironical.