A Clostridial or Enterococcal Food Poisoning Outbreak

A SEMINAE on food poisoning, Cockburn (1) reported that Clostridium welchii was the cause of 1 percent of more than 55,000 food poisoning incidents in England and Wales dur¬ ing 1949-58.A high of 93 incidents for this period was recorded in 1957, mainly in group outbreaks.Most of these outbreaks were as¬ sociated with cooked meat or meat products which had been left at room temperature for hours before serving.In contrast to the ex¬ perience in England, there is a paucity of re¬ ports of clostridial food poisoning in the United States.McClung reported four outbreaks in 1945 (2).Hart and associates described an outbreak which affected more than 100 passen¬ gers on a train who had eaten a turkey dinner highly contaminated with O. perfringens and enterococci (3).The outbreak reported in this paper occurred among persons who had attended a reunion dinner on Saturday, September 26, 1959.On the following Monday, the caterer who had pre¬ pared the food notified the Berkeley City Health Department that a large number of per¬ sons had become ill after the dinner.The host¬ ess had refrigerated the remaining food.The menu consisted of roast beef, barbecue sauce, chili beans (red beans with ground meat), tossed green salad with Eoquef ort cheese dress¬ ing, French bread with garlic and butter spread, and apple pie, all furnished by the caterer.