Calgary daycare E. coli outbreak brings supply chain, inspections into question

While health inspectors and labs investigate an E. coli outbreak in Calgary daycares, one food supply expert suspects the issue could have come from further up the supply chain.

While health inspectors and laboratories investigate what is one of the worst food-related E. coli outbreaks in Canada, one food supply expert suspects the issue is likely to have come from further up the supply chain.

On Sept. 4, Alberta Health Services declared an outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bacteria, closing 11 daycares in the Calgary area.

On Tuesday, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Mark Joffe confirmed earlier messaging that the epidemiology of the case points to a central kitchen that served the daycares.

“The kitchen was closed and an investigation began immediately,” Joffe said, noting inspectors collected food samples from the kitchen and leftovers from the daycares the next day.

Those samples are under analysis at provincial labs as part of the investigation that includes interviews with everyone affected by the outbreak, to find out what they ate.

On Tuesday, 264 lab-confirmed cases were linked to the outbreak, resulting in a total of 37 hospitalizations and 22 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a severe kidney and blood complication. Canada typically sees 400 cases of E. coli in a year.

Sylvain Charlebois of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, said investigators should be casting a wider net.

“When you look at a facility like that (central kitchen) serving so many people, you have to look up the food chain to see whether or not some issues could have erupted,” he told Global News. “You need to talk to suppliers, understand how they’re managing risks on their end before anything is shipped to the company itself, the kitchen itself.