Nancy Young > wrote in message >...
> kilikini wrote:
> >
> > This is a sincere question....
> >
> > How could the green onions cause that hepatitis outbreak? Would the pickers
> > of the onions have hepatitis or is the government just trying to protect a
> > huge corporation?
> >
> > Help please?
>
> They've already reported that a number of the workers have Hepatitis.
> And if the pickers were the problem, obviously a lot more people in
> a wider area would be affected than just one store in a chain.
>
> nancy

Sorry to, in effect, follow up to my own follow up, but I spent some
of my lunch break on the FDA and CDC web sites today.

On 11/21 the CDC released a report stating that as the restaurant
workers fell ill quite late in the outbreak, they could not have been
the source of the outbreak, although they could have been infectious
while working in the restaurant. A case-control study described there
pretty well pins down green onions as the source. The CDC's hypothesis
seems to be that green onions are a particularly good candidate for
being contaminated (they have been associated with other food-borne
illnesss outbreaks), and contaminated green onions combined with the
restaurant's food storage and service practices to cause this
outbreak. (Contaminated and uncontaminated onions may have been stored
together in buckets with shipping ice for as much as five days before
being processed into salsa, and the salsa may had a shelf life of as
many as three days.) The report includes a fairly detailed description
of the methods and preliminary analyses used in the study. I found it
convincing, but I'm not an epidemiologist or biostatistician. If you
want to read it yourself,
<http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm52d1121a1.htm>

-bwg