Amid McDonald's, other outbreaks, IIT food safety lab studies causes of pathogenic foodborne illness
BEDFORD PARK, Ill. (CBS) -- One person is dead and at least 75 have fallen sick from the E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounder hamburgers.
These illnesses follow the deadly listeria outbreak linked to Boar's Head deli meats.
This all demands the question—how safe is our food, and what is being done to make it safer? The Institute for Food Safety and Health at the Illinois Institute of Technology is studying what causes such pathogenic outbreaks in the food supply for answers.
Work in the labs at the IFSH in southwest suburban Bedford Park is centered around learning more about why some food products make people sick—and what can be implemented to make sure they don't. In one project under way when CBS News Chicago visited, very small pieces of an apple that researchers monitored for bacteria as they dried.
Dr. Alvin Lee leads IFSH, and said such studies directly relate to the McDonald's outbreak happening now.
"To try and determine how pathogens behave in foods," Lee said. "Once we know how they behave in foods, it gives us much more information in terms of how we control them."
Lee is a microbiologist and virologist with more than 20 years' research experience. He was asked if such outbreaks as the ones involving McDonald's and Boar's Head are happening more often, or if they are just making headlines about them more often.
"We are seeing more outbreaks, partially because the regulators are doing their work too," said Lee. "They test more frequently. They are actually capturing all the results from incidences as well."
Investigators are working to confirm if slivered onions or beef patties in the McDonald's burgers are the source of the E. coli outbreak. Preliminary findings show the onions are most likely.
As the Food and Drug Administration works to determine if the onions were served or sold at other businesses, other major fast-food chains are pulling onions from some of their locations—while stressing they had no indications of illness.
"Onions are sort of an emerging food product that has really been in the last five, six years linked to more and more foodborne illness," said Bill Marler of Marler Clark, The Food Safety Law Firm.
Marler has worked for decades as a foodborne illness lawyer—representing victims of outbreaks across the country.
"It's likely that this outbreak was caused by fecal-contaminated water," Marler said.
He said he believes the changes he saw in the meat industry years ago need to make their way into farming and produce.
"This is the kind of outbreak that should focus congresses and the FDA and industries attention on solving the problem which is fecal contamination in water that is being applied to crops," Marler said. "The industry and government regulations have not kept up."
So is today's food supply more dangerous and more contaminated, or is research getting better at figuring out what is wrong with it?
"I think it's more the latter," Lee said. "Our food supply is safe. We are doing a lot more things these days to detect them and we have more information these days about what is actually happening."
As for what could be in the future in terms of prevention, Lee said new technology could be pressed into use.
"There are ways we can use technologies maybe like artificial intelligence and things like that to predict certain things from happening," Lee said, "so we could actually take action prior to people getting sick."