E coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders declared over: CDC
Matt Cardy/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The deadly E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders was declared over on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In total, 104 people reported falling ill across 14 states with about one-third of them being hospitalized, according to the CDC.
The true number of people who got sick was likely much higher because many people recover from E. coli without medical care and are never tested, the CDC noted.
Americans between ages 1 and 88 were affected in the outbreak, according to he CDC. Colorado had the greatest number of cases with at least 30 people falling ill. The state also reported one death.
An outbreak notice was first released by the CDC in late October. Evidence from health officials’ investigation at the time showed that slivered onions served on Quarter Pounders were a likely source of contamination.
Nearly all the people who fell ill and were interviewed by health officials reported eating at McDonald’s and the overwhelming majority remembered eating a menu item that contained the fresh, slivered onions, according to the CDC.
The fast food chain’s distributor of the onions, Taylor Farms, initiated a voluntary recall of the onions in late October. McDonald’s stopped using the ingredient and removed the Quarter Pounder entirely off the menu in a dozen states.
The latest reported illness was on Oct 21. All the confirmed cases occurred before the onions were recalled and the ingredient was taken off of the McDonald’s menu at some locations, according to health officials.
The fast-food chain is no longer serving the recalled onions and there “does not appear to be a continued food safety concern related to this outbreak,” the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday. The agency also noted that its investigation is now closed.
McDonald’s North America chief Impact officer Michael Gonda and chief supply chain officer Cesar Piña shared a message on Tuesday, saying the announcements from the CDC and FDA provide “certainty and validation” that the outbreak is over and the risk to the public has remained low since late October.
While the issue had been fully contained — and any contaminated product associated with this issue had been removed from our supply chain as of Oct. 22, 2024 — it can now be classified as “closed” and remediated,” the message read, in part.
Hum Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — As world leaders mourn the death of former President Jimmy Carter and remark on his political and policy legacy, doctors are remembering his efforts to prevent disease, and his legacy in furthering global public health.
The 39th president spent five decades working to eradicate a parasitic disease, helped organize a major-drug donation program, and made advancements addressing the mental health crisis in the U.S.
Dr. Julie Jacobson, currently a managing partner of the nonprofit Bridges to Development, helped to provide funding for the Carter Center’s work in the Americas, Nigeria and Ethiopia while she worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for over a decade.
“He was hugely influential, I think particularly for the diseases that most of the world doesn’t appreciate even exist,” Jacobson told ABC News of Jimmy Carter’s work. “He was a true champion for the neglected tropical diseases, which are some of the most common infections of people who live with the least resources. And he found these diseases and then really wanted to do something about them, and used his voice, his influence, his passion, to continue to push forward where others were really not interested.”
Near-eradication of Guinea worm disease
Following his loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982, a non-profit organization that “seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health,” according to the Center’s website.
Among the organization’s many efforts, the Carter Center helped spearhead a successful international campaign with the goal of eradicating dracunculiasis, also known as Guinea worm disease, a parasitic infection caused by consuming contaminated drinking water.
Water from ponds or other stagnant bodies of water can contain tiny crustaceans commonly known as water fleas, which in turn can be infected with Guinea worm larvae, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About one year after infecting a human host, the Guinea worm creates a blister on the skin and emerges from it, which can cause burning pain, fever and swelling, according to the CDC and the World Health Organization.
“Nobody else wanted to take it on,” Jimmy Carter told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos during a 2015 interview on “Good Morning America”. “So, I decided to take it on.”
In 1986, Guinea worm disease afflicted 3.5 million people every year in 21 African and Asian countries. Disease incidence has since been reduced by 99.99%, to just 14 “provisional” human cases in 2023, according to the Carter Center.
Jacobson said that success is even more remarkable because there are no vaccines available to prevent Guinea worm disease and no drugs to treat it. Tracking Guinea worm disease, according to Jacobson, involves following possible cases for a year to determine if they are infected, checking to see if infected humans have any infected water sources near them, and monitoring the community as a whole.
“To think that you could eradicate a disease without any tools is really still just a crazy idea, but he did it with perseverance and working with people in the grassroots within communities and putting together teams of people to go and work with people in those communities and empower the communities,” Jacobson said.
The Carter Center says if efforts are successful, Guinea worm disease could become the second human disease in history to be completely eradicated, after smallpox, and the first to be done without the use of a vaccine or medicine.
Carter told ABC News during the 2015 interview that eradicating the disease entirely was his goal: “I think this is going to be a great achievement for, not for me, but for the people that have been afflicted and for the entire world to see diseases like this eradicated.”
Mass drug distribution for river blindness
The Carter Center also works to fight other preventable diseases, including the parasitic infections schistosomiasis and lymphatic filariasis – more commonly known as snail fever and elephantiasis, respectively – as well as trachoma, which is one of the world’s leading causes of preventable blindness. It’s also working with the governments of Haiti and the Dominican Republic to eliminate lymphatic filariasis and malaria from the island of Hispaniola, which both countries share and which is “the last reservoir in the Caribbean for both diseases,” according to the Carter Center.
Carter and his organization also played a part in organizing a major drug-donation program to help eliminate onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, which is transmitted to human through repeated bites of infected blackflies, according to the CDC.
Pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. had been implementing field studies in Africa which showed that the drug ivermectin was effective at treating river blindness in humans. The Carter Center partnered with Merck to mass-distribute ivermectin, brand name Mectizan, “as much as needed for as long as needed” in Africa and Latin America. To date, the Carter Center has assisted in distributing more than 500 million treatments of Mectizan, according to Merck.
In 1995, Carter negotiated a two-month cease-fire in Sudan to allow health care workers there to more safely help eradicate Guinea worm disease, prevent river blindness, and vaccinate children against polio.
“When we have known solutions, it is ethical to make sure they’re available to the people who need it most,” Dr. Usha Ramakrishnan, chair of the Department of Global Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told ABC News. “And that’s where we were with river blindness. There was a treatment, but improving access to medications, making it affordable, reaching the people they need was very much along the lines of the work [the Carter Center] was doing.”
Addressing mental health
Carter was also committed to tackling mental health issues. During his presidency, he created the Presidential Commission on Mental Health, which recommended a national plan to care for people with chronic mental illness.
Although it was never adopted as policy by the Reagan administration, the plan’s recommended strategies were adopted by some mental health advocacy groups to “make gains in the 1980s,” according to one study.
Carter also signed into law the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which provided funding to community mental health centers.
After his presidency, Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter continued working to improve access to mental health.
Ramakrishnan said the Carters’ work helped to reduce some of the stigma associated with mental health.
“There continues to be a lot of stigma, but they truly got it out [in] the conversation and mainstreaming mental health as an important aspect of health and well-being,” Ramakrishnan said. “There’s still a lot of challenges, and there are many capable people that they have mentored and trained who are carrying that mantle forward.”
(NEW YORK) — A deadly, undiagnosed disease that has been spreading in one region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) may be linked to malaria, health officials said Thursday.
As of Dec. 14, the latest date for which data is available, 592 cases have been reported with 37 confirmed deaths and 44 deaths under investigation, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the public health agency of the African Union.
Over the last week, 181 samples from 51 cases were tested in a laboratory, Dr. Ngashi Ngongo, Africa CDC chief of staff, said during a Thursday press briefing.
Laboratory testing showed 25 out of 29 tested were positive for malaria. Additionally, rapid testing showed 55 out of 88 patients were positive for malaria.
Ngashi said there are two hypotheses: The first is that the undiagnosed disease is severe malaria “on a background of malnutrition and viral infection” and the second is the disease is a viral infection “on a background of malaria and malnutrition.”
Malaria is a serious disease caused by a parasite that infects a certain type of mosquito, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Most people contract malaria after being bitten by an infected mosquito.
Most cases of malaria occur in sub-Saharan Africa, but it also occurs in parts of Oceania and in parts of Central and South America and Southeast Asia.
Malaria can be deadly if is not diagnosed and treated quickly, the CDC said.
What we know about the disease
The disease first appeared in a remote area in the province of Kwango, in the southwestern part of the DRC on the border with Angola, according to Africa CDC.
The first case was documented on Oct. 24. Patients have been experiencing flu-like symptoms including fever, headache, coughing and difficulty breathing as well as anemia, Africa CDC said during a press briefing earlier this month.
A plurality of cases, or 42.7%, have occurred in children under 5 years old. This age group also has the largest number of deaths, with 21 so far, data from Africa CDC shows. Children between ages 5 and 9 make up the second highest number of cases
Africa CDC said in a post on X earlier this month that it took five to six weeks after the first case was reported for local authorities to alert the national government, highlighting “gaps in Africa’s disease detection systems: limited surveillance, testing delays & weak lab infrastructure.”
-ABC News’ Youri Benadjaoud contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Some hospitals in the U.S. are seeing an increase in RSV and higher levels of “walking pneumonia” among young children despite overall respiratory illness activity remaining low nationally.
Cook Children’s Medical Centers in Texas reported a “steep increase” in children visiting the emergency room due to respiratory-related illnesses.
On Tuesday, at the health system’s Fort Worth location alone, there were 572 patients — a near-record-high number — in the emergency department. Officials said the increase in hospital visits is due to a spread of RSV and walking pneumonia in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Additionally, University of North Carolina hospitals reported 40 walking pneumonia cases in the last week of October compared to no cases the same time last year.
Infectious disease specialists say that although parents should stay alert when it comes to respiratory illnesses spreading, this season also may also be marking a return to typical seasons seen before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s the calm before the storm,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a professor of medicine and infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, told ABC News. “It feels that there’s so much going on … that we almost forget about respiratory viruses, but they’re very regular. They’re kind of falling back into normal pre-pandemic cadence.”
Walking pneumonia seeing cyclical increase
So-called “walking pneumonia” is a respiratory tract bacterial infection caused by the bacteria Mycoplasma pneumoniae (M. pneumoniae), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Infections are generally mild, and people may seem better than expected for those with a lung infection, hence the term walking pneumonia, the CDC said. Sometimes serious complications, however, emerge requiring hospitalization.
For the week ending Nov. 2, the latest for which CDC data is available, 2.8% of all pneumonia-associated ED visits led to an M. pneumoniae diagnosis, up from just 2% at the end of September.
Rates were highest among those ages 1 and younger, making up 7.8% of all pneumonia-associated ED visits with an M. pneumoniae diagnosis for the week ending Nov. 2.
Experts say mycoplasma infections have a cyclical nature and tend to surge every three to seven years.
“Just like other respiratory viruses, there was not a lot of exposure during the pandemic years because of social distancing and people staying away from each other, and so we’re catching up to that,” Chin-Hong said. “Mycoplasma may also be one of these things where you’re kind of seeing the perfect storm. So, it comes back every four or five years and people are getting back to their normal lives.”
RSV activity returning to pre-pandemic levels
Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is a common respiratory virus with most children affected by their second birthday, according to the CDC.
Although it typically causes mild, cold-like symptoms and most people recover in one to two weeks, it can be a serious infection for infants and older adults, resulting in hospitalization, the CDC said.
Current levels remain lower than those seen at the same time during the past few seasons.
“While RSV activity is increasing in certain regions, particularly among young children, it’s important to remember that we’re seeing a return to more typical pre-pandemic patterns,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
“This year’s season is starting later and progressing more slowly compared to the past few years, which were marked by earlier and more severe outbreaks,” he added.
Brownstein pointed out that while national levels remain low, certain regions in the southern U.S. and eastern U.S. are seeing localized surges, especially among young children.
When to go to the emergency room
Chin-Hong said if symptoms are mild, including low-grade fever, dry cough, sore throat, headaches and mild aches and pains, parents can keep their children home and contact their primary care provider with any questions.
However, when symptoms become more severe including difficulty breathing, a long-lasting fever or lethargy, then it might be time to visit the emergency room.
If you have “a child who’s having a cough for more than seven days and maybe they’re not shaking that off, then you worry about something like walking pneumonia,” Chin-Hong said.
How to prevent RSV and walking pneumonia
To prevent RSV, there are three vaccines approved for adults ages 60 and older as well as some adults between the ages 50 and 59 who are at higher risk. There is also a vaccine available for pregnant women between 32 weeks and 36 weeks of pregnancy.
For babies under eight months, there are two monoclonal antibody products available. Monoclonal antibodies are proteins manufactured in a lab that mimic the antibodies the body naturally creates when fighting an infection.
“For walking pneumonia. or mycoplasma, there’s no vaccine for that, but by getting vaccines for RSV, COVID [and] influenza, you reduce the probability of co-infections that can make things worse,” Chin-Hong said.
Experts also recommended applying lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as wearing a mask in spaces with poor ventilation.
“Practicing good hygiene, like frequent hand-washing and covering coughs and sneezes, remains essential in preventing the spread of respiratory infections,” Brownstein said.
