Something else that you can't eat

Seems like only yesterday that the Great American Spinach Scare was in full swing, with the grisly specter of Escherichia coli and its portents - severe diarrhea, projectile vomiting, kidney failure, and, uh, death - looming over the national psychescape. Well, that threat came and went, only to replaced by the Menace of the Green Onions (or the Scallions, for the hoity-toity). This time, on a corporate level, it's Taco Bell that's feeling queasy:

As many as 84 people in seven states have been confirmed as having the strain of E. coli bacteria involved in an outbreak that may be linked to Taco Bell restaurants, officials said Friday.

South Carolina and Utah are the latest states to report outbreaks of the illness. State and federal agencies are still trying to pin down the source, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the vast majority of the reported cases had eaten at Taco Bell restaurants before falling ill.

Dr. Greg Braden of the CDC said his agency and state health departments have not seen any other sources of the illness and are zeroing in on Taco Bell and its suppliers of green onions.

For those keeping score at home, those states reporting outbreaks in the as-yet-undeclared-epidemic are New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, South Carolina and Utah.

What's on the radarscope here at Waveflux is the supply chain: a New Jersey food distribution warehouse operated by McLane Foodservice, a food processing plant also in Jersey and operated by Ready Pac, the grower Boskovich Farms which is located in California. If any or all of these nodes in the great green onion chain of being also supplies this foodstuff to other restaurants, or to other food manufacturers, or to groceries, then we have a much larger issue - not that scallions are as popular as spinach, but the worry of wider contamination is there.

Now as before, it's best to remind people that you can't just wash E. coli contamination away, so please don't try. Best to do without green onions for a while.

(Urgh. Cross-posted.)