Last week the news covered a story of chicken livers contaminated with Salmonella Heidelberg. They were labeled as “ready-to-eat” but the livers had been braised such that from the outside they looked cooked but the insides were coolly raw. The outbreak had been going on in New York and New Jersey for two months and we were approaching fifty cases without a solid lead when two public health students, working as interns in our office, cracked the case. Interviewing cases is not a glamorous task, in fact it is downright monotonous. We employ a 17-page shotgun questionnaire to the approximate 1000 annual cases of Salmonella that occur in NYC annually in order to elicit suspect food items. To accomplish this task we have a team of MPH students dial the cases and beg their indulgence as we plunge into the twenty-minute interview. The students make the calls one aisle over from my cubicle, so I overhear them as they repeat the same questions to every case. Questions like “have you any eaten any stuffed, frozen chicken products, such as chicken Kiev or chicken Cordon Bleu?” So when two students, classmates and friends, shared the uncommon mention of chicken liver we had a new lead. Chicken and eggs are of course standard questions but we don’t usually ask about individual chicken parts, such as hearts and livers. The next day a third person mentioned chopped liver. We dispatched a food inspector to the store to retrieve the chicken livers. At the city’s Public Health Lab they were able to grow the same Salmonella species (serotype Heidelberg) from the cooked chicken livers. A week later the molecular results came back, a perfect match to the strain causing the outbreak. The chicken livers were recalled and outbreak was stopped. Two new disease detectives earned their badges.
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