Jeff Benedict

And one of the primary doctors at Children's Hospital in Seattle, when he saw that there were a number of children that had come in with these symptoms, mainly in their stomach and the throwing up, the diarrhea, the bloody diarrhea, he was immediately alarmed because of the number.

And they kept coming.

One of the things that helped them early was the recognition that the victims who were showing up at the hospital were all children.

And that tells you something.

And it's like trying to solve a puzzle and you start looking backwards.

Okay, where did these children eat?

And it didn't take them long to start turning their focus to fast food restaurants in the Pacific Northwest, particularly around the greater Seattle area.

And step by step, they got to Jack in the Box.

Very little.

If you took a poll at that time on any public street in any major city in the U.S.

and asked, what is E. coli, most people would just look at you like, what?

They'd never even heard the term.

Back then, there hadn't really been a national outbreak of E. coli.

There'd been a few very small cases that had been studied by the medical profession, but most people, including the medical establishment, were unfamiliar with this.

And so the hospital is sort of scrambling around, but they don't really know what they're dealing with.

Not much.

If you think about it in today's terms...

You can go to a grocery store in any state in America, and if you buy meat or poultry, there's stickers on the outside that warn you to cook them to the proper temperature and handling instructions and all that.

I mean, at Thanksgiving, when you buy a turkey, there's warnings on the outside about the things that can make you sick if you don't store it and cook it properly.

The federal government does that well now, but then those things didn't exist.