Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This episode discusses the death of several children. Please use discretion.
We saw some blood in his stool, and we were also noticing decreased urine output. But the bloody diarrhea was, I mean, that was, as you can imagine, that was alarming.
This is Darren Detweiler. In early 1993, he was living just north of Seattle with his wife and their two children. In late January, their 16-month-old, Riley, got sick and they took him to the hospital.
They started on my V fluids and, you know, just sitting there in that hospital, which strangely was across the street from his daycare center. sitting there with him, holding him on my lap for much of this when he was, you know, with his IV. And there was a sense of, oh, this is going to be fine. We're just going to pump through full of fluids and it'll be fine.
But everything escalated so quickly.
Riley wasn't getting any better. The doctors decided that he should be airlifted to Seattle Children's Hospital.
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Chapter 2: What unusual symptoms did children experience in January 1993?
And step by step, they got to Jack in the Box.
Jack in the Box is one of the oldest fast food chains in the country. 27 of the 37 sick children had eaten there. The top public health official in the state, a man named John Kobayashi, contacted Jack in the Box headquarters and said they had a problem, a potential E. coli outbreak. At that time, what is known about E. coli?
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.
E. coli is a kind of bacteria that can be found in the intestines of people and animals. There are many different strains of E. coli, and many don't cause any harm. But some can be deadly, including one called E. coli 0157 H7.
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.
One of the few things that they did know was that most people at the time got E. coli from eating undercooked ground beef. State epidemiologist John Kobayashi asked Jack in the Box how they cooked their hamburgers. They said that they made sure to cook them to an internal temperature of 140 degrees, which was the federal regulation.
But one year earlier, John Kobayashi had raised the Washington state required cooking temperature for ground beef from 140 degrees to 155 degrees. And Jack in the Box had just admitted that they hadn't been doing that. At the time, what was the USDA doing in terms of food safety?
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.
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Chapter 3: How did doctors identify the source of the outbreak?
And so they made the decision to essentially ignore the Washington state regulation and stick with the nationwide regulation.
Bill found something else. Before the outbreak, a Jack in the Box employee sent a complaint to corporate headquarters. Quote, Jack in the Box management replied, quote, we would like to acknowledge the time and effort you have taken to contribute to the success of Jack in the Box by enclosing this pen.
Usually you don't find smoking guns in these kinds of cases. Bill found, basically found two of them.
Jack in the Box's lawyer was a man named Bob Piper. In early 1995, he and Bill met at a hotel in Seattle, along with representatives from Jack in the Box's insurance company, to try and negotiate a settlement for Brianne Kiner's family.
What's interesting about Bill is he didn't have a lot of experience negotiating. And, you know, the insurance companies have powerful lawyers, and they have a lot of them. And they do settlement stuff all the time. So again, he's negotiating against or with people that are also older than him, more experienced than him. They're backed by big companies. Bill's kind of out there.
He's really kind of on his own. But Bill was armed with information. You know, he knew more than they did. about every aspect of the case. He knew more about E. coli. He knew how it worked.
At the time, the biggest personal injury settlement in the state was $10 million. Bill was hoping to settle Brianne's case for even more, in part because he thought Brianne deserved it, and also he wanted the food industry to finally start taking E. coli and food safety seriously, and he thought this would set a precedent they couldn't ignore. His opening demand was $100 million.
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Chapter 4: What role did Jack in the Box play in the E. coli outbreak?
Bill Marler kept practicing law and made a niche for himself in food safety law.
Back in the mid-90s, late 90s, E. coli outbreaks linked to hamburger and recalls of hamburger were super common occurrences. They were happening all the time. And it just took a while for sort of the cost of that to get absorbed into the system to the point where the system finally just said, okay, we'll fix it. And so they started doing a variety of interventions to make hamburgers safer.
They developed a vaccine that is sometimes used by some cattlemen. And essentially... What used to be 90-plus percent of my work became, in the early 2000s, just absolutely disappeared. And most of the E. coli cases that we see now are leafy greens, romaine lettuce. That's kept us, unfortunately, really busy. This pathogen, E. coli 0157, has become an environmental pathogen.
It is in the environment, and you see it in outbreaks linked to romaine lettuce and sprouts and even flour. And we seldom have E. coli outbreaks linked to hamburger. We seldom have recalls of hamburger-linked E. coli, they just don't happen.
And, you know, it's one of those rare instances where, you know, humans saw a disaster, did something about it, and it actually has turned out better than you could have expected.
Bill Marler has represented thousands of clients over the past 30 years, cases dealing with E. coli, salmonella, listeria, and hepatitis. Bill often says he begs the food industry to, quote, put me out of business.
In our next episode, the story of how a group of young men volunteered to eat food laced with things like formaldehyde, borax, and salicylic acid every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and how they paved the way for the first major food safety laws in America. They were called the Poison Squad.
Jeff Benedict's book is Poisoned, the true story of the deadly E. coli outbreak that changed the way Americans eat. We'll have a link in the show notes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, and Lena Sillison.
Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Sederborg. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus.
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