Detectives close in on its lair
lab would be used in a technique called gene sequencing. It would tell scientists whether the listeria germ in the samples matched that of the outbreak strain, known as ST6.
The batch of samples would take seven hours prepare.
Nomsa Tau points to a 1.5kg tub of Ricoffy in the centre’s kitchen. “There was no time to eat or drink, she says. “I ran back here to gobble a muffin. But we were running on pure adrenaline.”
It was three o’clock in the morning on February 3 when researchers returned to the NICD with the samples from the Polokwane factory.
Among the team that had visited the plant were representatives from the NICD, the department of agriculture, farming and fisheries, listeria and food safety experts from the World Health Organisation and environmental health practitioners. The themselves for their babies’ deaths. They, and not the government officials or failing systems involved, will be judging themselves guilty. NICD’s Juno Thomas led the team.
When they arrived at the plant, two police vans were waiting in the parking lot — just in case.
Thomas explains: “We suspected we may run into trouble — so we arranged that the police meet us there. The environmental health practitioners had been refused entry twice before.”
The Enterprise staff there were anything but friendly. “Management was openly hostile towards me,” Thomas recalls. “I felt uncomfortable.”
Thomas’s views on the dangers of cold meat were well known. She had done many media interviews in which she warned South Africans that ready-to-eat meats, like polony, had been serial offenders in previous outbreaks of listeria.
At the factory, a staff member snarled at her: “People don’t know what they’re talking about. There’s absolutely no way it can be polony.”
Because in the cases of both listeriosis and Life Esidimeni there are, indeed, none so blind as those who see, but choose not to.
The next day at the NICD, there was intense panic. Juno Thomas had her hands in her
hair.
She needed a certain type of solution to allow the listeria in the samples collected from the Enterprise factory to grow, so that she could test whether they matched the ST6 strain.
But South Africa had run out of the nutrient-rich medium.
“For the first time ever, there was a national shortage of selective agar,” Thomas says. “Selective agar has vitamins, chemicals and antibiotics that kill off any other bacteria that could be in the sample — so only listeria will grow in the petri dish.”
Thomas and her team were forced to wait seven days for a new batch to be imported. And then it got stuck at customs. They were at risk of losing all the samples.
“If you don’t culture the sample quickly, other bacteria could overgrow the listeria — and we would have to start again,” she explains.
“We didn’t think we could get access to the factory again.”
Aweek later, the 104 glass vials with the extracted DNA from the factory samples rattled against one another as exhausted medical scientist Tau walked up to the gene sequencing unit on the hill at the NICD.
In a room at the back of the unit, the NICD’s secret weapon had been doggedly decoding the genetic code of food and environmental samples.
The secret weapon was a gene sequencing machine named after the 007 secret agent, James Bond.
Tau was cautious, but hopeful. “You can’t really know if you’ve got anything until the sequencing is done,” she says.
Like its silver-screen namesake, this secret agent has state-of-the-art technology at its service. But it takes time. Five more days would pass before Thomas and her team would know whether they had stopped this villain in its tracks.
Thomas got the call at half past 11 on Saturday night, March 3. She had been waiting all day. Her husband, daughter and cat were all asleep.
The NICD’s bioinformatics scientist Mushal Allam had finally finished analysing the genetic information. “We were expecting the results sooner, but Mushal was visiting his family in Sudan, and the internet was too slow to process the information quickly.
“There was nothing I could do. I was just watching the phone,” Thomas says.
More than 30% of the samples taken at Enterprise tested positive for Listeria monocytogenes. And a quarter of those samples contained the outbreak strain. The case was closed.
The health minister was the first person Thomas called with the news. On Sunday, just after midnight, Aaron Motsoaledi answered his phone, carefully listened to Thomas, and announced: “We have to inform the public. We’re holding a press conference later today.”
BListeria is the perfect villain, says US food safety legal expert Bill Marler. Marler arrived in South Africa last week to team up with legal firm Richard Spoor Inc in a class action suit against Tiger Brands, which owns Enterprise Foods.
“Listeria has been watching humans develop for years,” he quips. “It saw our fancy refrigeration systems and thought: ‘Ha! I’ve got you now.’ ” ack at the NICD, the hum of the gene sequencing machine is getting louder.
Not far from the institute, people are lining up at grocery stories to return their polony. It’s about two weeks after the health minister’s Sunday press conference.
The customers don’t only have Enterprise cold meats in their plastic bags. Many have brought Rainbow Chicken polony too. The health department recalled Rainbow Chicken Limited’s cold meat products along with those of Enterprise Foods, as the NICD had found listeria in Rainbow’s food as well.
What the gene sequencing machine is doing is testing whether the listeria in the Rainbow polonies is the killer strain, ST6.
And for those results, Juno Thomas is holding her breath. And the country too.