Dozens reportedly fall ill after eating at Chipotle
Officials suspect norovirus as more than 120 students sickened at Boston College
Things are going from bad to worse at Chipotle Mexican Grill.
The number of Boston College students who became ill, nearly all of them after eating at a Chipotle restaurant near campus, grew to more than 120 on Wednesday. Dr. Thomas Nary, director of university health services, announced Wednesday that the symptoms are consistent with norovirus. A spokeswoman for the Boston Public Health Commission said the illnesses were likely caused by norovirus, but final test results aren’t expected for a couple of days. Norovirus is the most common cause of gastrointestinal illness in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, infecting as many as 21million people and resulting in as many as 800 deaths in a year.
The illnesses led to the temporary closure of the restaurant in the city’s Cleveland Circle neighbourhood. City officials said a restaurant employee was sick during a shift last week.
A spokesman for Denver-based Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. has said the Boston College illnesses are likely an isolated case of norovirus and unrelated to the E. coli cases that have turned up in nine states. The restaurant chain has closed stores in the Pacific Northwest and did exten- sive cleaning at stores in California, Minnesota, New York and Ohio that were linked to the E. coli outbreak.
“We do not have any evidence to suggest that this incident is related to the previous E. coli incident,” the company said in a statement. “There are no confirmed cases of E. coli connected to Chipotle in Massachusetts.”
Health officials in Boston said several violations had been found in that store during an inspection on Monday, including meat held at an improper temperature and an employee who was working while sick.
At a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. investment conference in New York on Tuesday, Chipotle said it might be forced to raise prices next year to cover the costs of an enhanced food safety program and business lost because of the closed stores and slumping sales. Last week, it filed a statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission saying that the E. coli problem would push down sales in stores that had been open at least a year by as much as 11 per cent in the fourth quarter.
The source of the tainted food that caused the E. coli outbreaks at Chipotle has not been disclosed.
Chipotle is not the only business that has confronted food safety problems during the holiday season. Costco, Starbucks and Walmart have been involved in a recall of prepared foods containing celery that may have carried a different strain of E. coli than the one involved in Chipotle’s cases.