Wretched days end?

Chipotle E. coli woe may be over: CDC

Chipotle Mexican Grill’s $3 billion E. coli nightmare could end as soon as this week.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been investigating the outbreak of the nasty bacteria at the popular chain, could close its investigation as early as Thursday, it said.

“If we went several weeks to a month, or longer, with no new cases beyond Nov. 10, the CDC could close this case,” Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the federal agency, told The Post.

Some Seattle and Portland, Ore., customers got sick after eating at Chipotle in October, the CDC said, attributing the illness to E. coli.

Since then until Nov. 10, the CDC reported that 47 people in nine states who ate at a Chipotle restaurant contracted E. coli.

In the meantime, com pany’s shares have lost nearly $3 billion in market value.

They closed Wednesday at $549.50, up 1.3 percent.

Chipotle executives want nothing more than to be released from the cloud of an active investigation.

Top management who spoke at an investment conference this week about the situation said they want to launch a marketing campaign “inviting customers to come back,” but they are first waiting for the “CDC to call this all over.”

Chipotle execs did not endear themselves to the CDC when they described the agency’s handling of the investigation as “unusual and even unorthodox.”

On Wednesday, the health protection organization fired back.

“We are not doing anything unusual here,” Skinner said, adding that “we have always investigated and reported E. coli in this manner.”

The CDC could close its investigation without uncovering the source of the outbreak, Skinner said.

If it does, it would be only the second time in nine years that the CDC would have closed a case without knowing the source of an infection, according to data on its Web site.

The bacteria involved in the Chipotle case are so uncommon that the CDC has encountered them only three times in the last 19 years.