Nestle workers may be hit by E.coli investigation

About half of the 550 workers at Nestle USA’s Danville plant may be out of work temporarily after the company halted the plant’s production and shipment of its recalled Toll House refrigerated cookie dough.

“Danville is the center of our refrigerated cookie dough expertise,” said Roz O’Hearn, a spokeswoman for the company. “We do have some employees in the facility that are affected by the recall. And we’re anticipating that we’re going to have temporary layoffs.”

Company officials recalled the product Thursday after learning of a Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation of an E. coli outbreak that may be related to the consumption of raw Toll House cookie dough.

The recall does not affect other Toll House products, including Toll House cookies that were prebaked, chocolate baking bars, all Toll House morsels and cocoa. Dreyer’s and Edy’s ice cream that contain Toll House cookie dough also are not affected.

The strain of E. coli that patients are suffering from has not been found in the company’s cookie dough, O’Hearn said. But officials decided to cut production and shipment as a safety measure.

“We take our responsibilities for the health and safety of our consumers very, very seriously,” O’Hearn said. “The most responsible thing we could do was to stop making cookie dough.”

O’Hearn said she was not sure how long the cookie dough production in Danville would be shut down.

“It’s a temporary layoff until we get this investigation concluded,” she said. “It’s distressing, and we understand that.”

The Danville facility makes the majority of the company’s Toll House cookie dough. The plant also makes refrigerated pasta, which hasn’t been affected by the E. coli outbreak. Production of the pasta will continue.

O’Hearn said that Nestle is working with the FDA and CDC in their investigations.

The FDA will do trace-back work at the Danville plant to look for the contamination’s source, said Mike Herndon, a spokesman for the FDA.

“We’re going to go to the firm and do our investigative work as we normally do,” Herndon said. “It may not be at that plant, but certainly that’s part of the process.”

Herndon said there’s no timeline for an investigation of an E. coli outbreak and no way of knowing when the investigation will end.

“They’re all unique,” he said.

E. coli is a potentially fatal bacterium illness with symptoms that include dehydration, abdominal cramping and diarrhea.

Sixty-five cases nationwide and two cases in Virginia of a specific strain of E. coli have been reported across 29 states, since March, according to a news release from the CDC. Twenty-five patients have been hospitalized, and seven patients developed a type of kidney failure known as hemolytic uremic syndrome. No one has died.

The CDC interviewed patients with E. coli during a preliminary investigation of the outbreak, according to a news release from the CDC. The patients answered questions about food they had eaten in the days before becoming ill. Most patients said they ate refrigerated prepackaged Nestle Toll House cookie dough products raw.

“We’ve had much larger outbreaks than this,” said Lola Russell, a spokeswoman for the CDC. “This is very early. We don’t know how many people are affected.”

Russell said the CDC will work with the 29 states’ health departments and investigate cases of E. coli as they arise.

“Some of the states do have product samples,” Herndon said. “CDC will be taking some of those samples to see if there’s a genetic match.”

Russell said the CDC does not know how long the outbreak will last.

“It depends on if people continue to eat them or not,” she said. “It depends on our eating habits.”

The illness has affected people from the ages of 2 to 57, she said. More than 70 percent are younger than 19 years old, and 75 percent are female. Children and the elderly are at the most risk for the illness, Russell said.

“Most healthy adults can recover completely in a week,” she said.

Nestle is asking all distributors to take the product off of their shelves. Consumers who bought the recalled cookie dough can return it for a full refund.

O’Hearn and Russell also said that everyone should follow the cooking directions on the package.

“Any product that is intended to be consumed cooked, don’t eat it raw,” O’Hearn said.

Cooking the product will protect consumers from E. coli, but Russell said the Toll House cookie dough should not be handled at all so consumers won’t get the bacteria on their hands or other cooking surfaces.