Personal Injury Law

Same Caterer In North Dakota May Have Spread Salmonella To Two Events

By Marler Clark LLP

There was a wedding in Washburn and a family reunion in Wilton that will probably be remembered for a long time. Both North Dakota towns are north of Bismarck.  There apparently was a common ingredient at both events--salmonella.  And it was not pretty.

About 40 people got sick, 11 were hospitalized, and two were in intensive care.

Doug Ness told KSYR-TV that he had to take four days off of work from his job as a chiropractor at Active Life Chiropractic in Bismarck last week. "I couldn`t leave my bed," Ness says. " Basically it was bed to bathroom and it wasn`t much fun."

He was just one of many who got sick from salmonella bacteria after eating from the taco bar at his friend`s wedding in Washburn.   "Later than afternoon I`d heard from some of my friends that went to E.R. and they had I.V.s and were given morphine for the pain or discomfort so from there we kind of knew something was going on," Ness says.

Others reported the same symptoms of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea after a reunion in Wilton hosted by the same caterer.

"There`s a common caterer but it`s really too soon to identify what`s really happened here," state epidemiologist Kirby Kruger told the television station. "We`re still doing some investigation and we`re still waiting for some results to come back."

Read more about the outbreak in the North Dakota's press release from last Friday.

Full post as published by Salmonella Blog on June 23, 2009 (boomark / email).