As an attorney who has represented hundreds of victims of food borne pathogens, I always take note of outbreaks. Recent news reports about an outbreak at Central State Hospital in Pineville, Louisiana was especially interesting to me from both a professional and personal standpoint. My great-grandfather was the first administrator of Central State Hospital in Pineville, Louisiana. So I read with great interest and sadness this weekend’s news about three deaths, and dozens of sicknesses, possibly caused by food borne pathogens over the weekend there. News reports of the outbreak state that state health officials are investigating the cause of the outbreak.
Those state health investigators have many tools at their disposal to determine the cause of the sicknesses and I hope that every weapon at their disposal to find the culprit at Central is used. One of the weapons that health officials can use is Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) technology. PFGE allows scientists to perform DNA “finger printing” of a particular strain of disease-causing bacteria isolated from patients and from suspected food.
When common PFGE patterns are detected, health authorities are able to begin narrowing in on common foods consumed to detect an outbreak.Sometimes the same PFGE is found at the plant, warehouse, manufacturing, slaughterhouse or facility.
I would suspect that we will hear a lot more from state health officials in the next several days about these genetic fingerprinting and other results of their investigations. When and if a common PFGE pattern is found, health officials will start to narrow in on the food-borne pathogen that caused these sicknesses and deaths.
Richard J. Arsenault, 2011
