The manager of environmental health at the Thunder Bay District Health Unit says they have a good lead on the cause of a gastrointestinal outbreak that afflicted at least 141 people who ate last weekend at Murillo’s This Old Barn restaurant.
But, said Chris Beveridge on Friday, they would prefer to conduct further investigations before revealing what it is.
In updating the outbreak, Beveridge did say that a pair of stool samples tested have been positively identified as carrying Norovirus, a disease that’s usually passed on through contaminated food or water and spread from person to person with fecally contaminated hands of a victim or by contact with fecally contaminated objects, with the person subsequently touching their mouth before properly washing their hands.
It will take a few days before the exact cause of the outbreak is known, Beveridge said.
“We haven’t really been able to pinpoint a particular source to date,” he said. “We do have a good lead we’re following up on. We do have 141 people who have reported ill. We’ve contacted the majority of people who were at the event and the public have actually been quite helpful.”
The good news, he added, is the people who were hospitalized have been discharged and no serious cases of illness developed as a result of the contamination.
“Calls to the health unit are starting to decline, so I’m hoping the number of ill are starting to plateau and will stop by this afternoon,” he said, noting the disease usually runs its course in a couple of days or more.
The restaurant, which sat 256 people over the weekend, remains closed indefinitely.
“He has an order to close which he is complying with. He’ll be closed until the investigation is complete and we identify a source and that he’s meeting our requirements based on the findings that we have,” Beveridge said.
E.coli has not been eliminated as the cause of the illness. Heavy rainfall last Friday could have led to contaminated well water. He’s also not ruling out the possibility of a perfect storm, in which both diseases were present at the same time.
“We’re keeping our options open,” Beveridge said.
“If we can pinpoint Norovirus in stool with a food item, then we’ve got a match. If we pinpoint E.coli, which we have in the water, then we can do further tests to determine the type of E.coli with the stool sample, then we’ll have a match for E.coli.
“We still haven’t made those matches yet.”
There have been previous E.coli diagnoses in the well water used by the restaurant, but Beveridge said there have been no cases of food contamination, adding the restaurant has a clean bill of health from a food inspection standpoint.
“The operator has been a historically good operator and we’ve never had any issues or complaints or anything. So this is a bit of a surprise from this particular premise.”
Stool samples from infected patients have been sent to labs in Thunder Bay, Toronto and to the Health Canada laboratory in Ottawa for diagnosis, a process Beveridge suspects will take a few days.
Beveridge said this is only the third case of this magnitude of gastrointestinal illness at a Thunder Bay-area restaurant in 15 years.
