It’s noon on Jan. 25 and, as usual for this time, the line for the Chipotle Mexican Grill on Marshall Street is to the door.

The line is persistent, even though the restaurant chain has been the center of an E. coli outbreak that began in October 2015 and has since infected 53 people in nine states, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Marshall Street location, which was not permitted to comment for this story, is not one of the Chipotles that has suffered directly from the outbreak.

But the restaurant, along with Chipotle’s other locations — which exceeds 1,900 — will close for a few hours the morning of Feb. 8 for an all-staff meeting on food safety through a live satellite feed, according to USA TODAY.

Despite the outbreak, members of the Syracuse University community remain — for the most part — unperturbed.

“I’ve been relatively unaffected,” Tim Davey, a junior marketing management major in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, said of his desire to eat at Chipotle after the outbreak. “It’s something that I think about, but it’s something that doesn’t really deter me that much.”

Stephen Milewski, a junior broadcast and digital journalism major, echoed these sentiments, saying that while the potential to contract E. coli does raise some red flags, he doesn’t see students caring all that much.

A Marshall Street Chipotle employee said workers could not comment on the matter. Chris Arnold, national communications director for Chipotle, did not return a call requesting comment.

Chipotle’s struggle with E. coli began in October 2015 when health officials notified the chain of 27 cases of E. coli in Washington and 13 cases in Oregon, according to the CDC.

A number of these cases involved people who had eaten at 11 of the Chipotle restaurants in those areas. In response, Chipotle immediately closed 43 restaurants in the vicinity, according to a statement from the company.

At SU peer institution Boston College, more than 120 students contracted a norovirus after eating at a Boston-area Chipotle. A norovirus is a highly contagious virus that causes inflammation of the stomach or intestines, resulting in stomach pain, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting, according to the CDC.

“Obviously something’s wrong because it’s happening in two separate restaurants in two different parts of the country,” said Rick Welsh, chair of SU’s Department of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition. “Something is going wrong with their procedures and they’ve got to figure out what it is.”

As time went on, the issue only grew. Seven other states, including California, Ohio, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, began to see outbreaks as well, according to the CDC.

In these instances, Welsh said, it’s difficult to isolate where on a company’s supply chain things went wrong. But he added that Chipotle will take every measure in making sure history does not repeat itself.

“They are trying to figure it out, but nobody knows yet,” Welsh said. “And they may never know for sure exactly what happened … but they’re going to try and make sure it doesn’t happen again by making sure everyone’s following the rules.”

This set of rules is known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, or HACCP, he said.

The Food and Drug Administration describes HACCP as a management system that addresses food safety by analyzing and controlling biological, chemical and physical hazards “from raw material production and handling, to manufacturing, distribution and consumption of the finished product,” according to the FDA website.

HAACP forces a person or a firm to examine every potential point of contamination and consider each of these points a problem area when developing or operating a food processing or food production system, Welsh added.

“I think (food borne illness) happens, it does happen all around, but you have to take the safety precautions,” said Liza Ramirez, general manager of M Street Pizza. “If you take the safety precautions, especially with E. coli, you should be able to knock it out.”

Ramirez added that she has not noticed a change in M Street’s business since Chipotle’s E. coli outbreak.

And although Chipotle is the chain in the news right now, that does not mean the restaurant is the only one that’s fallen victim to a problem innate to the food system.

 

“There is one thing to remember, and it’s that foodborne illnesses have been increasing across the board and not just at Chipotle,” Welsh said. “There’s something system-wide that’s happening, too, regarding the transmission of these pathogens to people.”

Welsh added that this does not mean he is letting Chipotle off the hook; he’s simply looking at the issue in the context of “a rising problem across the food system,” he said.

The way meat is raised and processed, the usage of antibiotics and a concentrated food system are all reasons Welsh cites for the increase in foodborne illnesses. Antibiotics create antibiotic-resistant pathogens, which are hard to treat, he said, and a concentrated food system implies a lot of product going through a single plant and then out on a long supply chain to serve a wide geographic area.

So if there were a problem at a large plant, it could potentially affect a large number of people, Welsh said.

In regard to whether people are safe to eat at the Marshall Street Chipotle, Welsh said he thinks they are. But others are less than convinced.

“The E. coli outbreak at Chipotle has definitely turned me away from going to Chipotle, and I have not been since I heard of the outbreak,” said Abby Moore, a freshman mechanical engineering major in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. “I’m very nervous and don’t want to get sick.”

Moore, who frequented Chipotle before the E. coli outbreak, added that if the outbreak stops, she would consider eating at the restaurant again.

Welsh, who called the chain’s decision to temporarily close all locations on Feb. 8 a “very, very good thing to do for a number of reasons,” said he thinks Chipotle is doing all it can do to make sure the outbreak is contained and eliminated.

“They shut down their restaurants, they’re reviewing their processes, they’re cooperating with the federal regulators and the regulators at all levels and they’re trying to reassure their consumers,” he said. “I think that they’ve done what they can do.”

Published on January 27, 2016 at 11:40 pm

Contact Brigid: brkenned@syr.edu