TRENTON, NJ (CAP) - Taco Bell announced yesterday that tests have ruled out E. Coli as the possible cause of a stomach illness that has sickened more than 60 people in the Northeast. Company officials now say they think it was just the food.
"You know our marketing routine," said Taco Bell spokesperson Renny Petrovich. "You don't really buy the food, you just rent it for a while. We are still investigating, but it may have just been our corporate strategy gone a little amuck."
Petrovich said samples from the company's entire menu were collected from multiple restaurants in several states and then fed to homeless people to observe the results. Scallions from a California farm were considered as the source of the outbreak, but the company now does not believe that to be the case.
"We've taken this health issue very seriously and want to put these scallion rumors to rest," said Petrovich. "We think what happened is that one of our homeless test subjects probably smelled like scallions, and that might have made some of the testers ill. But there was no E. Coli."
Petrovich said Taco Bell has removed green onions from the company's 5,800 restaurants and has no plans to sell them again because "once you relate scallions to the smell of some scuzzy guy with no teeth who keeps licking his lips, it's tough to really enjoy your Gordita."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it expects the number of cases to grow as people continue to draw the correlation between a meal at Taco Bell and an urgent trip to the bathroom shortly after. Forty-nine of those who got sick were hospitalized, and seven of them vowed never to eat fast food again.
- CAP News Staff