Jeno's, Totino's frozen pepperoni pizzas recalled
— -- While no one died in this outbreak, the bacteria is E. coli O157, the same strain that sickened about 200 people and killed at least five in 26 states last year in an outbreak tied to bagged spinach.
The packages have the code "ET 7750" as well as a "best if used by" date of on or before "02 APR 08 WS." Consumers should throw away any pizzas they find with those marks, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Most of those frozen pizzas are still on store shelves but some may have been purchased and are in consumers' freezers, says General Mills' Tom Forsythe. The company is based in Minneapolis. The pizzas were produced in its Wellston, Ohio, plant.
The first person fell ill on July 20. The last reported illness was Oct. 10, according to the USDA. Nine of the people who got sick reported eating either Totino's or Jeno's pizza with pepperoni. Four of the patients developed kidney failure, but all recovered.
Public health officials don't know if it's the pepperoni or another ingredient that is carrying the E. coli bacteria. No other types of General Mills pizza have been implicated.
Pepperoni is the most popular pizza, while plain cheese pizza generates the second-highest number of sales, Forsythe says.
Tennessee had eight cases, the most of any state. Officials there were the first to realize that the outbreak was national. "It takes a lot of time when you have a low number of cases to get all that data into the same place and realize that cases in different parts of the country match, particularly when they're spread out over both time and geography," says Timothy Jones, Tennessee's deputy state epidemiologist.
When health officers began interviewing those who had been ill, "spontaneously a fair number of patients said 'Totino's frozen pepperoni pizza,' which wasn't even on our radar screen," Jones says.
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