Day 107 - 24 Mar 95 - Page 39
1 the system allows food poisoning, is capable of failure,
2 has failed, it is by that definition not hygienic.
3
4 Q. Mr. Atherton for McDonald's, on day 86, page 51, line 9,
5 when asked about a useful estimate for the numbers of
6 complaints by customers of food poisoning specifically, he
7 said: "Alleged food poisoning complaints by customers per
8 store -- it would have to be a complete shot in the dark --
9 it may be three or four, five a year. It may be more than
10 that".
11
12 If, say, it was about four a year, about 2,000 complaints a
13 year from customers at McDonald's as a whole, in your
14 experience, what kind of indications could you get from
15 that rough figure given by McDonald's own witness?
16 A. In my experience, most consumer complaints of food
17 poisoning -- that is the ones I investigate which is a
18 substantial number -- are rarely substantiated.
19 Perversely, an enormous number of people suffer food
20 poisoning and falsely attribute it to a particular premises
21 or meal. It is a well-known phenomenon known as the "last
22 meal syndrome". You see, the incubation period maybe
23 anything up to, say, typically 36 hours or, for some types,
24 72 hours or sometimes four or five days. The consumer
25 tends to relate the food poisoning to the last meal eaten;
26 whereas, in fact, it may have been several meals several
27 days ago that actually caused the food poisoning. They
28 will be unable to link their food poisoning with that
29 relatively remote event.
30
31 Q. So you are saying we cannot draw any conclusions from those
32 figures?
33 A. It would not be wise to draw any really hard and fast
34 conclusions from that.
35
36 Q. When you say "not substantiated", does that mean they are
37 not true or they are just impossible to substantiate or
38 just not investigated or what?
39 A. The combination of the two. One rarely gets all the
40 evidence one would need. For instance, microbiological
41 confirmation of a food poisoning illness, very often this
42 is verbal reports and no forensic, if you like, evidence.
43 Very often, the pattern of symptoms reported by the
44 sufferers are not compatible with food poisoning or not
45 compatible with the type of food poisoning one would expect
46 from the spread of foods served, or that one finds that
47 maybe a party of two or three people or even one person
48 might report illness, and you go back through the records,
49 and you find that 30, 40 or more people have eaten the same
50 food at the same time and not reported symptoms.
51 Therefore, it raises some doubt as to whether they had food
52 poisoning.
53
54 In other instances the symptoms reported are fully
55 compatible with, say, a completely non-related food
56 poisoning, a non-related illness, such as a viral influenza
57 or some such. So, it just underlines the difficulty of
58 drawing data and interpreting data that comes to you.
59
60 MS. STEEL: If there are pathogenic bacteria in food that have
