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

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