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Area girl stricken by food poisoning in Texas
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Saturday, June 14, 2008 11:18 PM EDT
BENNINGTON TWP. - Abigail DeHaas is allergic to cheese but the 13-year-old isn't used to worrying about eating vegetables.
When Abby asked her father to get a salad for her, she made sure not to get cheese on it because she didn't want to get sick. But she didn't think twice about the tomatoes.
Abby and the DeHaas family left theirBennington Township home in April for Lubbock, Texas, for a wedding. On the evening the family was ready to head back to Michigan, Abby realized she was hungry.
She hadn't eaten anything else that day, so she asked her father, Ron, to pick up a salad at an area fast-food restaurant.
Ron made sure to order a salad without cheese, so the employee had to prepare a salad from scratch. According to Ron, the employee used sliced tomatoes instead of the cherry tomatoes that the fast food restaurant used in their pre-packaged salads.
The next morning, Abby was very sick.
“I had a fever, nausea, and vomiting,” she said. “I didn't feel well at all.”
The symptoms Abby described led her family to an understandable conclusion - she had food poisoning.
“We took her to a walk-in clinic that morning in Lubbock,” Ron said. “They didn't do any tests on her because they thought it was food poisoning. They gave her Phenergan (an anti-nausea allergy medicine). I didn't help a whole lot.”
Later in the day, as the DeHaas family readied to board their flight home, Abby was feeling worse.
“We got into the airport and I was in tears,” she said. “I didn't want to go onto the plane, I was still sick.”
A few days later, Abby was better.
But the DeHaas family, along with the rest of the country, started hearing reports of more people in Texas becoming sick. Those people didn't had salmonella poisoning, contracted from certain tomatoes.
“I started thinking about it,” Ron said. “We were in the right spot at the right time...The only thing she had eaten was the salad, so I'm 100 percent confident that the salad was the cause of it.”
The Food and Drug Administration issued a caution to restaurants throughout the country about certain tomatoes that were the cause of a salmonella outbreak. A short while later restaurants across the country stopped serving the tomatoes.
The FDA recently released information, narrowing down the source of the outbreak. Tomatoes from more than 35 states - including Michigan - were OK'd to eat and as of Friday, according to the FDA Web site.
One of the states suspected to be the cause - Texas - has had more than 50 of the 200-plus salmonella cases reported.
“I talked to the Lubbock Department of Health,” Ron said. “They told me that the earliest case of salmonella poisoning was on the 14th, a day after Abby got sick.”
Ron said he was almost positive that his daughter had the first case of salmonella. Adding weight to his reasoning, red plum, red Roma and round red tomatoes were linked to the outbreak, according to the FDA. Round red tomatoes are commonly used by restaurants for sliced tomatoes on burgers.
Cherry tomatoes have been cleared as safe to eat by the FDA. Reflecting back on that months later, Ron couldn't help but laugh.
“Had she not been allergic to cheese, she would've gotten the (cherry) tomatoes,” he said.