After 32 people were infected with the outbreak strain of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli O157:H7 in 11 states between October 8th to October 31st, the CDC is now warning people about Romaine lettuce.  All of it, whole heads of romaine, hearts of romaine, and bags and boxes of precut lettuce and salad mixes that contain romaine, including baby romaine, spring mix, and Caesar salad, because no common grower, supplier, distributor, or brand of romaine lettuce has been identified.

If you keep lettuce that long, anyway. The CDC is great about food warnings that are weeks too late, the same thing happened last year, only then they warned people about the November outbreak in January so this is an improvement.

In the recent occurrence,  66 percent of ill people are female, 13 people were hospitalized, including one person who developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a type of kidney failure. In Canada, 18 people have been infected with the same DNA fingerprint of E. coli O157:H7 bacteria in Ontario and Quebec. This is the same DNA fingerprint as the E. coli strain isolated from ill people in a 2017 outbreak linked to leafy greens in the United States and to romaine lettuce in Canada. The current outbreak is not related to a recent multistate outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infections linked to romaine lettuce.

Antibiotics are not recommended for patients with E. coli O157 infections. Antibiotics are also not recommended for patients in whom E.coli O157 infection is suspected, until diagnostic testing rules out this infection. The benefit of antibiotic treatment has not been clearly demonstrated and some studies have shown that administering antibiotics to patients with E. coli O157 infections might increase their risk of developing hemolytic uremic syndrome.

People usually get sick from Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) 2–8 days (average of 3–4 days) after swallowing the germ. 

Public health investigators are using the PulseNet system, the national subtyping network of public health and food regulatory agency laboratories coordinated by CDC, along with pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and whole genome sequencing (WGS).