A salmonella outbreak linked to Taco Bell has sickened at least 25 Ohioans, 10 of whom were hospitalized.


The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not named the restaurant chain involved in the investigation - the agency refers to it only as a Mexican-style fast-food chain - but officials in multiple states have said it is Taco Bell.

The illnesses are from outbreaks of two different kinds of rarely seen salmonella, Hartford and Baildon. Health officials say there's likely no continued risk of infection, as both outbreaks have tailed off.

The Ohio Department of Health helped study the illnesses, said spokeswoman Jen House, but nobody so far has been able to definitively link the infections to a particular product.

"We can't locate any one item or one ingredient," House said.

In a written statement, Taco Bell chief quality assurance officer Anna Ohki said that there's no reason to avoid eating at the company's restaurants.

"We take food safety very seriously and our food is perfectly safe to eat, so our customers have absolutely no cause for concern," she said.

Because of the short shelf life of produce - which might have been what was contaminated - and the comingling of products from multiple sources, finding an original source of contamination can be difficult, the CDC said.

The last reported case in Ohio was in early July, House said. None of the cases was in Franklin County. Licking and Fairfield counties reported one case each, she said.

Nationally, at least 155 people have been sickened by the two strains of salmonella bacteria since April, the CDC said.

In studies looking at both outbreaks, investigators found that sick people were much more likely to report having eaten at the restaurant than people who were not sickened. Scientists often compare infected individuals with a similar group of people who are well to investigate outbreaks of food-borne illness.

People infected with salmonella often develop diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps 12 to 72 hours after they are infected. Most people recover, but symptoms can be severe and are of most concern in infants, elderly people and those with weakened immune systems.