UWO's salmonella crisis meets Law & Order

It was lunchtime on a Monday at the University of Western Ontario.

Akosh Kazinczi did what hundreds of his fellow students do on any given day. He headed to the cafeteria and bought a chicken breast pita with lettuce, tomato, and onions.

At 7 o’clock the next morning, he woke up vomiting.

“It was really terrible,” said Kazinczi, 20. “I was dehydrated, had the sweats, chills, all the gross (symptoms) too.”

Kazinczi was one of at least 85 students who got salmonella poisoning after eating at the Centre Spot cafeteria in Western’s University Community Centre in the week following Nov. 8.

Many others showed similar symptoms but have not been diagnosed with salmonella.

Kazinczi was in bed for the rest of the week, throwing up every half hour.

He lost 15 pounds in four days.

“Nobody wants to be vomiting furiously constantly,” said the third-year biology student. “I was emotionally distraught.”

Kazinczi said his best friend’s father is a lawyer. When he heard about Kazinczi getting salmonella, he offered to write a letter to Pita Pit’s head office in Kingston to ask for compensation.

“I jumped all over it,” said Kazinczi. “I was pissed.”

He’s not the only one who blamed Pita Pit for the tainted food.

The media published many stories early in the outbreak, all of them stating that the students who got sick had all eaten at the Pita Pit outlet in Centre Spot.

Their information was based on early lab results from the Middlesex London Health Unit. Wally Adams, the unit’s manager of environmental health, said inspectors closed Pita Pit and after a primary inspection, concluded that everything was normal.

But after more and more cases appeared, all of them UWO students, Adams said the health unit took a more in-depth approach called HACCP, or hazard analysis critical control points.

“It’s the approach we take when we want to get in there with a fine tooth comb,” said Adams.

He said there were positive cases that originated from food retailers in Centre Spot other than Pita Pit. The inspection broadened to include the entire cafeteria, which uses shared dishwashers and employees.

After nine inspections, the health unit was unable to pinpoint the cause of the tainted food. Inspectors examined each stage of the food preparation process, from looking at invoices to checking freezer temperatures.

Adams said the problem is in going back a week or two and trying to figure out what went wrong.

“They’re humans doing it, and somebody made a mistake.”

Not everyone agrees. Western’s daily student newspaper, The Gazette, posted a poll on their website asking whether those who’d been “poisoned by salmonella from Centre Spot” are entitled to monetary compensation.

By Nov. 28, about 57 per cent of those who participated had voted “Yes, the university owes those whose health was compromised by its negligence.”

About 42 per cent of voters said “No. Suck it up.”

Some members of the university community responded more eloquently in letters to the newspaper.

Mark Lepore, a third-year student, was supportive of the efforts of cafeteria staff to keep things clean.

“As with every food operation, there is always a risk of contamination,” he wrote.

“While measures are taken to prevent this — and Western is pretty strict — it is bound to happen eventually.”

Susan Varills, a fourth-year student and a former cook, disagreed.

“If a regular restaurant had such a contamination with so many confirmed cases, they would not only face closure, but I’m sure such a restaurant would face a number of lawsuits,” she wrote.

Whether or not the university is liable for the salmonella outbreak is a complicated question, said Stephen Pitel, an associate professor at Western’s faculty of law.

He said unless there was serious damage done to the victims, with debilitating or long-term repercussions, a few days’ sickness would not incur large compensation.

“There’s also the cost of pursuing legal action,” said Pitel, pointing out that for students, it might not be worthwhile.

Legal fees were on Kazinczi’s mind when he got a call from a Windsor law firm on Nov. 23. He said the firm is starting a class action suit with other students who had been sick.

“But that would have been time consuming, and I didn’t really want to pay for lawyer fees with them,” he said.

Kazinczi said the letter to Pita Pit is “basically like a bluff in poker,” saying they have evidence against Pita Pit and are willing to sue them for compensation. But he is also willing to settle out of court.

“If they don’t want to settle out of court, I’m just going to drop the whole thing,” he said, citing time and money as reasons not to sue them.

Though Kazinczi said he is not a greedy person and isn’t out to get anybody, he admitted he wouldn’t say no to compensation.

He said he was “one of the fortunate ones” since he had just finished his midterms before getting sick. He missed about 20 hours of class, but did not lose any marks for labs.

But he also works at three part-time jobs and said he lost a few hundred dollars from missing four days of shifts.

Peter Panopoulos, a lawyer for Pita Pit Ltd, said the company is not directly responsible for the Centre Spot location, which is a “non-customary franchise.”

“The University of Western Ontario basically runs the show,” he said from Kingston. “It would make little sense for someone to sue us.”

That being said, Panopoulos said Pita Pit is not happy about some of the speculation made in the media about them.

“We’re the only ones who’ve been named, and there were 13 other cases that we were not involved in,” he said.

“Once that image is out there, it’s difficult for people to get past it.”

Panopoulos declined to say whether Pita Pit has lost business as a result of the outbreak.

He said the pattern that came out of the initial data was misinterpreted. He added the London health unit confirmed to him and Pita Pit’s CEO on a conference call last week that they do not know what caused the outbreak.

Adams said the infectious disease experts at the health unit are still sifting through data to find a common thread in what the victims ate and when they ate it.

“Statistically, nothing stood out,” he said. “The best we could do is speculate.”

He said inspectors were on location to make sure the Centre Spot staff implemented the recommendations made by the health unit to prevent further outbreaks in the future.

The university issued an apology to students on Nov. 27, stating it has made the necessary changes, including hands-free sanitization stations, hiring an independent health inspector, and other measures to avoid cross-contamination.