Richard Greener - The Knowland Retribution

“Half?” Stein cried out with startling force. “You mean half the old people getting E. coli are going to die?”

“No,” Dr. Roy told him, unruffled, quickly taking in the others. Pitts looked grave, but by no means threatened. The morbid cast to Louise’s brown eyes had deepened, and perceptibly. Maloney kept his focus on Stein, reacting only marginally to the unhappy news in the air.

She thought she’d made the figures clear. Perhaps they were misunderstood. Most likely, Mr. Stein had jangled their nerves and their brains. She wanted to say, “Now, everyone, take a deep breath.”

Instead, she raised her small right hand in calming benediction. “Those estimates are only for the demographic group generally referred to as elderly and infirm,” she explained, as though it were truly excellent news. “And it only includes those within that group who contact the E. coli, and then become ill and progress to hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS.”

She attempted a reassuring smile.

“And why is that again?” asked Wesley Pitts.

“Excellent question, Mr. Pitts.” She was handing out bon-bons to everyone now. “Contact with E. coli 0157: H7 is most often only mildly harmful. However, ingestion of it through a ground beef product introduces the bacteria to the digestive system. It may subsequently leave the digestive system and enter the bloodstream, where it may break down red blood cells with its SLT or Vero toxin. After that, the damaged cells lodge in the kidney, causing kidney failure.”

“Can you tell us,” asked Pitts, “how you assess the risk mathematically?”

She was off the flip charts now.

“If your meat was contaminated, it would be about one death for every twelve hundred people hospitalized. I said there were about seventy-three thousand people hospitalized yearly with E. coli symptoms. But that figure reflects 150 million cases of food poisoning. Maybe more. Many get sick from agents less harmful than E. coli. Among those exposed to E. coli, we’re talking only about confirmed cases with hospital admission. Many others fall ill but never go to the hospital. Even when they do, many are undoubtedly misdiagnosed. Clinical medicine is often hit or miss. The heart stops in everyone who dies, but not everyone who dies does so from heart failure.”

“So, it’s not too bad,” said Nathan Stein hopefully.

“As I understand it,” said Louise Hollingsworth, “there is some potential for a bad outcome, but the numbers are actually quite favorable.”

Dr. Roy nodded. “In my opinion, the science indicates that it would take many thousands of people with food poisoning to result in a single death.”

“I know it’s in your report,” Tom said. “Tell us again how you test for E. coli.”

“In order to do that, one must be able to make a definitive identification. For that, one must conduct a stool test using the sorbitol-MacConkey agar. This is a substance resembling gelatin, in which the test may be performed. Without such testing no positive finding for the presence of E. coli bacteria can be asserted.”

“Does that mean,” asked Maloney, “that in the absence of such a test, any claim that E. coli was present would have no legal validity?”

She smiled the smile that she always smiled when declining to render legal advice. “I am not a lawyer, Mr. Maloney. What I can say is that no scientific credibility would attach to such a claim without the SMAC test. I don’t believe a trained medical professional, Ph. D. or MD, would testify to the presence of E. coli without testing-proper testing-as I have described it.”

“Tell me,” said Maloney, “how readily available is the sorbitol-MacConkey agar in small-town hospitals in the southeastern part of the country?” Maloney had certainly read the report, quite likely more than once.

“It is readily available,” Dr. Roy replied. “I would anticipate no difficulty in testing for E. coli in even the smallest of cities. Samples could be sent to any large hospital in the region. Any doctor who suspected E. coli poisoning could get immediate help from Atlanta or Birmingham or Charlotte, for example, or any full-service general hospital.”

“We need a month,” said Stein.

“I’d like a lot longer,” added Wesley Pitts.

“Let me ask you this,” said Tom, “in your expert opinion, what would be likely to happen if a substantial supply of E. coli -infected meat was widely distributed in the southeastern states in the next week?”

She should, of course, have seen this coming.

It suddenly dawned on her that she had not been involved in a remotely normal corporate consultation. She was not, and had not been, merely an academic fan-dancer doing her stuff, as she had done so often, for corporate mediocrities whose breadth of mind encompassed little more than expensive lunches and modes of theft.

Whatever this was, the brilliant Dr. Ganga Roy felt entirely out of her depth. She was now almost certainly being asked about real people dying.

She rallied, but not without effort, not without some of the mischief deserting her spirited manner. “The symptoms of this type of food poisoning caused by E. coli O157: H7 usually begin appearing in two to four days. Serious complications within a week; deaths thereafter.”

She felt a little lightheaded now, but plucked up the courage to ask, “What do you mean by ‘widely distributed?’”

“Hard to say, exactly,” said Maloney. “These people make ground beef for a variety of brand names. Most of them house names, named for whatever chain it’s being sold in. It’s hard to keep track of everything.”

“Not entirely,” said Louise Hollingsworth, her voice more robust than before. “Competing supermarkets in the same city sell the same product under their own names. Shoppers don’t know where it comes from. But the company knows. And the distributors know. They know where every bit of it goes. Of course, at the store level, it often gets mixed together with meat from other suppliers, and that could make positive identification difficult.”

“They said that it was only one line,” said Nathan Stein. “How much meat could that be?”

Dr. Roy had command of herself again. “If we are talking about a processing plant, there is no such thing as a small problem involving a single machine or production line.”

Magically, she seemed to have forgotten the tangible corpses at issue and focused again on relatively cold facts. “Let us say that a single line has reported a problem. Those on other lines may or may not have recognized it as well. They may or may not have seen fit to report what they saw or suspected. Inspectors may find some and miss others. Moreover, if one machine or one product line has E. coli, it is likely to have spread. The entire plant is suspect.”

“And that means what, Dr. Roy?” said Maloney, not bothering, or able, to suppress the slight quaver that persisted as he spoke. “Let’s say that tens of thousands-perhaps hundreds of thousands-of pounds, maybe millions, get distributed to hundreds of outlets, maybe more. That means what?”

She did not respond.

“Dr. Roy?” The others were bearing down, straining from their seats, Louise on her feet, Stein poised to spring like a feral cat, restrained only by Tom Maloney’s heavy hand. But it was Maloney who spoke again.

“Let us say, Dr. Roy, that a universe of three hundred thousand people eat this meat. If everyone among the three hundred thousand gets sick, and I realize that’s farfetched, and let’s say that half are children and elderly, about nine hundred would end up in the hospital. Am I right? Of the nine hundred, perhaps forty-five would advance to HUS. Of that group, with a death rate of 3 to 5 percent we might expect between one and a third and two and a half deaths. Since we can be fairly certain that all three hundred thousand will not become ill-if only half do-that brings the projected deaths to less than one person, doesn’t it?”