How the CDC website confirmed my food conspiracy in 2019

I got hit with food poisoning from a local BBQ joint in Austin back in 2019. I was sick for 3 days straight, couldn't keep anything down. When I looked up the place on the CDC's foodborne illness tracker, I found 12 other reports from the same week. The health department shut them down for 2 weeks but nobody in the media picked it up. Meanwhile, the restaurant owner started a GoFundMe saying the city was out to get him. Got me thinking about how the system really works - the data is public but nobody knows how to read it. Have any of you actually looked at your local health inspection scores before picking a place to eat?

3 comments

3 Comments

shane_hayes3d ago

But is it really a conspiracy when a restaurant owner has every right to defend his business against what might be bad timing or a single bad batch of meat? I mean, the data is public sure, but without a proper investigation linking the cases directly to his kitchen, it's just a bunch of people getting sick around the same time which could be a coincidence. The real story here might be how the health department uses that data to make a name for themselves by shutting down a local spot over a few reports that could have been caused by anything from bad salsa to the flu going around.

logan5613d agoRising Star

Wait, isn't that kind of a stretch though? The health department doesn't usually go after a small spot unless they've got multiple complaints or a clear pattern (like all the sick folks ate the same thing). A few cases could be a fluke, but a handful pointing to one place feels like more than bad timing.

shanef343d ago

Flip it around and ask why nobody's talking about the other customers that DIDN'T get sick. If there's a bad batch of meat, a food prep error, or something intentional, people eating at the same time should have similar odds of getting hit. But if out of 50 people who ate the special that night only 4 got sick, that's a 92% survival rate from a supposedly contaminated kitchen. Maybe it's not the food itself but something like a server who's a carrier for norovirus, or even a customer who touched a contaminated surface and then their own food. The health department loves to slap a closure on the restaurant because it's easy press, but following a single sick customer's path through that building could pin the blame on a hand railing in the bathroom instead of the grill.