Food Poisonings Stick In The Craw Of Japanese Reputation For Fastidiousness Imperiled As Illness Hits 7,400 People

Takeout manager Kazue Tamura didn’t think twice when a customer motioned to some food and asked, “This stuff is OK, isn’t it?” The unspoken words were obvious - food poisoning.

“I knew what he was talking about,” said Tamura, who runs a shop in Tokyo’s ritzy Ginza district. “We’ve been extra careful.”

Japan - famed for fastidiousness, hyper about hygiene - is discomfited to find itself in the grip of its worst food-poisoning outbreak in nearly a decade.

More than 7,400 people, most of them schoolchildren, have been sickened nationwide, many by a virulent strain of bacteria known as E. coli O157. Four have died and hundreds are hospitalized.

Top-level officials are holding emergency meetings. Customers scrupulously check expiration dates and are making a run on household disinfectants. Headlines trumpet the latest infection figures, and public-service pamphlets feature cartoon depictions of dangerous bacteria.

Yoko Mikata, 52, was typical of many shoppers as she browsed rows of boxed lunches at a convenience store in downtown Tokyo. Too busy to cook, she wanted to buy a prepared meal, but was worried about getting sick from it.

She decided to compromise. She bought the “bento,” or boxed meal of steamed rice, vegetables and meat, but would take it home and microwave it thoroughly before eating it. And she’s taking other precautions as well.

“I’m not eating ground meat, and I wash my hands and clean my cutting board more often,” she said.

Health officials were anxious to paint the outbreak as a fluke. Dr. Toshio Shimada, chief of the bacterial division of the National Institute of Health, called it “abnormal.”

“The Japanese hygiene standard is very high,” he said.

He and others underscored the importance of distinguishing between conventional food poisoning - now blamed for stomach pains and diarrhea that afflicted several hundred students this week in Yokohama, outside Tokyo - and those linked to the far more serious E. coli O157 bacteria, believed to be causing a much larger outbreak in the western city of Sakai.

Highly contagious, spreadable through various foods as well as human contact, E. coli O157 can sicken people in extremely small concentrations. A strain of it caused about 500 people to fall ill in Washington state in 1993 after eating undercooked hamburgers.

“O157 is highly dangerous. It can kill people,” said Shimada.

Up until now, only about 100 cases of E. coli O157-linked food poisoning had been reported annually. But the outbreak in Sakai alone has sickened 5,683 people, of whom 47 were in serious condition and five were in critical condition as of Friday.

Schools have been the most common breeding ground, but most have either closed for the summer or are about to do so. Even so, the crowded conditions in most Japanese cities could contribute to the spread of infection, public health officials said.

A midsummer heat wave could also be a factor. E. coli O157 flourishes at temperatures above 68 degrees, and temperatures have been running in the mid-80s around Japan.

Japan’s fondness for raw fish and its weakness for prepared meals sold in convenience stores puts it at some food-poisoning risk, but Shimada said on the whole the diet here is less likely to spread E. coli than elsewhere.

In the United States and some other Western countries, hamburgers and scrambled eggs prepared by catering services can readily spread the bacteria, he said.

Hideko Nagafusa, the principal of a Yokohama school where about 200 of the 750 pupils fell ill, said she was shaken by the outbreak, even though it turned out not to be caused by E. coli and most students were recovering. Her school had just won a goodhygiene award from the city.

“We were really shocked,” she said. “We want to find out the cause of this as soon as possible.”