But the CDC kept the restaurant's identity under wraps.

This did not sit well with Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney whose firm specializes in litigating food-borne illness cases. Marler is nothing if not tenacious -- just ask the dozens of food processers and fast-food outlets who have paid more than $600 million in claims to his clients in the past two decades.

The CDC has a policy of seeking "cordial relationships" with companies who supply information voluntarily," its deputy director, Robert Tauxe, said in an interview with MSNBC that was quoted on Marler's blog. It publicly identifies a source of food-borne illness, he said, "only when people can use that information to take specific action to protect their health." The reason Restaurant Chain A had been admitted to the CDC's equivalent of a witness protection program was that the outbreak had already run its course.

Reporters from Food Safety News, the online newspaper funded by Marler's firm, contacted all six of the possible companies. They either refused to reply or insisted that they were not Restaurant Chain A. The reporters kept digging and eventually came across a document from Oklahoma's Department of Health. (Oklahoma was one of the affected states.) Marked "for internal use only" the document was called "Summary of Supplemental Questionnaire Responses Specific to Taco Bell Exposure of Oklahoma Outbreak Associated Cases Multistate Salmonella Enterititis Outbreak Investigation" (PDF). It's a long, convoluted title, but the important words were "Taco Bell."

Even once Food Safety News made the finding public, the CDC maintained its code of omerta. Taco Bell, which the CDC found to have been responsible for a 2006 E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak that sickened more than 70 customers in the Northeast, did not return my call, but the company did put a cryptic post on its website linking to the CDC's investigative report about the recent salmonella outbreak but did not own up to being at fault.

A restaurant poisons its customers. A government agency colludes to keep its identity under wraps. And it takes a scrappy trial attorney to uncover the truth for Americans. Talk about a sickening situation.

Image: Fred Prouser/Reuters.

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