CHICAGO -- A five-month study on the nation's largest salmonella outbreak released Saturday confirmed suspicions that tainted raw milk entered the Hillfarm Dairy's piping system and was mixed with pasteurized milk.
'All of the available evidence points to the crucial problem occurring in the pasteurized skim blending line,' the study concluded.
More than 17,000 cases of salmonella-related illnesses and six deaths were traced last March to tainted milk processed at the Melrose Park dairy, owned by Jewel Food Store.
Even after five months of study, however, officials from the Salmonella Task Force said experts could not reconstruct the exact sequence of events that led to the outbreak.
The report did show the salmonella bacteria was first found at the plant sometime in 1984. There were two other smaller outbreaks of salmonella in 1984 that were traced to the dairy only after the larger outbreak in March.
The dairy plant remains closed and store officials did not indicate when the plant would reopen.
At a news conference Saturday, Illinois Inspector General Jeremy Margolis emphasized such a serious outbreak was not likely to happen again.
Margolis said the circumstances that allowed the raw milk to blend with pasteurized milk were highly unusual and called the defective piping system an 'engineering quirk.'
Dr. Bernard Turnock, director of the Illinois Department of Health, said health officials acted properly in alerting the public, given the information they had.
'I think they made the right decision with the information that they had,' Turnock said. 'I think they could have gotten the information they needed faster.'
Critics claimed the health department and Jewel Food Store were slow in releasing the salmonella information to the public.
Health officials realized an outbreak was underway March 29, but they did not warn the public about it until April 1 and the dairy was not closed until April 9.
The only health official to take a fall for the outbreak was Health Department Chief Thomas Kirkpatrick Jr., who was fired by Gov. James Thompson when he disovered Kirkpatrick was vacationing in Mexico at the onset of the outbreak and refused to return to Illinois.
