I’ve always been something of a conspiracy theorist and I can’t understand why a quiet, unassuming company like Chipotle is having so much trouble getting ahead of this E.coli or norovirus outbreak or whatever is making people sick. I’ve eaten at the original Chipotle in Denver – we used to go there all the time for lunch during my fellowship in medical toxicology – and the burritos on the east coast are a pale, soggy, falling-apart imitation of the gorgeous works of stomach-bombing deliciousness that we used to enjoy in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains. Am I going to be the one to bring up whether this outbreak, which is only affecting one company in several different states in geographically divergent parts of the country and is impossible to contain or identify the source – might be food terrorism or corporate sabotage? Stranger things have happened. Why isn’t the FBI investigating, along with the CDC? There are Artificial Neural Network (ANN) software platforms (one from a group at University Colorado at Denver with Dr. Massimo Buscema’s group) that have been used to track down the source of listeria in canteloupes a few years ago, among other outbreaks. The ANNs have even been used to fight crime and locate (successfully) the most probable location for murder suspects and predict (again successfully) the most probable location for gang violence to erupt. Time for people to start thinking outside the box!
