Food poisoning survivor lobbies for bill in Congress

WASHINGTON -- What was supposed to be a four-day California vacation almost three years ago turned into a 30-day nightmare for a Henderson family when 9-year-old Rylee Gustafson was hospitalized with deadly food poisoning after eating contaminated spinach.

Her parents were told to prepare for the worst as Rylee lay at UCSF Children's Hospital in San Francisco. Her kidneys failed, there was swelling around her brain and heart, toxins had attacked her pancreas, and she could not breathe on her own.

"It was horrible," her mother, Kathleen Chrismer, said of her only child.

Miraculously, Rylee pulled through.

Now 11, the soft-spoken girl wearing a brown sweater and a pink flower hair clip visited Nevada members of Congress on Wednesday and asked them to vote for a bill aimed at strengthening the government's powers to force food recalls and increasing the frequency of inspections at food facilities.

"I want to tell them why it is important that our food is safe because a lot of people have suffered so much," said Rylee, a sixth-grader at Webb Middle School.

She was the only Nevadan stricken in an outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 in the summer of 2006. The illnesses traced to contaminated spinach killed three people and afflicted 205 others, the federal Food and Drug Administration said.

Rylee's family did not know what had attacked her until her illness was reported by the hospital to Clark County health authorities.

Only then did the family trace back to the bag of spinach that Rylee had picked out at the supermarket on Aug. 22, 2006, while shopping with her stepfather, Matthew Tateishi. They ate spinach salad that night.

Four days later, as the family was driving up the California coast to visit the Monterey Aquarium and San Francisco, Rylee got sick with stomach pains and diarrhea, and it got worse from there.

"I only remember the beginning and the end, pretty much," Rylee said.

Chrismer said family members know they are lucky. At a news conference Wednesday in the U.S. Capitol, they learned about 2-year-old Kyle Allgood of Idaho, who died in September 2006 after eating spinach contaminated with E. coli. Ashley Armstrong, a 5-year-old from Indiana, continues to suffer from health problems after eating spinach that summer.

Rylee does not show complications but probably will need a kidney transplant, maybe two of them, Chrismer said.

The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, sponsored in the House by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., is controversial. Small farmers, organic growers and gardeners fear it will burden them with paperwork to the benefit of larger corporate farms.

DeLauro said the fears are unfounded. She said the intent is to keep the marketplace safe from food-borne illnesses such as the salmonella traced to tainted peanut products earlier this year.

"Eating peanut butter should not be an act of faith," she said.

Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760.