Over 100 diagnosed with food poisoning after eating at National Food Safety Summit

If there’s one place you can feel pretty certain you won’t get food poisoning, it’s at the National Food Safety Summit, right?

Wrong.

More than 100 people have now confirmed that they got sick with suspected food poisoning at the summit, which was held earlier this month in Baltimore.

According to public information officer for the Baltimore City Health Department Michael Schwartzberg, calls came in on April 15 and 16 from attendees with complaints of feeling sick with diarrhea and upset stomach, approximately 12 hours after eating a meal at the summit on April 9.

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Health officials are still baffled as to what caused the outbreak of gastroenteritis, an illness that causes nausea and diarrhea.

A state health official gave an update on Tuesday regarding the outbreak, noting that they’d heard from approximately 400 of the 1,300 attendees and that no hospitalizations or deaths have been reported.

“We are working on evaluating possible exposures and doing testing at the Maryland state public health laboratory to attempt to identify an agent,” Tuesday’s update stated.

The Food Safety Summit, which was held April 8-10 at the Baltimore Convention Center, was host to 1,300 of the top food safety officials in the nation.

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Many federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, Disease Control Prevention, and businesses such as McDonald’s, Tyson and ConAgra Foods had sent staff to attend the summit.

“With the exception of one issue, everything was in compliance with codes and regulations. Centerplate [the center’s in-house caterer] was issued a violation for condensation dripping from one of the 2 ice machines in the kitchen, and this issue was immediately corrected,” Schwartzberg wrote in an email.

Centerplate is yet to issue a statement.

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