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Today, at 65 years old, Koehler owns a Thai restaurant where one of his top priorities is serving customers safe food. Ken Koehler Facebook Twitter LinkedIn
More than 12 years ago, Ken Koehler was in his mid-50s, leading an active lifestyle, working 70 hours a week managing two recycling companies, and enjoying long bike rides and sailing
along Maine’s coast on weekends. Everything came to an unexpected halt when he started feeling sick in a way he had never felt before, culminating in two days on his bathroom floor and 18
hours in an emergency room.
“I had no idea what was going on,” he said. “I honestly just wanted to die. I felt so horrible.”
His symptoms included the “worst diarrhea and vomiting” he had ever experienced. When blood appeared on the second day, he knew it was time to go to the hospital.
At the emergency room, Koehler was so dehydrated that he required three IV bags of fluids and underwent a series of tests to determine the root of the problem.
After he was discharged, a doctor followed up with the news that he had a severe case of salmonella. He was prescribed ciprofloxacin, one of the few antibiotics effective against the strain
identified in the outbreak.
“It was a very rare strain,” he said
Identifying the causeRecovering at home in bed, Koehler received a phone call from a representative of the Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention, who asked him questions about what he had eaten in the
days before he became ill.
“Ask me what I had for breakfast, and I probably can’t tell you. I’m going 100 miles an hour all the time,” he said. “This woman was trying to figure out what I had and where I got it from.
And within 20 minutes of her asking me specific questions, she was able to narrow it down to shopping at Hannaford and the ground beef I had purchased.”
AARP; (Source: Getty Images(2))He relayed that he had divided a 3-pound package of ground beef into individual pounds and still had some left in his freezer.
“Within five minutes,” he said, “somebody showed up in a hazmat suit and a cooler and came in. I pointed to where the packages were, and they took them out. I signed a release, and off they
went.”
The sample he provided yielded a positive test result and served as evidence to prompt Hannaford to initiate a recall of more than 112,000 pounds of ground beef.