Campus officials have concluded that there was no connection between The Towers Dining Hall and last week’s campus illness outbreak, after Dining Services officials and several outside groups investigated the matter, Dining Services director Josh Hubbard said yesterday.
Dining Services hired a private company, Lapuck Laboratories, and its consulting division, RJH Associates, to investigate the matter. Dining Services and Student Health Services also worked closely with the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Public Health and local health inspectors to find a cause of the illness, he said.
“As of now there is nothing definitive pointing toward food,” Hubbard said.
The outbreak affected what some estimated to be more than 100 students early last week and the weekend before, including some entire floors in The Towers and several residences on Bay State Road. Some students immediately concluded that the problem had been with food in The Towers Dining Hall, which many said they ate before getting sick.
As of last Wednesday, 46 BU students had visited Student Health Services seeking attention for similar symptoms, but 10 of them had not eaten in The Towers Dining Hall, according to Hubbard.
Dining services is still waiting for test results from Student Health Services to confirm their conclusions.
Hubbard said Dining Services is trying to be as cooperative as possible to ensure it is not responsible for the outbreak. He said he is dedicated to finding and solving any possible problems.
“If [the illness] had to do with food … we want to know,” Hubbard said.
“[Dining Services] treated this matter very seriously,” Hubbard said later.
The “geographic similarities” of many of the ill students prompted the investigation, Hubbard said. Most of the sick students lived in The Towers and on Bay State Road, though he said many of them had not eaten in Towers Dining Hall, or even Dining Services at all.
“It’s easy to blame food,” Hubbard said.
Hubbard, who has been director of Dining Services at BU for three years, said he has never encountered a problem of this magnitude before, though it is likely the problem would have been much larger if it had been connected to food.
“The likelihood of this being food-connected is minimal,” Hubbard said. “Had this illness been connected to food, there would be an even larger number of students ill.”
Leslie Stierman, a freshman in University Professors Program who lives on Bay State Road and frequently eats at the Towers Dining Hall, said she was never worried about eating there, even as rumors circulated last week that the illness could have been caused by the food.
“I only eat at Towers out of convenience,” Stierman said. “I’m not going to start going somewhere else just because of a scare.”
Stierman said she has confidence in Dining Services and Towers staff.
“I know that [Dining Services} most likely fixed the problem, otherwise they’d get into serious trouble,” she said, “so I’m not all that concerned.”
Hubbard said he was eager to “put an end to rumors” about possible food poisoning.
“Folks in Towers work hard out there,” Hubbard said. “They really try to produce a top-notch product.”
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