An 11-year-old American girl reportedly suffered brain damage after consuming spoilt burger and fries from a Wendy’s restaurant in Ottawa County, Michigan.
What was a regular meal after softball practice became a nightmare, as an E. Coli infection snowballed into a series of life-threatening issues involving her kidneys and brain.
The girl now needs regular dialysis and her ability to learn has deteriorated as a result.
Her family is now suing the parent company of the Wendy’s franchise for US$20 million (S$27.2 million) worth of damages, including economic losses that may stem from her brain injury.
According to Michigan news outlet Wood TV, 11-year-old Aspen Lamfers was a healthy, normal child who excelled at her studies and sports before the incident.
Source: Wood TV
On 1 Aug 2022, she visited a Wendy’s outlet along Port Sheldon Street in Michigan after her team’s softball practice session.
There, Aspen got a hamburger, chicken nuggets, and fries.
In the days that followed, the child reportedly started experiencing abdominal cramps, diarrhoea, and blood in her stool.
At the hospital, doctors found that she had an E. Coli infection, which soon developed into hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) that attacked her kidneys.
The Lamfers family’s lawyer Tom Worsfold told Wood TV that it was “almost a miracle” that Aspen survived the ordeal.
“The infection continued to progress and attacked her pancreas and her brain. She had significant brain swelling suffering seizures while in the hospital, she had left-sided paralysis,” he explained.
Source: Wood TV
He added that she needed constant dialysis due to the kidney issues, was in and out of consciousness, and experienced hallucinations during that period.
Her parents took a video of her crying out in the hospital asking, ‘Why am I so sick?’ It’s just so bad. That terror for an 11-year-old girl needs to be compensated.
Aspen spent about a month undergoing treatment and rehabilitation before she could go home.
Following the ordeal, Aspen now has to live with high blood pressure, weakness on the left side of her body, diabetes, and brain damage, which has impacted her ability to learn.
For instance, the family’s lawyer said that her reading level dropped by a grade after she fell ill.
A year after getting sick, Aspen’s math grades have also dropped from above 70% to below 9%, Worsfold added.
Now, the Lamfers are suing Meritage Hospitality Group, the company that owns more than 380 Wendy’s, Taco John’s, Morning Belle and Stan’s Tacos locations across 16 states, for US$20 million (S$27.2 million) in damages.
The sum includes past and future economic losses, considering that Aspen would likely lose most of her ability to earn an income from her cognitive impairments.
Apparently, just days before Aspen’s visit to the Wendy’s restaurant, health inspectors had shut it down due to “gross, insanitary conditions” throughout the building.
Source: Wendy’s United States
Investigators found mouldy and spoiled food, including day-old chilli that staff had left sitting out, and produce without date labels.
The inspectors wrote in the restaurant’s health records that the “facility throughout is dirty at an excessive end of the spectrum”.
Consequently, the restaurant closed sometime in July 2022 to retrain its staff and fix the issues at the premises and had reopened by the time Aspen visited.
A few days after she ate there, however, inspectors returned to find many of the same problems still present.
Worsfold hence believes that Aspen fell ill from the restaurant’s cross-contamination.
In a statement to Michigan television station WZZM, Meritage Hospitality Group addressed the situation and said: “We take the health and safety of our customers very seriously. We deny any wrongdoing or failure of our food safety practices in this case. We cannot provide further comment in light of the open litigation.”
Also read: US Woman Gets Bacterial Infection From Eating Undercooked Fish, Has All 4 Limbs Amputated
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Featured image adapted from Wood TV.
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