By Michael Fumento

Copyright 1997 by Michael Fumento

Read the shorter version of this article.

Where are those tea-heaving Boston patriots when you need them? Iced tea served in restaurants around the country was turning up with a deadly poison the same that killed the children at Jack-in-the Box a few years ago. But instead of dressing up like Indians, going to the nearest restaurant, and tossing crates of tea into the nearest harbor (or at least sink), Americans just sat on their duffs!

Which turns out to have been the correct thing to do. For no one died from this allegedly tainted iced tea. Indeed, no one even got sick from it. None of which stopped the media from tossing around headlines like "Killer Tea" and "Bad Brew" and comparing iced tea to sewer water. Nor did it stop major chains such as Wendy's, KFC, Boston Market, Blimpies, Appleby's, and Taco Bell from dropping iced tea from their menus.

The tempest began in the summer of 1994 when a restaurant customer in Cincinnati asked the local health department to test some tea with an "off" odor that had been served him at a restaurant. The Cincinnati Health Department ran a fecal coliform test and then went to 20 restaurants, rounded up samples of their iced tea, and tested it. Nineteen of 20 samples, they concluded, contained varying levels of fecal coliform bacteria. "Fecal" means "feces," "excrement," cocca, or whatever slang expression you feel like using.

E. coli

Having feces in your drink is not only disgusting, but potentially harmful. It can contain such harmful bacteria as cryptosporidium or E. coli, one strain of which caused the Jack-in-the-Box deaths (from eating undercooked beef). While it's rare for a healthy adult to die from either of these, they can nonetheless suffer anything from cramps to severe diarrhea.

Coliform in a water supply is a sign of possible harmful contamination, because all feces falls under the category of "coliform." Nevertheless, not all bacteria that are coliform are feces. This is the pivotal fact for our entire tale, but it will be discussed later.

For reasons unknown, the finding of coliform in the iced tea didn't become public for several months. But then the top blew off the kettle. The Cincinnati Health Department issued a health advisory warning that tea from local establishments might be harmful and released the names of the 19 restaurants to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Since "enquiring minds want to know" the newspaper ran a story titled "Iced Tea Worse than River," purportedly showing that "contamination is severe" in restaurant tea. "They are finding numbers we wouldn't recommend swimming in, much less drinking," one water quality expert was quoted saying.

From Ohio the story spread to Kentucky, Georgia, and other states. Television station after station went out to local restaurants and brought back their iced tea for testing, and each reported in breathless horror that all or virtually all of the samples contained bacteria.

"Along with what makes your tea so tasty, you could be getting a strong dose of some nasty bacteria that could make you sick," a Miami / Ft. Lauderdale TV reporter warned. A Tampa / St. Petersburg station declared, "You might be drinking danger and not even know it."

A Los Angeles station consulted the expertise of the person on the street. It quoted one iced tea drinker as being "shocked" while another said, "I think it's outrageous."

Meanwhile CNN co-anchor Katherine Calloway punctuated a news segment by saying, "I don't think I'll ever order iced tea in a restaurant again."

Some stations interviewed "experts" until they found somebody to agree with them. "If one [bacterium] is present, it's too much," a University of Texas School of Public professor told a Houston station.

Nobody seemed to notice that no one was apparently getting sick from drinking this tea. Incredibly, nobody was even claiming to have gotten sick from drinking the tea. No one was even trying to cash in and make a few bucks by pretending to be sick. No one was responding to the broadcasts with psychosomatic illness, as is so often the case when health warnings are publicized. No one was complaining. Period.

"I" FOR "INCOMPETENCE"

The worst station was WAGA-TV Atlanta, which during the November 1995 sweeps (when broadcasters try their hardest to pump up their ratings to impress advertisers), it ran a three-part series called "The Dirt on Iced Tea."

Reporter Virginia Ellis of the station's "I Team" (Investigative Team) said its sampling of iced tea in local restaurants found a "staggering amount of potentially harmful bacteria in a small amount of tea." Video of Ellis showed her standing in front of a local lake, saying dumping the tea there would force the lake to be closed.

Ellis found that all 20 samples collected from 20 different restaurants appeared to be "contaminated with potentially harmful bacteria called fecal coliform that comes from human or animal waste." This is what I call a "red flag." It should have made Ellis or somebody at that super "I Team" suspicious that all 20 had the same apparent problem.

What if you heard about a new prostate cancer test used randomly on 20 men that detected the cancer in all of them? Wouldn't that make you just a bit suspicious? It apparently didn't for Virginia Ellis, who told her viewers: "Bottom line: We don't want to consume it."

One of the neat things about the tea scare from a TV station's perspective is that it lent itself to so many visuals. Thus, in addition to the lake scene, WAGA showed a lab attendant saying, "Right here, it's so many you can't count them."

Ellis also inserted quotes from numerous health officials. "I think we were all pretty shocked," Cincinnati's Health Commissioner Malcolm Adcock told her. "If you have fecal coliform levels, that tells you that something is wrong, something is not being done properly," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spokesman Bob Howard said to her. The key word was "if." Howard knew only what WAGA had told him, and had responded appropriately to the hypothetical situation. But what viewer is going to pick up on that?

In a backhanded reassurance, Ellis told her audience, "Why worry? Well, that's assuming that we're all normal and healthy people and that we have strong immune systems. There are people with compromising immune systems [she meant "compromised"]. People with AIDS, children, elderly, people who are under chemotherapy." Indeed, she said, "If you've had iced tea all of your life, you may have built up a resistance to this and never be impacted by it." Imagine that, iced tea as a vaccination against bacteria. In any case, though, this hardly seems reassuring.

As a result of WAGA's reporting, the Georgia Public Health Division issued a public health advisory about restaurant tea, as had Cincinnati earlier.

THE CDC TRIES TO REMOVE THE HORNET'S NEST AND KNOCKS IT OVER

Now it was time for the media's pack mentality to kick in. Other TV stations began repeating the performance of WAGA's crack "I-Team." Finally, the CDC felt compelled to act. In February, 1995 it issued an advisory stating, "Tea is a beverage with little history of disease transmission," and "At present, no outbreaks of infection have been reported to CDC that were clearly associated with the consumption of tea."

No were no confirmed outbreaks ever, out of nearly 10,000 investigations of food-borne illness over the past decade. Indeed, there had only been a single complaint, and that was unconfirmed. The CDC also took the opportunity to provide directions on safely brewing tea.

So everybody breathed a big sigh of relief, right? They began ordering those wading-pool sized glasses of tea so popular in America, right? And they did so without first asking the waiter where the toilet was, right? Wrong. The Associated Press (AP) now sprang into high gear. It labeled the CDC advisory a "warning" and asserted it was based on tests indicating "high levels of fecal coliform bacteria, which can cause stomach upset and diarrhea."

AP's report led to more than 140 separate television news stations running stories about supposedly dangerous levels of bacteria in restaurant iced tea. Some were so astounding they would make you think the water for the tea had been pulled straight out of a toilet an unflushed one.

A sampling:

• "Your iced tea could be a witch's brew of bacterial contamination," said WNBC in New York.
• "It would be like drinking from a sewer," claimed WGHP in North Carolina.
• "Are you drinking toxic tea?" KTRK-TV of Houston asked viewers. It then went where no station had gone before to indict tea on store shelves and even herbal tea, such as Celestial Seasonings.
• "You could be ordering a glass full of fecal bacteria," exclaimed KCAL in Los Angeles.
• "Experts tell us that some iced tea you buy is as bad as drinking out of a sewer," said CNBC.
• "Experts say what we found is disgusting," said KPNX of Phoenix.
• "Sugar and lemon are about the only two things most of us want in iced tea,"exclaimed a reporter for WFOR in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, adding but "you could be getting a strong dose of some nasty bacteria that could make you sick."
• "Better listen up. We have a health warning for you tonight," WTVT in Tampa-St.Petersburg, Florida told viewers. It added, "You might be drinking danger and not even know it." The anchorman said, "Federal health officials say some restaurants are brewing bad iced tea."
• "It's pretty disgusting bacteria at that," said a grimacing reporter at KCBS in Los Angeles, calling the CDC memo a "national warning."

Most of these, mind one, occurred during the year's other sweeps month, February.

Officials at the CDC were horrified at this turn of events. Spokesman Howard declared, "Our advisory was in no way a warning or a red flag about tea or iced tea." Indeed, he said, "The Associated Press and Associated Press TV have inaccurately characterized" the memorandum as "'a warning about the potential health risks of bad iced tea.'" It is "not a 'warning,'" he said, rather "an advisory attesting to the safety of tea and tea drinking."

Ah, but no matter. The TV-tea stories continued with a vengeance.

"And in today's news, be sure to remove the poo-poo from your tea before drinking it."

Indeed, at least one station, KCBS-Los Angeles, told viewers, "Last week we told you about a national health alert, warning people who drink iced tea. Now, that report says some health departments have found large amounts of bacteria and it's pretty disgusting bacteria at that in iced tea served in restaurants."

Wait a second! How could a report say one thing last week and say something new the next? At the very least, it would have to be a new report or memo. Old reports just can't say new things. In any case, this wasn't in the first memo and there was no second one. KCBS's story was full of, well, fecal matter.

It's hard to gauge how scared the public was by all this. But iced tea is a $3 billion-a-year business and the restaurants were terrified. By February, the Wendy's chain had capitulated to the media campaign, suspending sales of iced tea. Perish the thought that the chain that pioneered a burger with three quarter-pound slabs of artery-choking, obesity-causing beef would sell its customers something that was bad for them.

Joining Wendy's was KFC, Boston Market, Blimpies, Appleby's, and Taco Bell. After WNBC New York's report, local outlets of TGI Friday's, Houlihan's, Roy Rogers, and Nathan's stopped serving brewed tea. Several of these serve almost exclusively foods that are so bad for you they ought to station an ambulance outside the door at all times. But the tea is what they pulled, or replaced with less-convenient tea bags that are also three times more expensive.

It's not that these restaurants didn't know the score. At least Wendy's did. "It's sweeps month, so television stations have to get everybody fired up," said a spokesman for the corporation. But when you're the subject of hysteria, standing on principle rarely pays.

A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY

By June of 1996, Cincinnati's Adcock must have been feeling like Dr. Frankenstein. The creature he had created was on the loose and seemingly refused to be penned in. CDC spokesman Tom Skinner called it "the story that just will not go away." Ironically, the very lack of illness may have contributed to this. Since no one was getting sick, there was essentially no news "peg" or "hook" on which to hang the story, hence the story was timeless.

Adcock said the risk factor was blown out of proportion by TV stations that sensationalized the issue as a quick way to boost ratings. "It's a basic sanitation issue, more than imminent risk," he said. "Basic sanitation is not sexy. It doesn't capture headlines."

But even Adcock was wrong in this. Sanitation had nothing to do with it. The problem is the tests that the health departments were using. In short, they weren't designed for tea but for water. Water supplies shouldn't have any bacteria in them, not because all bacteria is harmful to humans most isn't but because any bacteria in water could be a marker for fecal coliform and such nasties as E. coli. But one needn't have a master's degree in chemistry to know that iced tea is not something as simple as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. Tea is a plant, which contains and carries a huge number of substances.

"The results cannot be related directly to food, because many of the types of bacteria that you find in a fecal coliform test can commonly be found in vegetables and a variety of other foods," explains Michael Doyle, a microbiologist and director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.

The results of fecal coliform tests on iced tea merely indicated plant bacteria normally found on tea leaves, especially of the Klebsiella and Enterobacter type. If you use a test that's able to distinguish between various types of bacteria, you can see this. But if you use a test that only measures fecal bacteria or its absence, it's like using a home pregnancy test to find out if your baby is going to be a boy or a girl. The test isn't designed for that.

"I'm guessing they used the fecal coliform test because it's easy and available," said Robert Harrington, director of public health and safety at the National Restaurant Association in Washington, D.C. "This entire episode is the result of a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of a fairly common lab test."

You can't blame a reporter for not knowing what "Klebesiella" is or especially for having trouble pronouncing it. You can blame him for ignoring the red flags. Why didn't anybody think it suspicious when all of their samples came back positive? Why did they think nothing of it when they got reactions from lab technicians such as the one in Tampa who said, "I was shocked. As a scientist, and processing water samples over the years, I have never seen this level of fecal coliform in a sample meant for human consumption."

There's that critical word again: water. Finally, why didn't it bother them that nobody was getting sick from this supposedly feces-flavored drink. They absolutely, sternly, steadfastly refused to become ill. No matter how many red flags popped up, all were ignored. The story was just too tasty or untasty, as it were.

There were other indications that all this was much ado about nothing. The FDA in November 1995 issued a reassuring memo on iced tea safety on an electronic bulletin board available to state regulatory officials. The next month, it went further in explaining that naturally occurring bacteria, not just fecal material, could lead to high coliform counts and recommended use of a more specific test.

Harrington thinks it wasn't enough. "I lay a lot of blame at the feet of local health departments," said Harrington, but "I lay the biggest blame at the feet of the FDA for not taking an early stance." Still, the FDA did do something, and the TV stations ignored it.

Some scientists also tried to set the record straight. After WAGA began its crusade, the University of Georgia's Doyle purchased 25 bags of dry tea leaves at local stores and found none had fecal contamination. So if the leaves were clean, and the water was clean, and presumably feces wasn't getting into the tea-making systems at all those restaurants, then there was no feces in the iced tea, right? Ah, but try explaining that to "I-Team" reporter Virginia Ellis.

"But could that mean that it was fertilized at some point, or had exposure to fecal matter through manure, could that be at all part of the source here?" she asked an assuredly exasperated Doyle. Goodness, lady! He just told you the leaves had come from stores. Does she think stores use fertilizer?

THE UNBLINKING EYE THAT SHOULD HAVE BLINKED

The Tea Association's Joseph Simrany thinks it's no accident that television news, rather than newspapers, were behind the scare. "It's a visual medium; they go for the sensational and big graphics," he said Actually, it wasn't graphics the TV stations loved, it was all the shots they could insert of people ordering tea, drinking tea, of insides of restaurants, outsides of restaurants, drive-thrus, menus, iced tea urns, of the labs that did the testing. They ate it up, or drank it down as it were.

In fact, the print media were almost universally quite responsible in trying to squelch the false fears raised by the TV stations. Articles in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Washington Post, Tampa Tribune, and a few other places all provided the other side of the story. The worst thing about them was they kept repeating the same puns in their headlines, such as "brouhaha" and "brews up tea scare."

The Tribune paraphrased a spokesman for Wendy's as calling the scare "an urban television tale,"and said that Wendy's has switched from brewed to pre-made tea, "but only to calm anxious customers." It quoted an environmental epidemiologist with the Florida Health and Rehabilitative Services office in Tallahassee as saying, "You might find bacteria in brewed tea, but that doesn't mean it's hazardous. In fact, there have been no reports of food-borne illness related to ice tea in Florida."

It added that the CDC's manager for microbiology, Joseph M. Maddan, said that small numbers of coliforms are present in raw milk, vegetables, meat, poultry and other foods, "Therefore, they (bacteria) are of little, if any, value in monitoring raw foods."

All of these things would be of tremendous interest to tea drinkers, yet they couldn't learn them from the TV stations.

NO REGRETS

Predictably, when the wall of facts finally rushed over the top of the TV dam, apologies were few and far between. Which is to say there weren't any. "We thought it was important to report in detail," said the Cincinnati Enquirer's Tom Bonfield, the man who started it all. "We tried to be fair and responsible." This from the man who had claimed a perfectly harmless beverage had "severe" contamination and quoted somebody saying, "They are finding [fecal coliform] numbers we wouldn't recommend swimming in, much less drinking."

WAGA's Ellis told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, "I think we covered it fairly and thoroughly and despite the fact that some people label local TV as hysterical with an even tone." After all, she said, "We didn't say it was going to kill you." True enough. But how would Ms. Ellis feel if the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, which she had personally attacked on the air for calling her series a "Brou-Ha-Ha," falsely accused her of severely beating her child. Then later the newspaper could reply it had done nothing wrong since, after all, it didn't say Ellis had killed her daughter.

A representative of WTVT-TV of Tampa-St. Petersburg, showing he still just didn't get it or didn't care said,"The health department doesn't allow fecal coliform in drinking water, so why should we have it in tea?." He added, "The intention isn't to scare the public."

No, the intent was to raise ratings. That's why the station ended its first night's broadcast with a teaser. "By now you're wondering which restaurants served us tainted tea," it told viewers. "We'll have the results tomorrow, and what you need to know before you drink some bad brew." Of course, they already had the results. Here they were saying that local establishments were serving something that could make you terribly sick but they were going to make you wait another 24 hours to watch another broadcast before telling you which ones.

Inevitably, somebody used the "if only one" excuse. This time it came from Neil McNeil of North Carolina's WGHP, who had said drinking local tea would be like "drinking water from a sewer." Said the unrepentant McNeill, "If some of these reports, however overblown, save one life, they were worth doing."

But Neill, they saved no lives. They scared people, they cut into the profits of hard-working franchise owners, but they saved no lives. They prevented no illness. All any false food safety story ever does is dilute "the importance of the real food-safety issues," as a food safety specialist for a national restaurant chain put it. "There are enough" scares, he pointed out, that are serious.

What Kurtz wrote in the Washington Post about the iced tea scare applies in so many cases. "The alarmist tone of many of the stories raises question about whether the news media can properly calibrate the level of their reporting on complex scientific subjects. In an age of health warnings about everything from caffeine to Chinese food, a steady drumbeat of such reports can have a numbing effect."

Unless, Mr. Kurtz, they just make the drums beat all the louder next time.

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Michael Fumento is the author of the book, Science Under Siege.