Peoria botulism outbreak, 40 years later: ‘It grabs hold of you and stays’
PEORIA, Ill. -- Tracy Pinkham remembers all of it: The way the onions looked slimy and how she woke the next morning with a dry mouth and blurry vision that got worse as the day went on. Her head falling to her shoulders as her husband drove to a walk-in clinic that diagnosed her with an inner-ear infection and sent her home. The crowded emergency room. The doctor who scoured his medical textbook for answers. The two months on a breathing machine, paralyzed. The nightmares. The decades of muscle weakness that never seemed to get better despite physical therapy.
“I used to joke that I died and somebody different came home,” said Pinkham, 64. “In essence, that is the truth. I wasn’t the same person when I came home, mentally or physically, and it had long-term consequences.”
Over three days in October 1983, Pinkham and 27 other diners at the Skewer Inn, a beloved restaurant in Peoria’s Northwoods Mall, ate onions unknowingly contaminated with botulinum, one of nature’s deadliest toxins.
One person died. Several others spent months in intensive care units, hooked up to ventilators. The toxin left them paralyzed but conscious. They heard every word, felt every needle prick. And yet, they couldn’t move or speak or open their eyes.
They were, essentially, prisoners in their own bodies.
At the time, it was the country’s third-largest botulism outbreak of the 20th century and remains to this day one of the nation’s largest.
Often mischaracterized as food poisoning, botulism is a potentially fatal illness that has been documented in every U.S. state and countries around the world. In September, an outbreak in southwest France killed one person and sickened 14 others who ate homemade preserved sardines at a restaurant.
About 200 U.S. cases are reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention each year, agency data show. Most involve a form of the illness that affects infants. Because botulism is so rare, it remains a largely unknown illness — even to some in the medical community — often misdiagnosed on first examination.
“Published literature on botulism and its treatment is sparse and characterized by disparate, low-quality data, some of it many decades old,” doctors with the CDC wrote in a 2017 paper. “Gaps exist in our knowledge of basic facets of botulism.”
Even less is known about the long-term effects of the toxin on its victims. But Pinkham and some other survivors of the Peoria outbreak say that 40 years later, they’ve never fully recovered.
“I had no idea that botulism is actually the opposite of what you think of,” said Mary Lou Dobrydnia, 69. “It grabs
