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Toxic Carrot Juice Becomes Powerful Learning Tool Faculty member’s investigation uncovers cause of botulism outbreak.
 German Gonzalez
Gonzalez, a Walden University faculty member who teaches in the Master of Public Health and Ph.D. in Public Health programs, recently did just that after co-authoring a paper published in the Nov. 15, 2008, issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
The paper, “International Outbreak of Severe Botulism with Prolonged Toxemia Caused by Commercial Carrot Juice,” compiled the work of researchers across the United States and Canada after six people in Georgia, Florida and Ontario, Canada, fell ill after drinking commercially produced carrot juice in fall 2006.
Gonzalez, the infectious diseases and epidemiology unit director for the North Central Health District in Georgia, learned about the outbreak after receiving a call from a colleague who reported that a severely ill patient was being treated at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta for what appeared to be botulism caused by Clostridium botulinum neurotoxins. Two other patients were being treated at a local hospital.
All three people had attended a family reunion together a few days before they were admitted to the hospital. Gonzalez and his team headed to the home where the reunion was held and started digging through the trash and the refrigerator, looking for causes of the outbreak. They rounded up all the possible contaminator suspects—including one empty and one partially consumed bottle of carrot juice—which were sent off for testing. The results were astounding. From the open bottle, researchers found so much botulism “it contained more than 200 lethal doses,” Gonzalez recalls.
Three Outbreaks Linked
Meanwhile, the carrot juice was pulled from store shelves, and the manufacturer ultimately changed the production process to prevent another disease outbreak. Although the juice was pasteurized, the only way to protect it from the C. botulinum toxin was through refrigeration. If the juice was improperly stored at any point, the toxin could thrive.
Experience Brings Learning to Life
Gonzalez has a wide breadth of experience to draw upon. The Colombia native received his doctor of medicine degree from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá and then worked as a trauma surgeon and medical director for rescue teams in his native country.
Colombia’s political and social instability prompted Gonzalez to immigrate to the United States in 2000. While his medical school education in Colombia taught him about topics such as epidemiology, social medicine and health care administration, “I never thought I would use it,” Gonzalez says.
When he began to put those subjects into practice in his job at the North Central Health District, “it was love at first sight,” he says.
Since then, Gonzalez has gone on to earn a Master of Public Health degree from Emory University. He began teaching at Walden in 2008, where he has been able to apply his experience teaching residents and interns in Colombia, as well as his current on-the-job experiences.
By incorporating real-world examples into the Walden experience, Gonzalez believes his students “will learn better than if it was abstract ideas. There still can be a disconnect between academia and real-life applications,” he says.
Gonzalez says his role isn’t to spoon-feed graduate students. Instead, he says, “I’m a facilitator. I facilitate their learning. If they figure it out by themselves and have a good example to draw from, they will never forget it.”
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