WASHINGTON — If you have pets and kids — a new study finds you should make sure the two don’t share — everything. A study in today’s journal “Pediatrics” finds a recent outbreak of salmonella poisoning that sickened 79 people — mostly children — around the country was tracked to contaminated pet food. Vanderbilt University’s Dr. William Schaffner told ABC News that kids didn’t even need to eat the pet food to get sick. “It looks as though the children kind of were around the food bowl, played with it, may have played with the water in the pet’s water bowl and it was that kind of an association that led to the transmission of the salmonella,” he said. Washing hands, repeatedly cleaning the pet’s food bowl, taking it up after the pet has finished eating and washing out that water bowl on a regular basis, are important to avoid the most recent outbreak of salmonella, he said.
Monday, Aug. 9, 8 a.m.
