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80's MRE's and food poisoning??

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 11:01 pm
by Sr. Wing Commander
I remember back in the mid 80's a story on 20/20 about how a large number of MRE's made several soldiers sick. Somehow bacteria wasn't killed during the retort process and grew in the packs. If I remember right a few soldiers died. Years later someone told me this was true but that it was mainly confined to Chiken Ala King (which looked like vomit in a pouch).

I was wondering if anyone has any links on news to this or articles or even remembers it, or if it is not true.

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 10:01 am
by kman
I've read a few stories about that - seems like the issue was centered around the "Chicken ala King" MRE. This is why I refer to it as "Chicken ala Death" :-). I actually tried one of those from 1992 and it was still good and I didn't get sick. Whew.

When I get some time, I'll have to dig around and see if I can find those articles.

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 4:06 pm
by mw509
Would it be possible to find the original 20/20 clip on the internet some where?

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 5:48 pm
by kman
It can be kind of tough finding archived video like that. Text and news stories stand a better chance of getting archived either by the original producers, Google cache, or The Internet Archive/Wayback Machine:

http://www.archive.org/

But it's worth digging around to see what we can find.