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E. Coli Could Hurt Taco Bell Sales
But his co-worker, a fellow college student, expressed less gusto for his lunch after learning about the outbreak. "I didn't know about it. Otherwise I don't know if we would have come here," said Dale Gadnorsa, 23, also of Philadelphia.
The company suggests that customers who are worried about the outbreak call its hot line, 1-800-TACO-BELL.
  A man wearing a Food and Drug Administration jacket waits to be let into a Taco Bell restaurant that is closed in South Plainfield, N.J. Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2006. At least three dozen people were stricken in New Jersey and New York and apparently all the victims had eaten at Taco Bell restaurants. The threat of more E. coli infections linked to Taco Bell restaurants appears to have passed, a health official said, as the company prepared Tuesday to reopen the affected eateries. (AP Photo/Mel Evans) (Mel Evans - AP) 
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Barry Sawyer, an operator who answered the phone at the Miami-based call center, said he has handled 25 calls since Wednesday. Most callers were not ill; they just wanted to understand the situation.
"The majority are calling in and asking 'What's going on?'" Sawyer said. "I don't think I've received any irate calls about it."
Dr. Douglas Archer, associate dean for research at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida, said throwing out more than the scallions would be premature.
"If nothing's pointing to anything else, where would you stop if you started down that path?" he said. "Taco Bell has been around for a long, long time, and they've served billions and billions safely."
Ready Pac Produce of Irwindale, Calif. _ which washed, chopped and packed the green onions suspected in the outbreak _ said it bought its scallions from a grower in Oxnard, Calif., about 45 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
This is the second E. coli scare to hit Ready Pac in the past four months. In September, spinach with the Ready Pac label was among dozens of brands pulled from the shelves before federal authorities traced a nationwide E. coli outbreak to another California processing plant that bags spinach.
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Associated Press writers Lisa Leff in San Francisco, Gillian Flaccus in Irvine, Garance Burke in Fresno, Janet Frankston Lorin in Jersey City, N.J., and Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Ky., contributed to this report.
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