AVON, Ind. (WISH) – An Indiana family is demanding answers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration after their 9-year-old son nearly died from a form of E. coli so severe his kidneys began to fail.
Colton George was a thriving, baseball-playing, 9-year-old boy when he woke up Nov. 17 with a bad stomachache. The next morning, he was a patient in the intensive care unit.
“They said the first three days were going to be deadly probably,” Colton said.
Before his sickness, the 9-year-old had been on an antibiotic to treat a tooth infection. When his stomach started aching Nov. 10, his parents thought the medicine was likely the cause – but Colton’s pain only got worse.
“17th, my wife called me. I was at the firehouse. She said, ‘Hey, I need to take Colton to the emergency room. He is doubled over in pain,’” said Colton’s father, Chris George.
The family arrived at the emergency room begging for answers and were soon moved to Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis.
After first believing Colton had colitis, doctors diagnosed him with Shiga toxin-producing E. coli hemolytic uremic syndrome – a form of E. coli so severe it was causing his kidneys to fail. For the next 18 days, Colton was confined to a hospital bed, and for 11 of them, he needed around the clock dialysis.
Even though George is a Wayne Township firefighter, the sight of his hospitalized son was hard to bear.
“That was devastating, to say the least. To sit there and see your child have a tube down his throat on a ventilator, it’s something that nobody needs to see,” he said.
The days proved challenging – Colton even had to celebrate his 10th birthday in a hospital room – but he was eventually released and made the journey back home to Avon, Indiana.
Colton’s parents then began a months-long quest for answers, fixed on finding out exactly who and what was responsible for their son nearly losing his life.
Eventually, they got Colton’s whole genome sequencing data from the Indiana Department of Health. The data revealed a link between his illness and an E. coli outbreak that affected 88 people across 12 states. At the end of 2024, the FDA said the outbreak was linked to a specific kind of romaine lettuce; although, it’s not been confirmed it is absolutely linked to Colton’s sickness.
The family still wants to know who supplied the lettuce that likely sickened Colton. The FDA won’t give them an answer, even after hundreds of messages and dozens of emails.
“The first two or three days, we didn’t know if my son was going to survive or not. So, frustration, not being able to get an answer from the FDA… it makes you upset. You should be able to call somebody that’s working for you as the federal government and get answers, and they won’t supply anything,” George said.
The family’s food safety lawyer says the FDA knows who the supplier is and the public has a right to know, too.
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