Customers returned 1,255 packages of ground beef to Dorothy Lane Market for a refund between Monday and Thursday morning, DLM officials said today, July 31.

Many of those customers purchased new packages of ground beef to replace the product that DLM on Monday voluntarily withdrew from the marketplace, said Calvin Mayne, DLM's vice president. DLM acted after two children were sickened with E. coli bacteria traced to ground beef produced by DLM supplier Coleman Natural Meats and sold at DLM's Washington Square store. The bacteria was traced to a Nebraska processing plant that was implicated in an earlier E. Coli product recall involving Kroger ground beef, and which also processed some of Coleman's beef.

Coleman no longer sends its beef to the Nebraska plant for processing, Mayne said. Coleman Natural Meats owner Mel Coleman Jr. is scheduled to come to Dayton this weekend to speak with customers in DLM stores, Mayne said.

There have been no new cases of illnesses caused by the E. coli strain known as "E. coli 0157:H7" that caused headlines Tuesday for sickening six people in Montgomery County in the past few weeks, said Bill Wharton, spokesman for Public Health — Dayton & Montgomery County.

Those six people — ranging in age from 1 to 20 years old — are all "well on the road to recovery," Wharton said.

Within three hours of receiving confirmation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that a package of Coleman ground beef provided by the family of one of the sick children tested positive for the E. Coli strain that sickened the child, Dorothy Lane Market officials began calling customers who had purchased ground beef and used their DLM loyalty card and informing them of the voluntary withdrawal and refund offer, Mayne said. As a precaution, store officials decided to withdraw all Coleman ground beef that was processed at the Nebraska plant, which included sell-by dates between June 9 and July 29.

Cooking ground beef thoroughly kills E. coli. All ground beef should be cooked to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, to the point where "the juices run clear and there is no pink inside," Wharton said.

Were you affected by the recall?