Still, Norton said, the department still has some of the meat in its freezer, and he doesn’t plan on using any of it until he can find out more about what happened.

“But I think it’s probably all right. We didn’t have any repercussions.”

Attempts to reach Todd Sarver, president of the Ellwood Moose lodge, were unsuccessful.

Richard McGarvey, spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Health, said that his agency has checked out “a handful” of reports concerning people who had become ill after the dinner, “but we can’t confirm anything yet.”

“What makes it difficult,” he said, “is that normally, we would want to be testing food, trying to find out if something was contaminated. But being as the dinner was in early March, that’s difficult to do at this point.

“I will say that it is our understanding that this was a potluck-type dinner, and that most of the stuff was prepared somewhere else and brought to the facility. So if there was something, at least you don’t have the type of mass risk that you’d see if it had happened at a restaurant.”