Break in salmonella case?
WASHINGTON (AP) - June 20, 2008 The FDA wouldn't say where in Florida and Mexico the hunt is
centering. But officials stressed that the clues don't necessarily
mean that a particular farm will turn out to be the culprit.
Investigators will pay special attention to big packing houses
or distribution warehouses that handle tomatoes from many farms and
where contamination could be spread, leading to what now appears to
be the nation's largest-ever salmonella outbreak from tomatoes.
"It does not mean definitively the contamination occurred on a
farm in Mexico or on a farm in Florida," said Dr. David Acheson,
FDA's food safety chief. "This is not just the farms that we're
inspecting, it's the whole distribution chain."
A surge of newly confirmed cases moved Friday's official count
to 552 illnesses in 32 states, pushing the outbreak into record
territory. In 2004, government records show there were three
separate tomato-and-salmonella outbreaks that together totaled 561
illnesses, the largest of which sickened 429 people.
Most of Friday's newly reported cases were people who became
sick in April or May but just completed testing to prove they had
the outbreak strain of salmonella.
But the latest victim got sick on June 10, meaning the outbreak
may not be over.
And Texas is clearly its center, with a doubling of known cases
from 131 confirmed earlier in the week to 265 as of Friday.
"These 552 may actually represent several thousand illnesses in
the United States," cautioned Dr. Ian Williams of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Previous research shows that for every case of salmonella
reported to the government, 30 or more people get sick but don't
see a doctor or undergo confirmatory testing, he noted.
The FDA continues to urge consumers nationwide to avoid raw red
plum, red Roma or red round tomatoes unless they were grown in
specific states or countries that FDA has cleared of suspicion.
Check FDA's Web site - http://www.fda.gov - for an updated list.
Also safe are grape tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and tomatoes sold
with the vine still attached.
The FDA already had said that central and southern Florida and
parts of Mexico were suspects because they supplied the vast
majority of tomatoes sold when the outbreak began in April.
But Friday marked a big step in the monthlong investigation.
Investigators have been tracking where the sick said they bought or
ate tomatoes, and then where those retailers or restaurants in turn
bought them. After a lot of frustrating dead ends, the probe
finally yielded a set of clues - a list of farms in Florida and
Mexico that seem to have been at least part of that supply, plus
records showing the packing houses and other distribution stops
between farm and point of sale.
"A tomato that made somebody sick in Vermont has come a long
way," Acheson pointed out. "A lot of suppliers and warehouses
have potentially handled that tomato. ... It could be anywhere on
that distribution chain where all these tomatoes were together at
one point."
So FDA inspectors, working together with Florida state officials
and Mexican regulators, will start at the farms and fan out to
packing sheds and beyond, in hopes of finding spots where tomatoes
from the farms of interest intersected.
FDA isn't aware of anyone in Mexico infected with the same
strain of salmonella that is causing the outbreak, Acheson noted.