August 29, 2008
The Salmonella outbreak of the summer of 2008 appears to be over. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the outbreak, which began in April, sickened at least 1,440 people before it ran its course, and that no new illnesses have been linked to the contamination.
The outbreak, originally blamed on tomatoes, was later linked to jalapeno and serrano peppers grown in Mexico, but the CDC says it may never know for sure where the contamination originated, in part because of flaws in the nation's food safety system.
Officials at both the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called for new steps to improve the safety of fresh produce include. In particular, they say more exact inspection procedures and more funding would allow state laboratories to test samples of suspected pathogens faster. They also call for enhanced FDA authority to impose produce safety regulations.
Despite the CDC's uncertainty, the FDA announced at the end of July that laboratory testing had confirmed that both a sample of serrano pepper and a sample of irrigation water collected by agency investigators on a farm in the state of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, contain Salmonella Saintpaul with the same genetic fingerprint as the strain of bacteria that is causing the current outbreak in the United States.
At that time, it issued a warning to U.S. consumers about Mexican peppers.
Two weeks earlier it said it had determined that fresh tomatoes now available in the domestic market were not associated with the outbreak, and removed its June 7 warning against eating certain types of red raw tomatoes.
Tomato growers reacted angrily, blaming the agency for ruining the market for tomatoes at the precise time they were being harvested. A number of fast food and other restaurant chains shunned tomatoes for several weeks during the errant recall.
