Legion of Angels News Archive

More than 1,000 people in 41 states and the District of Columbia have now been sickened in the nation’s salmonella outbreak, in what officials said Wednesday was the largest food-borne outbreak in the last decade. And some food safety experts this week tied problems in tracing the source of the contamination to what they say are shortcomings in the Bioterrorism Act of 2002.

Federal investigators have now linked at least some of the outbreak to fresh jalapeños, Dr. Robert Tauxe of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, though they have not ruled out tomatoes.

But officials have still not pinpointed the source of the contamination. Nor do they know the country or state where the tainted produce was grown, despite a rule issued by the Food and Drug Administration under the bioterrorism law that was intended to give federal officials a way to respond immediately to threats to the nation’s food supply.

The rule requires importers, processors and distributors to keep track of where they buy produce and where it goes. A major hurdle facing investigators in this outbreak, however, is that processors frequently repack boxes of tomatoes to meet a buyer’s demands. In doing so, officials said, they are not required to record the tomatoes’ farm, state or even country of origin.

“The purpose of the recordkeeping provision of the Bioterrorism Act was to support going back to the origin of food after people have gotten sick when you are trying to find out how the biological agent got there,” said Michael Taylor, a professor at the George Washington University and a former F.D.A. official. “But the provisions are of little or no value with respect to trace-backs of fresh produce because of the amount of shoe leather and time it would take.”

The rule requires only that produce handlers keep track of food one step back and one step forward in the supply chain and does not apply to retailers or growers. Because the rule does not specify the format for records, investigators are sifting through a hodgepodge of paper trails to identify the source of the contaminated produce.

“It’s clear that the F.D.A. is not equipped to deal with a trace-back of the magnitude that they are dealing with right now,” said Mike Doyle, director of the center for food safety at the University of Georgia.

Several lawmakers and consumer advocates are calling for a system that requires the industry to track the entire history of food products. Some groups, like the Produce Marketing Association, said they would support national regulation.

Dr. David Acheson, the agency’s associate commissioner for foods, said in a telephone interview on Monday that the F.D.A. lacked authority to require full trace-back capability, adding, “It’s the industry’s responsibility to put that kind of system in place, not ours.”

But Dr. David A. Kessler, the F.D.A. commissioner in the Clinton and first Bush administrations, said the agency has the authority to require the industry to trace produce as it travels from “farm to table,” but has lacked “the impetus” to do so.

“The technology exists to trace the entire chain of a food product,” Dr. Kessler said. “The agency needs to require the industry to put into effect mechanisms to do full trace-back. That regulation could be put in place in months, not years.”

Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, said Congress needed to expand the agency’s authority to “trace contamination to the source.” Ms. DeGette has proposed legislation directing the agency to establish a tracing system.

California requires tomato growers to be able to trace their product from the marketplace to the field, which most do using electronic systems that track codes on boxes, said Jay Van Rein of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Source — The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) – Adding to tomato confusion, the government is about to start testing numerous other types of fresh produce in the hunt for the source of the nation’s record salmonella outbreak — even as it insists tomatoes remain the leading suspect.

Investigators are mum on exactly what other vegetables are getting tracked.

Items commonly served with fresh tomatoes is the only hint Food and Drug Administration food safety chief Dr. David Acheson would give, calling it “irresponsible” to point a finger until he has more evidence that some other food really deserves the extra scrutiny.

“Tomatoes aren’t off the hook,” he stressed. “It’s just that there is clearly a need to think beyond tomatoes.”

Still, Acheson widened FDA’s probe on Tuesday, activating an emergency network of food laboratories around the country in anticipation of lots of additional samples to test.

The reason is that the outbreak continues, with 869 people now confirmed having taken ill. Most troublesome, at least 179 of them fell ill in June, the latest on June 20. That is more than two months after the first salmonella illnesses appeared, meaning the outbreak is continuing weeks longer than food-poisoning specialists had expected — and suggesting the culprit is still on the market.

Over the weekend, disease detectives with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began interviewing people sickened in June to find out what they ate and to compare their diets with those of healthy relatives and neighbors. Officials wouldn’t reveal early findings, except to say they supported the investigation’s new move.

Among the possibilities FDA is exploring is whether tomatoes and other produce are sharing a common packing or shipping site where both might become contaminated, or whether multiple foods might be tainted while being grown on adjoining farms or with common water sources.

Pressure is increasing on the FDA to solve the case, with the tomato industry suffering millions of dollars in losses and pushing for Congress to investigate how the agency handled the outbreak.

But Acheson said Tuesday that there’s a growing misconception in the public that if tomatoes really were to blame, the outbreak would only have lasted six weeks.

That’s just not true, he said, pointing to farms that rotate harvests so as to keep producing tomatoes for months.

Tomatoes first became a suspect because of what are called “case-control” studies rapidly conducted in New Mexico and Texas, the outbreak’s center, CDC food-poisoning specialist Dr. Robert Tauxe said.

Those kinds of studies compare the sick to people who are otherwise similar — in income, lifestyle, where they live — but healthy. In those initial studies, about 80 percent of the ill reported eating certain types of fresh tomatoes, far more than the healthy group did, Tauxe said. Statistically, the association was too strong to think it a coincidence.

Some food-poisoning experts say the CDC missed a key step in not taking those studies a step further and trying to trace why some of the healthy ate tomatoes without harm.

For now, 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 the agency has cleared of suspicion. Check the 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.

That advice is coming under fire too because tomatoes are sent through multiple repacking and distribution sites around the country, even to Mexico and back, regardless of where they’re grown. But Acheson said the advice would be fine-tuned only if new science emerges.

Even Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt expressed frustration Tuesday that the case isn’t solved.

“Nothing happens fast enough when you have a problem like this,” Leavitt said as he asked Congress for more funds and stronger legal powers for food and consumer safety agencies. Still, “I feel confident we will find the solution to this problem.”

Source — The New York Times