Other Products Suspected in the Salmonella Outbreak
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not identified tomatoes as the definite source of the salmonella problem. Other products are being investigated as the source of the outbreak:
“…Raw jalapeños, serranos and cilantro, key ingredients in Mexican cooking, are now being linked along with tomatoes to the outbreak of salmonella that has sickened more than 1,000 people nationwide and forced grocers to pull produce from their shelves.
On Wednesday, experts with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned seniors and people with compromised immune systems - the most at risk - to avoid eating the raw peppers and cilantro.”
link: Health warning widens to peppers
This has been an ongoing problem since April and no definitive answer has been found yet. One comment about this salmonella problem is that this impacts only a small per centage of the American population. Only a small number, in relation to the general population, has become ill.
So far there has been one salmonella related death. The point is that even if a small segment of the population is impacted, the problem is serious. The illnesses and the time to identify the source of the problem show that the government agencies are not funded adequately nor staffed appropriately to provide the necessary security to the national food supply.
The number of people who have become ill now exceeds a thousand, even with warnings issued. The industry sector producing and shipping the tomatoes estimates that the damage has exceeded a hundred million dollars. The progress is that more products are added to a warning list. The question to the commenter would be ‘at what point do you consider this product safety concern as a serious issue?’.
Catherine Forsythe
One Comment
MacRand
July 12th, 2008
at 4:58am
Salmonella often comes from human waste.
Unlike the USA, many Mexican farmers use human waste as cheap fertilizer (nicknamed “Dynamite”) in their fields to grow eatable raw vegetables like tomatoes and peppers, to be exported to North America.
Once in the U.S., American shippers re-pack the Mexican vegetables, often mixing them with domestic (USA local grown) vegetables, confusing the “source” of Salmonella infections.
Politics - the Dept. of Agriculture and CDC are reluctant to point a finger at Mexican produce for political reasons unless they can isolate the cause, which is virtually impossible because of the re-packing stateside. But, “everyone knows” where Salmonella comes from — vegetables grown in fields fertilized with human waste — Mexico.
So, let’s watch and see how long it takes the U.S. bureaucrats to “identify” the source of the problem, and how many people have to get sick and die first.