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Critical Salmonella Clue Came From Minnesota

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The Associated Press

Published: July 24, 2008

WASHINGTON - It was a hot lead for detectives on a cold case. People suddenly were getting salmonella at a Minnesota restaurant more than 1,000 miles from the center of the nation's outbreak.

Not my tomatoes, protested the manager. He had switched his supply to government-cleared fresh tomatoes and even canned ones, but a lot of his menu items had a raw jalapeno garnish sprinkled on top, and that turned out to be a critical clue in the two-month salmonella mystery.

On July 3, Minnesota alerted federal officials. After tracing credit card receipts - to find what the restaurant's healthy customers didn't eat - there was good evidence that the jalapenos were sickening people.

Officials also had a diagram tracing the pepper shipments to three farms in Mexico.

One of those farms shipped peppers through the same large warehouse in McAllen, Texas, where Food and Drug Administration inspectors weeks later would find a single contaminated Mexican-grown pepper being packed by a neighboring vendor.

How could Minnesota pinpoint hot peppers just days after discovering a cluster of sick residents, when federal investigators had spent weeks fruitlessly chasing tomatoes?

To be fair, "there was already some doubt about tomatoes causing this whole outbreak," cautioned Kirk Smith, food-borne disease chief at the Minnesota Department of Health.
Federal investigators say Minnesota's information came just as they were getting hints from two Texas restaurant clusters that jalapenos might play a role.

"Ours was the first that pointed specifically to jalapenos as an ingredient, not just the salsa," Smith said.

It's too soon to know whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention improperly blamed tomatoes in early June based on reports from the first people to fall ill in New Mexico and Texas.

"I don't think we can find fault yet," said University of Georgia food-safety expert Michael Doyle.

"With tomatoes, if you looked at the initial case-control studies, they really came up high on the list."

The CDC didn't comment Wednesday.

TOMATO GROWERS IN FLORIDA SEEK COMPENSATION

TALLAHASSEE - Florida tomato growers want compensation from the federal government for millions of dollars lost because of an investigation that originally focused on raw tomatoes after a salmonella outbreak in parts of the country this spring.

Florida Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson travels to Washington next week to seek changes in the process so an entire industry is not unnecessarily tainted.

"Public health and safety is, of course, the top priority, but we also have to look out for growers who are losing tens of millions of dollars unnecessarily," said Liz Compton, spokeswoman for Bronson's office. "We're going to have food-borne illnesses in the future, but that doesn't mean an entire industry should have to suffer."

The Associated Press

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