Word: salmonella
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...comes as no surprise to me," Butterfield says. "Gas prices, food prices, salmonella - the world has gone absolutely crazy. And for a lot of people, that brings up this need to take control over what happens in their own yard. If all goes to hell, you can just lock the gate and stay at home...
...Taking tomatoes off shelves and menus may contain the outbreak, but it doesn't explain it. On May 22, the New Mexico Health Department notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it knew of seven people recently infected with Salmonella Saintpaul, an unusual strand of the bacteria that accounted for only 400 of the 1.4 million cases of salmonella infection reported last year. And it was precisely because occurrences of the Saintpaul strand are so rare that the report caught the CDC's attention. When Texas and a few other states reported cases of people being infected...
...There have been 13 outbreaks of salmonella in tomatoes since 1990, which puts the fruit on the list of high-risk foods that are prone to infection. But unlike the bagged spinach from the 2006 E. Coli scare, the tomatoes don't come with a traceable bar code. "When you're dealing with tomatoes, it is much, much more complex," explains Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's associate commissioner for foods. The FDA's great tomato hunt has an ever-expanding list of suspects. A salmonella victim can point to the supermarket (or restaurant) that sold the offending fruit...
...Still, the lag time between the initial outbreak and the government's reaction is startling: the first Salmonella Saintpaul victim fell ill on April 16, but the FDA didn't announce the tomato link until June 3. Williams says part of the problem identifying salmonella outbreaks is that a lot of victims don't see the symptoms - diarrhea, fever, vomiting - as sufficiently severe to warrant a visit to the doctor, and so they go undiagnosed. "There may be a delay in reporting outbreaks because people do not have a stool specimen tested," he says. Officials have not yet identified...
...unveiled a tomato-safety initiative in 2007 that sought to identify causes of salmonella infection, but Acheson admits that studying preventive techniques doesn't help the FDA deal with outbreaks. The FDA has no plans to change the initiative in the face of the recent outbreak...