Taco de Baja - 7-30-2008 at 01:10 PM
Not in Baja, but at least they may have tracked it down....
WASHINGTON (AP) — The salmonella strain linked to a nationwide outbreak has been found in irrigation water and a serrano pepper at a Mexican farm,
federal health officials said Wednesday.
Dr. David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's food safety chief, called the finding a key breakthrough in the case, as did another health
official.
"We have a smoking gun, it appears," said Dr. Lonnie King who directs the center for foodborne illnesses at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
Acheson said the farm is in Nuevo Leon, Mexico. Previously, the FDA had traced a contaminated jalapeno pepper to a farm in another part of Mexico.
Acheson and other officials were grilled at a congressional hearing about why the investigation originally focused on tomatoes.
The officials insisted that tomatoes still cannot be ruled out and that it is quite possible that the outbreak was caused by several different kinds
of contaminated produce.
The outbreak has sickened more than 1,300 people since April.
Tomatoes had been the prime suspect in the nationwide outbreak for weeks. But last week, the FDA said only jalapeno peppers grown in Mexico were
implicated in the nationwide salmonella outbreak. The FDA said then it had found the same strain of salmonella responsible for the outbreak on a
single Mexican-grown jalapeno in a south Texas produce warehouse.
If it turns out the tainted irrigation water was also used on tomatoes, it could provide some of the evidence that federal authorities are looking for
to back their original focus on the fruit.
Link
Agua Mala
MrBillM - 7-31-2008 at 12:50 PM
No surprise there.
Cypress - 7-31-2008 at 01:02 PM
Irrigation water isn't drinking water. Probably pumped it out of a river. Nothing unusual with that. Most sewage treated or otherwise makes its way to
a river, creek etc. Wash your veggies!!