Fred Harteis Health News - Think of your favorite recipe for salsa. Three common ingredients now are suspects in the salmonella poisonings that have become the nation's largest foodborne outbreak in at least a decade.
And therein lies the frustration. Seven weeks into their investigation, federal health officials aren't shortening the list of potential culprits but adding to it. Now jalapeno pepper producers are being probed alongside tomato distributors, and even fresh cilantro is under suspicion too.
It's quite a departure from the 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach, a mystery solved in about two weeks.
"We really, really got spoiled, if you will, with the spinach outbreak," Dr. Robert Tauxe, food safety chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Associated Press.
There aren't as many spinach lovers as tomato lovers, and the spinach consumers remembered eating came in bags, often still left in their refrigerators, bearing bar codes that were as good a clue as a fingerprint in helping investigators race to the very field that had been contaminated.
This time around, the suspects seldom are left over in the refrigerator or bear individual bar codes. Also, the victims are having a harder time remembering.
They say, "'Well, I'm not sure, I may have had guacamole, or a garnish,'" Tauxe notes.
But this outbreak is lasting an unusually long time, with a record 1,017 cases confirmed by Wednesday — the first of whom fell sick April 10 and the latest so far on June 26.
Tauxe said that makes the toll of the current salmonella outbreak far surpass recent large outbreaks of any foodborne disease: salmonella linked to peanut butter in 2006 and hepatitis A from green onions in 2003. It's not quite as big as when cyclospora-tainted raspberries sickened well over 1,000 people in the mid-1990s.
The scope is bad both for public health and a battered tomato industry that estimates losses at $100 million. Yet it is giving federal investigators some apparently valuable new clues.
Early on, lots of individuals got sick, not clusters of people who all ate at the same restaurant or catered picnic. But by mid-May and continuing well into last month, those clusters of five or more people sickened in the same spot were appearing. That's good news for disease detectives, who find it easier to trace suppliers for a few restaurants than hundreds of stores and market.
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About Fred Harteis: Fred Harteis leads Harteis International. Fred Harteis has a background in agriculture and has created many successful business ventures.