Peppers Salmonella Outbreak Revisited
A post-mortem of the nationwide peppers Salmonella outbreak from 2008 shows that investigators were kept on the wrong trail for weeks while they relied on faulty food history information collected from victims and struggled to trace product through a convoluted supply chain.
The report was published in The New England Journal of Medicine by scientists from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. It ripped the produce industry for commingling and repacking produce with varying degrees of product documentation throughout the supply chain,
The report said these problems, and others, kept investigators on the wrong trail for weeks -- chasing what they believed were contaminated raw tomatoes -- while the number of infections continued to climb. Ultimately, the outbreak was linked to Mexican-grown serrano and jalapeno chili peppers based on a breakthrough by the Minnesota Department of Health. By the time the outbreak was over, about 1,500 people in 44 states were sickened and two people died.
Public awareness of the Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak began in early June 2008, when the FDA warned consumers to avoid eating fresh tomatoes, which it said were the likely cause of the outbreak. Initially it appeared to be related to salsa and/or guacamole served in Mexican and Tex-Mex restaurants in the Southwest. The report said investigators spent seven weeks on tomato tracebacks, which ultimately failed to "converge on any one geographic location, grower, or supplier,''
Finally, on July 9, a nationwide alert on hot chili peppers went out. Between the two nationwide alerts, about 500 people fell ill with laboratory-confirmed infections. Eventually, the investigation led to two Mexican farms. At one, officials found Salmonella in irrigation water but it was not the outbreak strain. The other yielded water samples with the Saintpaul serotype. However, the researchers also noted that investigators from Colorado had collected a pepper carrying the outbreak strain from a sick resident's home and were able to trace it to a different Texas-based distributor, but from there the trail went cold.
National food safety lawyers PritzkerOlsen, P.A., represented victims of this outbreak and is involved on behalf of victims in practically all major outbreaks of Salmonella, E. coli, Campylobacter, Listeria, Shigella, Hepatitis and other foodborne disease. Our attorney group is one of just a few firms nationally that practices extensively in the area of foodborne illness litigation and we have collected tens of millions of dollars over the years for victims of food poisoning. At the same time, PritzkerOlsen is actively involved in numerous efforts to prevent outbreaks and our clients provided important testimony in Washington, D.C., that led to the recent passage of the sweeping Food Safety Modernization Act.
