FDA Lifts Salmonella Warning on Tomatoes

Archive

by: MICHAEL CHEUNG

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared it safe to eat tomatoes again, lifting its salmonella warning amid signs that the record outbreak may finally be slowing.

The FDA is still warning that the people most at risk for salmonella – including the elderly and people with weak immune systems – should avoid consuming fresh jalapenos and serranos while it continues to investigate the cause of the salmonella outbreak, which now has sickened 1,220 people in 42 states since mid-April.

However, the announcement, coming after the tomato industry lost more than $100 million in profits, doesn’t mean that tomatoes harvested in the spring were safe.  According to Dr. David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety chief, it just means that the tomatoes in fields and stores today are safe to eat.

“This is not saying that anybody was absolved.  We’re…informing consumers that tomatoes that are currently in stores and coming on to the market – domestic and imported – are okay,” said Dr. Acheson.

In the beginning of the salmonella outbreak, there was good evidence linking certain raw tomatoes to the sick, stressed Dr. Acheson.  However, inspectors failed to find the outbreak strain of salmonella on any tomato farms, not even in Florida or Mexico, the places where the salmonella had originally thought to have originated from.

As the outbreak stretched into last month, more evidence emerged against fresh jalapenos – and the FDA is devoting its efforts to investigating that now.   The agency sent inspectors to a Mexican packing house that supplied peppers linked to a cluster of those illnesses.  Fresh cilantro is also suspected.

There are signs that the outbreak is slowing, said Dr. Robert Tauxe of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  Between April and mid-May, illnesses steadily rose. Between May 20 and June 10, the outbreak hit a plateau, with about 33 people a day becoming ill. From June 11 to June 20, that dropped to 19 people a day.

Salmonella can lead to infections involving diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal cramps and sometimes a low-grade fever. In most cases, an infected person will recover within a week without medicine simply by staying hydrated, doctors have said.

Opinion

by: MICHAEL CHEUNG

Of course, it’s a good thing that the salmonella outbreak seems to be waning.  However, the FDA is obviously under tremendous pressure, both from the tomato industry and from consumers.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the FDA might have made this announcement a bit hastier than it normally would have.

But whether or not this announcement is correct, there still remains the problem of consumers.  Will the tomato industry manage to convince supermarket shoppers that its produce is safe to eat?  Many Americans doubtless will think twice about putting that tomato in their baskets, regardless of what the FDA says.

Tags: cilantro, fda, florida, infected, mexico, salmonella, tomatoes