Approaching 1,000

There has been little drop off in coverage of the salmonella outbreak, and one trade source indicated that he expects the media to pay even more attention when the number of salmonella victims passes 1,000.

Meanwhile, the most stubborn fact about the outbreak is that victims keep showing up. If this was not an ongoing outbreak, the FDA could drop its consumer advisories and media attention would die down. The agency might or might not find the source and when it did, the media would pay scant attention.

The FDA now is forced to recast consumer advisories that have done little good so far or doggedly maintain them to save face. And the industry continues to suffer....

Meanwhile, an interesting point is whether produce traceability systems in place now bear any blame for the FDA's lack of success.

One leading industry official said the answer is no. He writes in an email:

In tomato investigation, we are NOT dealing with failure of traceability. We are dealing with the fact that the traceback did not support the single point of contamination hypothesis. Tracebacks of tomatoes from this wide geographic distribution went back to multiple producers, regions and even multiple repackers. FDA in it frustration said tracebacks were too complicated and not working, when in reality, tracebacks to multiple sources were signally the unlikelihood that a single point of contamination had affected all these tomatoes and tomatoes from a common source likely did not cause these illnesses. I would submit that traceback worked, we (govt) just weren't listening carefully enough to what it was telling us.