Unsolved mystery- salmonella investigation

After a week on the move in Honduras, I have not kept up with the ebb and flow of the salmonella investigation. As I read the news accounts in the consumer press this morning, I see it is mainly the ebb and waning of the investigation once thought to have secured a "smoking gun." From the Web...

Food safety laws under scrutiny from The Miami Herald:

This summer's salmonella outbreak could go down as the national food supply's biggest unsolved mystery.
Instead of a smoking gun, the only clue is a single tainted jalapeño pepper with the rare strain of Salmonella Saintpaul found at a Texas produce distribution center.
The difficulty in finding answers to one of the nation's most complicated and longest-running food-borne-illness cases has turned a spotlight on the beleaguered Food and Drug Administration, as well as the system for protecting the U.S. food supply.
Tomatoes, the original suspect, have been released from questioning but not exonerated. Now federal inspectors have fingered jalapeño peppers from Mexico as a potential source of contamination. But the trail is getting cold, and it's getting hard to find enough evidence to isolate the source of an outbreak that has sickened 1,294 people since April.
Critics say it's evidence of a system that is broken and desperately in need of an overhaul.
''The bottom line is this is not working,'' said Carl Nielsen, a 28-year veteran of the FDA and former director of import inspections. ``There have to be radical changes.''


Honduran melon farm caught in the middle Also from The Miami Herald:

It took a single news release to undo what it had taken the Molina family 30 years to accomplish. In March, the Food and Drug Administration sent out a global news alert saying it suspected that a salmonella outbreak in the western United States was linked to cantaloupes grown on the Molinas' farm in Honduras.
Overnight, the farm lost most of its business as the United States closed its borders to its melons. Then the family began to field calls from jittery distributors as far away as England and the Netherlands.T
Four months later, the FDA has yet to prove that the salmonella strain originated at the Molinas' 7,400-acre farm, Agropecuaria Montelibano.
The family's company, Grupo Agrolibano, claims that it has tested more than 600 cantaloupes in collaboration with distributors in Europe and the Americas and that all tests came back negative.
It has been trying to convince the FDA that Montelibano was not the source of the outbreak. Yet the import alert, which bars shipments of the Honduran melons from entering the United States, remains.


TK: One melon exporters I visited with in Honduras (not the Molina operation) believes that the issue become too politicized in Honduras, to the detriment of resolving the issue. More on that later.

The Herald also publishes a infographic from the Center for Science in the Public Interest about foodborne illness outbreaks. From that chart:


Each year, food-borne illnesses cause an estimated 5,000 deaths and 76 million illnesses in the United States. Between 1990 and 2005, the Center for Science in the Public Interest identified 5,316 outbreaks. Food categories most commonly linked to the outbreaks were:
Seafood: 1,053 outbreaks involving 10,415 individual cases
Produce: 713 outbreaks involving 34,049 cases
Poultry: 580 outbreaks involving 17,661 cases
Beef: 506 outbreaks involving 13,873 cases
Eggs: 352 outbreaks involving 11,224 cases
Source: CSPI


TK: Here is some more coverage on the issue from The Houston Chronicle:

Nations differ on tests for peppers From the Chronicle's Seam Mattson:

HIDALGO, MEXICO — The lab results on Sergio Maltos' desk show that investigators from Mexico and the United States came to drastically different conclusions about the cause of the salmonella outbreak that sickened more than 1,300 Americans this summer.
Investigators from both nations visited the farm in question, about 200 miles south of Laredo in Tamaulipas state, in July to test nearly identical materials.
The Food and Drug Administration found irrigation water and a serrano pepper that tested positive for the salmonella Saintpaul strain. Maltos, a top official at the Nuevo León state laboratory that processed Mexico's samples, had two positive tests as well — one from animal excrement and one from mud near an irrigation ditch.
The water and peppers Mexico tested, however, were clean, he said.
How the FDA and its Mexican counterparts managed to reach such different conclusions in a binational health scare that has cost farmers millions of dollars is a mystery neither government seems in a hurry to clear up.



Later......

Mexico, which repeatedly denied having the salmonella Saintpaul serotype in the country even before testing was complete, said Acheson's statement broke an agreement that the two nations were to release findings simultaneously.
Last week, Mexico had not finished the tests required to determine whether its positive salmonella tests matched the strain responsible for the outbreak, Maltos said.
As Mexican farmers fulminated over the second FDA warning in a year to hurt their bottom line, Mexican federal health officials and the FDA declined to explain their conflicting findings.



TK: Whatever the facts of the case may be, consumer confidence in the safety of Mexican produce has taken a major hit, though perhaps not the damage the FDA has inflicted on itself by its ultimately unresolved investigation.

Here is a piece from The Des Moines Register about the likelihood of increased regulation next year.

Unsafe food leads to calls for increased FDA authority more authority From the story by Philip Brasher:

Little is likely to get done this year - it's too close to the election - but a food agency overhaul is likely to be high on the congressional agenda next year. The food industry, which once resisted increased regulation, has been hammered with one costly outbreak after another. The latest, involving a strain of salmonella bacteria, devastated the U.S. tomato industry before it was linked instead to Mexican-grown jalapeno peppers.The agency itself is asking for more authority.
"You will see the food industry being supportive of government action," said Bryan Silbermann, president of the Produce Marketing Association. "We've seen what's happened over the last eight years of government inaction."


Later.....

It's not clear how much Congress is likely to do to change the way outbreaks are investigated. That job is divided among federal agencies as well as state and local authorities with varying levels of funding and expertise.Durbin isn't ready to talk about something as sweeping as unifying the food-safety system. That would mean merging various committee chairmen who now share jurisdiction over the food agency, Agriculture Department and other agencies that oversee food. Better to start with bolstering the food agency, he said.
"We have to allow this agency to mature into an effective 21st-century agency to protect families," he said.


TK: Just how produce safety regulations will be enacted to provide the appropriate risk-based and commodity specific approach is one question I have. Congress may legislate with a blunt instrument and leave it to the industry and the FDA to sort it out. This process will take years, I fear...