Part 4 Rewind: WPPC-FDA Meeting Sept. 11

John (Jack) Guzewich of the FDA continues his presentation to the WPPC attendees on Sept. 11.

So it is often time starts out with a heads up that they(state and local officials) are suspicious something is going on, and then ultimately we get the word that a product we regulate is implicated and we are more heavily involved, and that’s the point a traceback investigation begins.

I hope that helps you understand…some of you are probably aware that the Centers for Disease Control, one of their publications is called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report…….they issued a preliminary report on this investigation on August 29 and I’m sure some of you are aware of that, it is available on their Web page and so forth, and their conclusion, which is actually not the CDC’s conclusion (alone), but they vetted their investigation with a large number of epidemiologists across the country, at the state and local level, as to their analysis itself and their conclusions. They continue to maintain that in the early part of this investigation that tomatoes were an implicated vehicle but clearly later in the investigation jalapeno and Serrano peppers were also involved as vehicles in the outbreak. So this will go down in our records as a multi-vehicle or multi-food outbreak with tomatoes, either roma or round, as well as Serrano and jalapenos as possible vehicles.

That’s a little background. We’ll try to answer more of your questions in the QA time.
(of the session).