Part 6 - WPPC-FDA Meeting Problems with traceback

More from John Guzewich, senior environmental health scientist in the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition of the Food and Drug Administration, addressing WPPC attendees in the FDA auditorium on Sept. 11. He speaking about the salmonella Saintpaul traceback investigation.



Some of the problems that we had with traceback were the lack of adequate identifiers. All that we had in some cases was a pull date or an invoice and it may say case of tomatoes, it may say red rounds, it may say romas, it may say just tomatoes. But the terminology was quite variable. That was one our problems. The products go through the market place and the names referred to on the records often are changed. The same product can have multiple names through the system, and it makes it difficult to know if we are tracing the right product or not.

And we have the problem of repacking as well….