Rewind - WPPC-FDA meeting - More from John

Okay, my (nearly) word for word transcription of the meeting is painfully slow. But here is another selection 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. More coming..


Part 7

And we have the problem of repacking that you have all heard about in this traceback. We had more than one instance of where there was repacking going on – that really compounded the problem. Along with repacking, we also had co mingling of tomatoes, and that compounded the problem.
We also had a lot of product with no address information, invoices and bills of lading with no address information, making it very difficult to trace back the step before that.
As is always the case with traceback, the locations where the tomatoes and peppers were exposed (to consumers), they (the restaurant or retailer) may have got that product in some kind of case or container, but that case or container has long since been thrown away by the time we get there, days or weeks after the fact. Any labeling on those tomatoes or peppers is gone, all we have to work with invoices or bills of lading. The range of record keeping was very broad, with some keeping records in a shoebox; at other times we were handed a box of computer printouts and (told) the information was "in there somewhere."

We had producing states of products importing (and repacking ) product from other places, confounding the traceback. We weren’t sure if was shipped out of that area or not. Some of the produce (repacked) was shipped with their own labels on the product.

Later, contrasting the traceback of tomatoes and peppers with that of the salmonella-tainted peanut butter…

I would contrast the traceback with what happened in February 2007, when we had had a traceback on salmonella that was tied to peanut butter. Once we had a jar with a label, by the next morning we had completed the traceback. That’s what we call traceback.