It seems that Salmonella has caused more damage in businesses than it did in people. During the Salmonella-tainted tomatoes scare, those in the business of selling them were brought to their financial knees. Now, Jalapeño pepper importers have seen their trade being effectively crippled by the latest developments in the investigation to trace the source of the bacteria.

The problem is that the government-imposed Salmonella tests take too long, and the Jalapeños are spoiled in warehouses while waiting for the green light to reach customers. Testing takes several days, while importers waited as long as ten days for test results, and had to destroy the stock because it was rotten.

The issue here is that no tainted tomatoes or vegetables have been found in Mexico so far. The investigation, now heading to its eight week, “have not found any samples of tomatoes or peppers positive for Salmonella Saintpaul,” Steve Sundlof, director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition said at a teleconference, according to the Washington Post.

Nothing is for sure, as “neither tomatoes, nor jalapenos explain the entire outbreak at this point,” Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the division of foodborne, bacterial and mycotic diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said.

A lot of restaurants as well as tomato producers have rushed to blame the agencies for scaring people away from the products they sell. After FDA’s announcements that tomatoes could be the cause of the salmonella outbreak, many people stopped buying the vegetable, which resulted in a more than $100 million loss for the industry. So far, all the tomatoes that have been tested for the bacteria proved to be negative.

The disease produced by the Salmonella bacteria is called salmonellosis and for most of the infected people is known to cause diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps. The illness generally lasts four to seven days and people normally choose to tough it out without a treatment.

The outbreak comes just months after CDC reported in April that U.S.' struggle to contain foodborne illness showed little progress in 2007, although they had a constant incidence between 2004 and 2006. According to the report, there were 17,883 confirmed cases of foodborne infections in 2007. Salmonella was by far the leader of all foodborne infections with an incidence rate of 14.92 per 100,000 people.