The U.S. Food and Drug Administration lifted Thursday its warning on certain kinds of raw tomatoes and restated a warning on jalapeño and serrano peppers as the possible cause of an epidemic of Salmonella Saintpaul responsible for more than reportedly 1,200 people getting sick.

Still not finding out the origin of the salmonella that set off the largest outbreak of foodborne disorder in a decade, officials with the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeated its caution that young children, the elderly or people with week immune systems should keep away from fresh jalapeno and Serrano peppers.

U.S. regulators and investigators are now certain that tomatoes in association with the warning -- fresh Roma, red plum and vineless red round tomatoes -- in stores and coming to market are free of the outbreak strain. The tomatoes were supplied by farms that were not harvesting in April when the outbreak started, said David Acheson, an FDA food safety assistant commissioner.

"Tomatoes that are currently on the market in the U.S. are safe to consume," said Acheson. In addition, microbiological tests conducted on more than 1,700 samples of water, soil, tomatoes and other items acquired from packing facilities, warehouses and fields in Florida and Mexico did not reveal any trace of the bacteria.

The six-week-old initial warning led restaurants to pull back fresh tomatoes and caused tens of millions of dollars in losses for the tomato industry. All-around sales of tomatoes went down 20 percent in June by comparison to the same time last year. Sales of Roma and round red tomatoes - the types isolated by the FDA as the possible sources of the contamination - dropped by 40 to 50 percent last month, said Ed Beckman, president of California Tomato Farmers.

According to CDC officials, 1,220 people in the United States and Canada have been sickened since April by Salmonella Saintpaul. While new reports of illness are still coming in, the number of cases appears to be diminishing, after reaching the peak during the last few days of May and the first week of June.