The US
health officials announced on Wednesday that Salmonella saintpaul, the
salmonella outbreak strain blamed for sickening no less than 1,307 people in 43
US states, the District of Columbia and Canada was found on a Mexican farm.
During a congressional hearing in Washington D.C.,
Dr. David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration’s associate commissioner
for foods said the FDA found salmonella in the irrigation water and on a serrano
pepper on a farm, located in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
“Now we have a smoking gun, it appears,” Lonnie King, who
directs investigations of food-borne illnesses at the Centers for Disease
Control and prevention in Atlanta,
said.
The announcement comes five days after the FDA recommended
consumers avoid only raw jalapeno peppers coming from Mexico, thus clearing those cultivated in the US. Two
weeks ago, the FDA announced it had finally found a Mexico-grown jalapeńo
pepper with the Saintpaul strain of salmonella. The discovery occurred at
Agricola Zaragoza, a distributor in McAllen,
Texas.
The warning angered Mexican authorities who called the FDA
announcement “premature.” Moreover, Marco Antonio Sifuentes, representative for
the Mexican agriculture ministry was very harsh when talking about the way the
FDA has handled the salmonella outbreak.
“In the case of tomatoes, the FDA made a serious error. Now
they are committing another big mistake because of their incompetence,” he said
last week.
Now, as the FDA officials made their new announcement, Mexico's
Agriculture Department released a statement according to which it “rejects” the
FDA’s conclusion that the source of the salmonella outbreak had been located in
the Mexican farm’s irrigation.
“The farm unit in question ended its harvest more than a
month ago, so the sample they say they have lacks scientific validity” because
the sample “was taken recently from a tank holding rain water that was not used
in production,” the statement read.
“The government reiterates its call for the FDA to use
information responsibly and, above all, to base it on scientific evidence,” the
statement continued.
At the same congressional hearing, Dr. Acheson and other top
health officials were grilled about the way they handled the investigation on tomatoes,
which were initially blamed for the salmonella outbreak. Many industry
representatives complained their loss had reached no less than $300 million and,
more than that, they had to dump tons of healthy tomatoes just because of the
government warnings. Last week the FDA eliminated tomatoes from the warning and
started focusing on jalapeno peppers from the US
and Mexico, and, ulterior, only
on those coming from Mexico.
Not a single tomatoes had been found contaminated, Dr.
Acheson answered when subcommittee chairman Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.) asked him
if the salmonella probe around tomatoes found something.
Both republicans and democrats criticized the governing food
safety authorities for not protecting consumers and for hurting growers with
their blanket warnings and slow “tracebacks.” They went even further and said
“this incident demonstrated that our governing food safety authorities are
outdates and must be reformed,” Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) said.
Cardoza even said there are serious “flaws” in the
methodology used in the investigation. “Furthermore, the process used by the
CDC to verify and refine the collected data calls into serious question the
effectiveness of communications between the states, CDC and FDA,” he added.
