The Food and Drugs Administration agency has recently reached the conclusion that tomatoes might eventually not be the cause of the salmonella outbreak that has made more than 900 victims nationwide since it was first discovered in late May. CDC said that even though tomatoes remain the number one suspect, the investigations will start to focus on the components found in salsa.

Officials have reached this conclusion after finding out that many of the persons who became ill ate at Mexican restaurants. Even though tomatoes are core components of other specific country dishes, only a very few people got infected with the bacteria after eating in restaurants that serve them. This led officials to suspect salsa as being the cause of the outbreak.

Their suspicions are backed up by the fact that Texas, a state where people eat a lot of the dish, has the biggest number of infected people, 380.

The FDA decided to monitor the Mexican food ingredients that come from that country. Starting Monday, the imports will be intercepted at the border and samples of the products will be sent to the labs to be analyzed.

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.

Until now, all the tomatoes that have been tested for the bacteria proved to be negative.