Food Safety Outbreak: Peppers
When over 900 people became ill from food in the summer of 2008, the FDA struggled for three months to trace the source. The contamination turned out to stem from salmonella in jalapeno and serrano peppers coming from Mexico.
At first the FDA thought tomatoes, often eaten with the peppers, were the culprit. No tomato contamination was ever found. The tomato industry lost over $250 million as stores dumped tomatoes and consumers stayed away.
Raw vegetables, shipped in bulk from various sources, are always difficult to trace, but frustrated tomato industry critics also blamed lack of transparency, saying that if the FDA had given out a little information while the investigation was ongoing, the initial blame on tomatoes might have been avoided and the real answer reached sooner.
An FDA official, reporting at the end of the outbreak, said in future the FDA needed both pathogen-detecting technology and funding to monitor and enforce industry practices.
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Sources
Fox, M. 2008. Salmonella outbreak over: CDC. Reuters. August 28, accessed August 5, 2010.
Rockoff, J. 2008. US: Tomato scare may be mistake. The Baltimore Sun, July 1.
Allen, A. 2008. Jalapenos, the Real Culprit? FDA Initially Blamed Tomatoes for 900 Cases of Salmonella Poisoning. The Washington Independent. July 7.
