Pepper provided hot lead in hunt for salmonella

updated 5:17 p.m. ET July 23, 2008

WASHINGTON - It was a hot lead for detectives on a cold case. People suddenly were getting salmonella at a Minnesota restaurant more than 1,000 miles from the center of the nation's outbreak.

Not my tomatoes, protested the manager. He'd switched his supply to government-cleared fresh tomatoes and even canned ones. But a lot of his menu items had a raw jalapeño garnish sprinkled on top, and that turned out to be a critical clue in the two-month salmonella mystery.

On July 3, Minnesota e-mailed the feds. After tracing credit card receipts — to find what the restaurant's healthy customers didn't eat — there was good evidence that the jalapeños were sickening people. And, officials had a diagram tracing the pepper shipments all the way back to three farms in Mexico.

One of those farms shipped peppers through the same large warehouse in McAllen, Texas, where Food and Drug Administration inspectors weeks later would find a single contaminated Mexican-grown pepper being packed by a neighboring vendor.

How could Minnesota pinpoint hot peppers just days after discovering a cluster of sick residents, when federal investigators had spent weeks fruitlessly chasing tomatoes?

To be fair, "there was already some doubt about tomatoes causing this whole outbreak," cautioned Kirk Smith, foodborne disease chief at the Minnesota Department of Health.

And federal investigators say Minnesota's information came just as they were getting hints from two Texas restaurant clusters that jalapeños might play a role.

"Ours was the first that pointed specifically to jalapeños as an ingredient, not just the salsa," Smith said.

Video   FDA:  Don’t eat fresh peppers July 21: Food and Drug Administration inspectors say that one sample of fresh jalapeno pepper has the same salmonella strain responsible for a food-poisoning outbreak. NBC’s Robert Bazell reports. MSNBC

Tomatoes falsely suspected?
It's too soon to know if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention improperly blamed tomatoes in early June, based on reports from the first people to fall ill in New Mexico and Texas.

"I don't think we can find fault yet," said University of Georgia food-safety expert Michael Doyle. "With tomatoes, if you looked at the initial case-control studies, they really came up high on the list."

The CDC didn't comment Wednesday, but FDA food safety chief Dr. David Acheson told The Associated Press that every part of the system should be scrutinized to see if it can be improved.

Regardless, the way Minnesota unraveled its own cases — speedily comparing the sick and the well and then racing to track food suppliers — offers lessons for a public health system grappling with how to handle increasingly complex outbreaks from tainted produce.

"We have got to put the appropriate perspective on this outbreak as to what went right and what went wrong so the kind of changes that are going to further foodborne disease (prevention) can be made," said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious disease specialist and frequent adviser to the government.

He fears the salmonella mystery may be the "swine flu of foodborne disease," and make federal health officials more reluctant to issue consumer warnings in future outbreaks unless they've found the smoking gun, an actual tainted food.

"That would be the worst legacy of this entire situation," Osterholm said.

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