Tomato Salmonella - FDA Unaware Of 'Repacking'!From Patricia Doyle, PhD
7-1-8

"Repacking tomatoes" a process the FDA says was a "surprise"...

Here we go again. The FDA was unaware of repacking, i.e. mixing tomatoes from different farms. Some tomatoes from the US are shipped to Mexico, mixed with Mexican tomatoes and labeled "product of US."

My guess is we will never learn the source of the tomato outbreak and numbers will continue to climb throughout the summer, until local farms have their tomatoes only sold at local farm stands.

Hopefully, many new home gardeners are going to put in a few plots of tomatoes next season.


Tomato 'Repacking' Surprises Salmonella Hunters
By Sabin Russell
San Francisco Chronicle

A widespread practice of mixing tomatoes from different farms at produce distribution centers has made it impossible so far to trace the source of a nationwide salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds, federal regulators said Friday [27 Jun 2008].

Dr. David Acheson, an associate commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration, acknowledged that the extent of the practice, known as "repacking," was a surprise to agency investigators, and that it vastly complicates the process of tracing the path of tomatoes from farm to store. "We are learning that this is a very common practice," said Acheson. "Possibly 90 percent of tomatoes are repacked."

The agency has found, for example, that tomatoes from Mexico have been shipped to Florida, repacked and sold with tomatoes from Florida. Similarly, tomatoes from the USA are sent to Mexico, where they are repacked and shipped to the USA as a product of the USA.

None of these juggled tomatoes has yet been linked to the salmonella outbreak, but the practice illustrates one reason why FDA disease detectives have had no success in tracking the bug back to the farms in Mexico or southern Florida, where they think it may have originated.

Distributors frequently repack tomatoes to meet the needs of commercial customers, such as restaurant chains, that demand that each box contain vegetables of similar size and ripeness. Not only does repacking make it harder to figure out where a bad tomato may have been grown, it raises the prospect that consumers who think they are buying produce from one of the many designated "safe" states may be getting tomatoes comingled with produce from other regions.

Attempts to find sources of vegetable contamination are notoriously difficult, because the product is perishable, tends to be consumed quickly, and seldom has the kind of labeling found in processed foods.

"Disease investigators are puzzled that salmonella cases continue to be recorded long after the harvests have been completed in south Florida and Mexico where the contamination was thought to take place. We have no evidence that the outbreak is over," said Dr. Patricia Griffin, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

She also acknowledged that, for every reported case, there can be as many as 30 people who recover without a visit to the doctor or whose illnesses go unreported.

The ongoing nature of the outbreak has also caused disease investigators to consider that some other food product or process may be responsible for the salmonella poisoning. Fresh tomatoes grown this spring in South Florida and Jalisco, Coahuila and Sinaloa, Mexico, remain the primary focus of the investigation, although tests of 1700 samples so far have turned up no trace of the bug.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 11GFS7.DTL

Patricia A. Doyle DVM, PhD
Bus Admin, Tropical Agricultural Economics
Univ of West Indies

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