Salmonella Blog - Surveillance & analysis on salmonella news & outbreaks

Three people in a meatpacking plant with nearly 800 employees have been diagnosed with salmonella. The plant has remained open, and although officials have not determined the source, they say all three people ate in the cafeteria.

The source of the outbreak is not known, and further testing is required. A representative of Hormel Foods, parent company of Rochelle Foods Inc., said the plant did not have to be closed and none of the meat was contaminated. Hormel spokeswoman Julie H. Craven said the company started to hear about the salmonella problem last week.

Two of the confirmed cases are employees and the other is an associate of the plant. O'Brien said the company has been cooperative, as has C.L. Swanson Corp., which contracts the cafeteria service at the plant. The three people with confirmed cases were found to have eaten breakfast in the cafeteria.
 

Seattle food-illness attorney Bill Marler has advised plaintiffs' attorneys to bargain directly with the Sheetz convenience store chain and Coronet Foods Inc., the bankrupt Wheeling, W.Virginia company that sold salmonella-contaminated Roma tomatoes to Sheetz.

A similar system was used when Chi-Chi's restaurant was sued by customers sickened in a 2003 hepatitis A outbreak at a western Pennsylvania restaurant. The restaurant chain settled 340 of 350 claims for more than $21 million, said Marler, who also represents scores of Chi-Chi's plaintiffs. Hundreds of smaller claims for out-of-pocket medical expenses were also settled without litigation.

Altoona-based Sheetz said it supports mediation.

Food inspectors also said Coronet and Sheetz did nothing wrong, but under the law they can be held liable because they supplied and prepared the tomatoes for human consumption. Nobody died in the Sheetz outbreak. Marler said most claims will be for less than $100,000 to cover medical bills, lost wages and pain and suffering.
 

Disease detectives say they are seeing welcome progress in tracking down some of the deadliest food-borne pathogens after several spectacular outbreaks in recent years. However, food safety experts say the war against food pathogens is far from over. As progress is made in fighting pathogens on one front, new problems and pathogens crop up elsewhere.

Within the last year, Scripps Howard News Service reports, the US saw the biggest outbreak of Hepatitis A, a disease once thought confined to poor countries with inadequate sanitation. Some 540 people in Pennsylvania were infected and three died after eating green onions. Meanwhile, outbreaks of the Norwalk virus beached some luxury cruises, and a dangerous strain of E. coli showed up at a Florida petting zoo.

Food scientists say these examples show it's hardly the time for cooks to relax safe handling procedures for raw meats and vegetables as the warmer weather signals the beginning of the peak season for food poisoning.
 

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service is issuing a public health alert to remind consumers to make sure that frozen meat and poultry products are fully cooked before they are consumed.

The warning comes after FSIS linked cases of salmonella infections in people to stuffed frozen chicken products sold in Minnesota and Michigan.

Many frozen entrees containing stuffed poultry products, such as a poultry product stuffed with cheese and other ingredients, typically are not-ready-to-eat and must be fully cooked as if they were raw. Because a microwave oven typically cooks product at non-uniform rates, it is important to ensure that the product is covered sufficiently for steam to build in the product, and that the product is set aside for a sufficient time for the heat to uniformly spread throughout the product at the completion of the microwave cycle. This will ensure that there are no "cold spots."

Also, using a food thermometer is the only sure way of knowing if your food has reached a high enough temperature to destroy foodborne bacteria.
 

The issues of food defense and bovine spongiform encephalopathy were the focal points of this year's U.S. Food Safety Summit, held recently Washington. Both Dr. Lester Crawford, administrator of the FDA, and Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns focused on the topics in their keynote remarks.

Johanns announced that almost $2 million in funding had been redirected to enhance research into BSE and that $5 million had been awarded to 17 colleges and universities to establish a Food Safety Research and Response Network.

The BSE research funds, redirected by the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA, will be used for new BSE projects and facilities. The newly funded projects include international collaborations with the Veterinary Laboratory Agency in Great Britain to study the biology of the BSE agent, the Italian BSE Reference Laboratory to evaluate present diagnostic tools for detecting atypical BSE cases and the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain to compare North American and European BSE strains.

The Food Safety Research and Response Network, spearheaded by North Carolina State University, will include a team of more than 50 food safety experts from 18 colleges and universities who will investigate several of the most prevalent food-related illness pathogens. Pathogens like E. coli, salmonella and campylobacter will be studied to determine where they are found in the environment, how they are sustained and how they infect herds.
 

Contaminated Roma tomatoes were the cause of three salmonella outbreaks last summer, including one that sickened patrons of a convenience store chain in Western Pennsylvania.

The CDC in Atlanta said 561 people in the United States and Canada were infected by salmonella after eating contaminated tomatoes. The worst of the outbreaks occurred among those who became ill after eating delicatessen sandwiches and salads with Roma tomatoes at Sheetz convenience stores.

Although a single tomato-packing house in Florida was common to all three outbreaks, other growers or packers also might have supplied contaminated Roma tomatoes that resulted in some of the illnesses.

The CDC says that 429 culture-confirmed, outbreak-associated salmonellosis cases were identified among residents of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and six other states who ate products with Roma tomatoes prepared at the Sheetz stores in early July.
 

A tomato packing house in Florida was the common link between three 2004 outbreaks of salmonella infection associated with eating Roma tomatoes, according to the current Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The outbreaks caused 561 illnesses in 18 states and in one Canadian province.

Although the packing house was common to all three outbreaks, other growers or packers may have supplied contaminated tomatoes that contributed to the illnesses.

The report noted that current methods of eradicating salmonella from fruit are inadequate. Because of this, food safety agencies, public health officials and the agricultural industry should make it a priority to investigate better methods.

Federal and state government investigations of the 2004 outbreaks will continue during the 2005 growing season.