Salmonella Blog - Surveillance & analysis on salmonella news & outbreaks

It could be a common peanut farm, or a common peanut processor or some other shared source between the two plants.

Whatever it is,  Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, says salmonella with the same genetic fingerprint coming out of facilities in Georgia and Texas means there has to be a common source.

“They have to have the same source,” says Osterholm, “You could have peanuts moving from one source in Georgia that ended up in Texas…There’s a tie there.”

Osterholm, one of the nation's top food safety experts, commented to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution after health officials in Colorado linked six cases to the Peanut Corporation of America's Plainview, TX plant; not the Blakely, GA plant that has been the subject of the largest recall of peanut products in U.S. history.

The second source of salmonella complicates the food safety investigation that had centered on a single factory, the Peanut Corp.’s plant in Blakely.

But the six Colorado illnesses were linked to the Texas plant, according to Dr. Ned Calonge, chief medical officer of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. That suggests a common source of contamination, he said.

PCA's Texas plant, which had gone without any licensing or inspections, was closed and its products recalled after the problems at the Blakely facility became public.

The recall began in January with a few hundred products and as of Sunday now stands at 2,591 products from more than 200 companies. Products from both the Georgia and Texas Peanut Corporation of America plants are part of the recall. The recalls have extended (we could call them experts) beyond American borders to Aruba, Australia, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Haiti, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, St. Maarten, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the United Kingdom. The recalls also have reached into some surprising products, such as bird food. Here is a complete Peanut Butter and other Peanut Containing Products Recall List.

For more in AJ-C, go here.

 Not really unexpected.  Hartford Insurance, however, has $12,000,000 per policy period - perhaps as much $40,000,000 total to cover claims of victims of this tragedy.  Also, manufacturers like Kellogg and King Nut are morally and legally responsible for the products they manufactured and sold.

Salmonella Typhimurium spread by products from Peanut Corporation of America has killed has killed its ninth victim. Announcement of the death came before the Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations ended its hearing today into the deadly Salmonella outbreak.

The latest death came in hard-hit Ohio where 92 cases of Salmonella Typhimurium have been confirmed. The victim was reported to be a woman from Medina County, Ohio.

By the end of today's hearing, at which Peanut Corporation of America officials invoked the Fifth Amendment, to avoid answering questions from Congress, most observers agreed this outbreak is no accident.

CNN has a good wrap-up here.

 This just in from the State of Texas:

Peanut Corporation of America voluntarily closed its Plainview plant last night after laboratory tests of sample products from the plant indicated the possible presence of Salmonella in some products.

PCA notified the Texas Department of State Health Services of the findings on Monday.

DSHS officials said it does not appear that any of the implicated products -- peanut meal, granulated peanuts and dry roasted peanuts -- have reached consumers.

The testing was done by a private lab under contract with PCA.

The peanut meal and granulated peanuts had not been shipped out of the Plainview facility. The dry roasted peanuts had been shipped to a distributor but were detained and recalled before further distribution.

It is not yet known if the Salmonella possibly found in the product testing is the same strain of the bacterium implicated in a 43-state outbreak of salmonellosis.

DSHS is developing specific criteria the company must meet before it can resume production and is not aware of any illnesses associated with products from the Plainview facility.

How fast is the list of peanut butter products growing?  Today a top Food & Drug Administration (FDA) official was sent up the United States Senate to tell its Agriculture Committee that 1,000 products in 16 categories have been "voluntarily recalled" by 75 companies  that choose poorly when buying peanut butter and/or paste from the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA).

But before the FDA brass hat could even get back to the office, THE BIG LIST had grown to include 1,554 products.  If your are signed up for FDA press releases, several an hour roll in at all times during the day.

Reasons for continued growth of  THE BIG LIST  were explained the FDA's spokesman in this way:

Peanut butter is sold by PCA in bulk containers ranging in size from five to 1,700 pounds. The peanut paste is sold in sizes ranging from 35-pound containers to tanker trucks. However, through its investigation, FDA has determined that PCA distributed potentially contaminated products to more than 300 consignee firms, many of whom then further distributed products, for consumption as peanut butter or for use as ingredients in hundreds of different products, such as cookies, crackers, cereal, candy and ice cream.

It's hard to believe that PCA's plant in the peanut-land that is Blakely, GA would have so many customers.  While FDA works through those 300 consignee firms, sickness and death continues to be the major characteristics of this outbreak.   The official number sick with Salmonella Typhimurium stands at 575 with eight deaths also associated with the outbreak. PCA is facing both civil and criminal charges.

We have to wonder what this "volunteer recall" looks like from the inside.  FDA negotiates the wording the a press release with each volunteering company.  Is FDA working down just those or line or is anyone attempting to contact all 300 of the consignee firms?  This outbreak must be making heads explode.

T

Ever wonder about how the peanut industry works.  We sure did, especially while visiting south Georgia where the Peanut Corporation of America's salmonella-tainted processing plant is located. Today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution stepped up with the facts on how things are suppose to work.

The A-J said:

>Georgia peanuts typically are planted in May and spend 140 days on average growing into mature plants. They thrive in Georgia’s sandy soils and subtropical climate, making the state the No. 1 peanut producer in America.

> The plants flower above ground, but they bear fruit underground. To harvest them, farmers use a device known as a digger-shaker-inverter, which slips under the plant, lifts it out of the ground, shakes off the soil and flips it over, so the peanuts are facing up, toward the sun.

> At this point, the insides of the peanut shell, or pod, are 40 percent water. The pods are left to cure in the sun for about three days, during which time the moisture content declines to between 12 to 18 percent.

> Now the farmer uses a combine to separate pod from vine, and harvests the pods. One acre typically produces more than 3,000 pounds of peanuts. The farmer hauls the harvested nuts to a “buying point” to be graded and sold to shellers.

> The shellers haul the peanuts by semi-truck to warehouses or directly to shelling plants, where machines remove the hulls and render the kernel, or what we call the nut. The shellers then sell the shelled peanuts to processors.

> Processors put shelled nuts into roasters. These machines cook peanuts at 250 to 300 degrees for 15 to 30 minutes —- a process that salmonella bacteria cannot survive. Peanut Corp. of America in Blakely is a peanut processor. The Food and Drug Administration report on the company states that “this firm has not established the effectiveness of the temperature, volume or belt speed specific to this roaster to assure it is adequate as a kill step for pathogenic bacteria.”

> Once the roasting is complete, the processor must take care to keep the cooked peanuts segregated from raw ones. They may not come into contact with any raw material, or dust from raw material, or equipment that has been exposed to raw material. Otherwise, the processor risks undoing the purifying work done by the roasters.

More in the A-J can be found here.