FDA:
Avoid jalapenos from Mexico, not US
By
LAURAN NEERGAARD
WASHINGTON
(AP) - Only jalapeno peppers grown in Mexico are implicated
in the nationwide salmonella outbreak, the government announced
Friday in clearing the U.S. crop.
The Food and Drug Administration
urged consumers to avoid raw Mexican jalapenos and the serrano
peppers often confused with them, or dishes made with them such
as fresh salsa.
But the big question is
how those who love hot peppers would know where the chiles came
from, especially in restaurant food.
"You're going to have
to ask the person you're buying it from," said Dr. David
Acheson, the FDA's food safety chief, who is advising restaurants
and grocery stores to know their suppliers and pass that information
to customers.The big break in an outbreak that now has sickened
nearly 1,300 people came on Monday, when FDA announced it had
found the same strain of salmonella responsible for the outbreak
on a single Mexican-grown jalapeno in a south Texas produce
warehouse.
Tomatoes had been the prime
suspect for weeks. And while those now on the market are considered
safe to eat, health officials still haven't exonerated them
from causing illnesses when the outbreak began in April.
The pepper discovery threatened
to paralyze that industry, too. Chile production is a $500 million
crop in New Mexico alone, which produces most of the U.S. crop,
state agriculture commissioners wrote the FDA on Thursday.
Friday's move clearing U.S.
peppers came because clusters of illnesses around the country
all seem to be tracing back to Mexican jalapenos, though not
all sold through the McAllen, Texas, produce warehouse, Acheson
said.
"Domestically grown
products are not tracing back at all to the outbreak,"
he said in an interview with The Associated Press. "On
Monday, we didn't know exactly where they all were coming from.
Today we're certain these are coming from Mexico."
FDA inspectors are on the
farm that grew the only tainted pepper discovered so far, trying
to determine where else it sent a harvest that began in April,
Acheson said. The farm is large, but the question now is whether
it harvested enough to be responsible for such a geographically
large outbreak.
Mexican officials blasted
the announcement as premature, saying the fact that no additional
salmonella was found in the Texas warehouse doesn't eliminate
that site as a suspect.
"Both U.S. and Mexican
tomato producers are still dealing with the impact of premature
public information given by the FDA in the past, and we expect
the FDA to present solid scientific evidence to back today's
announcement as soon as possible," said Ricardo Alday,
spokesman for the Mexican embassy in Washington.
The news is a relief for
U.S. pepper growers.
"It's good news, late
in the process. It's an announcement they should have made some
days ago," said John McClung of the Texas Produce Association.
He called the warning still
too broad, because many peppers from Mexico are grown on farms
in regions not implicated.
At the same time, investigators
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are retracing
the probe's early steps to see if jalapenos were missed early
on - or if tomatoes did indeed play a role. Initial reports
from the first ill in New Mexico and Texas provided a strong
link to tomatoes, but salsa was eaten, too, with less attention
paid to its other ingredients.
"We're still very interested
in looking at the role tomatoes played in this outbreak given
the strong epidemiological association," said CDC's Dr.
Ian Williams. That is "very much part of the active investigation
at the moment."
To date, the CDC has confirmed
1,294 people sickened from the outbreak. It doesn't appear to
be over yet, with people falling ill as late as July 10.