Salmonella Infections Now Over 1000

The current salmonella outbreak which has been linked to certain types of raw tomatoes – red round, plum and Roma – has now affected over 1000 people. This makes it the worst food-borne outbreak in over ten years and now the Centers for Disease control and Prevention are urging people at high risk not to eat raw jalapeno or serrano peppers. Those at highest risk for severe salmonella illness are the elderly, infants and people with weak immune systems.

Now the Food and Drug Administration is looking for farms that may have grown tomatoes and then switched to peppers.

CDC food safety chief, Dr. Robert Tauxe, says he understands the frustration that people have over this outbreak but that they were working as hard as possible to sort out the situation.

At least 300 people became ill in June, with the latest falling sick on June 26. Two deaths are associated with the outbreak – a Texas man in his 80s, and another Texas man who died of cancer but for whom salmonella may have played a role – and 203 people have been hospitalized.

The toll far surpasses what had been considered the largest foodborne outbreak of the past decade, the 715 salmonella cases linked to peanut butter in 2006, Tauxe said. In the mid-1990s, there were well over 1,000 cases of cyclospora linked to raspberries, and previous large outbreaks of salmonella from ice cream and milk.

The possibility that there may be many other salmonella cases that have not been diagnosed and/or reported – possibly thirty or forty for every one reported – is of some concern to the CDC.

“The outbreak could actually be tens of thousands of people rather than 1,000 people,” agreed Caroline Smith DeWaal of the consumer advocacy Center for Science in the Public Interest. “It’s certainly a disturbing event to have this many illnesses spanning this many months.”