Salmonella

WASHINGTON - The salmonella outbreak that has killed as many as nine people and sickened hundreds nationwide has created what advocates say is an unprecedented opportunity to reform the way America safeguards its food supply. "You've had the consumer community, the expert community clamoring for this for over a decade," said Michael R. Taylor, a former deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. "What's happened with this outbreak is it has just elevated the intensity of the political focus and the demand or expectation that something be done."

WASHINGTON - The peanut company at the center of the nationwide salmonella scare has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and will begin liquidating its assets as a crush of legal claims pile up against Lynchburg, Va.-based Peanut Corp. of America. "Given that PCA is under criminal investigation, I'm not surprised they've gone bankrupt," said Bill Marler, a Seattle-based lawyer representing 47 clients who are suing the company, including family members of two victims who died after reportedly consuming peanut products tainted with salmonella.

WASHINGTON - Jeffrey Almer's 72-year-old mother, Shirley, died in December from salmonella poisoning. "Cancer couldn't kill her, but peanut butter did," said Almer, whose mother ate tainted peanut butter in a Minnesota rehabilitation center where she was being treated for a urinary tract infection. With a visibly controlled sense of anger, Almer told a hushed congressional committee yesterday that, the day before his mother was supposed to return home, doctors unexpectedly gave her just hours to live.

WASHINGTON - Members of a Senate panel rebuked federal health and food safety regulators yesterday for their slow intervention in the nation's peanut-borne salmonella outbreak, demanding that officials find ways to cooperate when responsibility is split among different agencies. "All of this happened because of a failure - the failure of our government to prevent unsafe food from entering the food chain," Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, told officials from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing.

Two Baltimore children are among eight Marylanders reportedly sickened by salmonella contamination that federal authorities have traced to peanut butter products from a plant in Georgia. Baltimore's health commissioner, Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, confirmed that the children, ages 1 and 9, were among three Baltimore residents sickened late last year. The third was a 20-year-old. All have recovered. The eight Maryland cases identified so far are among 475 salmonella infections in 43 states linked by DNA analysis to the outbreak that began last fall.

WASHINGTON - Turf struggles, bad communication and weak leadership undermined the federal response to a recent salmonella outbreak that cost the tomato industry huge losses, witnesses told a House of Representatives subcommittee yesterday. Lawmakers joined farmers in a wholesale attack on the Food and Drug Administration's performance, potentially laying the political foundation for a regulatory overhaul and multimillion-dollar compensation package. "We have been the primary injured party," Reginald Brown, the executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, told the House panel, "and we look forward to Congress addressing that in the future."

WASHINGTON - The outbreak of salmonella poisoning that sickened more than 1,300 people across the country and cost American tomato growers more than $300 million has been traced to peppers grown on a farm in Mexico, federal officials said yesterday. "Now we have a smoking gun, it appears," said Lonnie King, who directs investigations of food-borne illnesses at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. David Acheson, the head of food safety at the Food and Drug Administration, said the strain of Salmonella Saintpaul that caused the nationwide outbreak has been found in irrigation water and serrano peppers on a Mexican farm.

WASHINGTON - For the first time since a salmonella outbreak began in April, the government said yesterday that at least some of the illnesses appeared to be caused by jalapeno peppers, and it warned those at greatest risk against eating them. Federal health officials have been warning since early June against eating certain types of tomatoes, and they again refused to rule out the possibility that tomatoes may be responsible for the largest foodborne outbreak in at least a decade. Tomato growers have complained for weeks that tomatoes are not the cause, and some state health officials suspect tomatoes aren't responsible because they have a limited shelf life and the number of illnesses keeps rising despite the nationwide warning.

WASHINGTON - Investigators are seeing more signs that the salmonella outbreak blamed on tomatoes might have been caused by tainted jalapeno peppers and have begun collecting samples from restaurants and from the homes of those who have been sickened, according to health officials involved in the probe. New interviews with those who became infected found that many had eaten jalapeno peppers, often in salsa served with Mexican food, according to two state health officials. So far, none of the jalapenos taken from restaurants and from the homes of those who became ill have tested positive for Salmonella saintpaul.

A growing number of health officials fear that investigators made a terrible mistake in blaming tomatoes for the sickening of more than 800 Americans, and they increasingly suspect jalapeno peppers, cilantro or some other food commonly found in Mexican restaurants, health officials involved in the investigation say. The salmonella outbreak should be petering out if contaminated tomatoes were the cause, because tomatoes have a limited shelf life and...