Food Contamination And Poisoning

Peanut Corp. of America, the company that produced the contaminated peanut butter now being widely recalled, lied to Food and Drug Administration investigators about shipping batches of the food known to be tainted with salmonella bacteria, the agency said Friday. The company had previously told the FDA that some lots of peanut butter had initially tested positive for the bacterium, then were retested and found to be negative before they were shipped.

David James recalled opening a container of peanuts at the processing plant here and seeing baby mice. "It was filthy and nasty all around the place," said James, who worked in shipping. Terry Jones, a janitor, remembered the roof that constantly leaked rain. James Griffin, a cook at the plant, recounted this simple rule: "I never ate the peanut butter, and I wouldn't allow my kids to eat it."

Inspectors found several violations of good manufacturing practices in the Georgia peanut butter factory at the center of an investigation into a nationwide salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds of people, federal officials said Tuesday. The Food and Drug Administration said it completed its investigation into the outbreak it linked to the Peanut Corp. of America plant in Blakely, Ga. The agency is to make a report public today.

The federal government Tuesday expanded its salmonella warning nationwide about three kinds of tomatoes as more retailers and restaurants stopped offering them and growers said sales were plummeting. Officials at the Food and Drug Administration said they were still searching for the origin of the tainted fresh Roma, plum and red round tomatoes, though industry insiders and early reports suggested that the field had been narrowed to Florida or Mexico.

Federal health and food inspectors so far have failed to find the source of salmonella-tainted tomatoes that have sickened at least 167 people across the nation. "Obviously the critical question is, where did these specific tomatoes come from? And we're not quite there yet. At this point today, we don't know where they came from," said David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's associate commissioner for foods. New reports of illness are still coming in, said Dr.

Federal officials said Thursday that they might never learn which farms produced tainted tomatoes that have now sickened 228 people in 23 states with a rare form of salmonella. "At this stage of the investigation there is no guarantee that we will be able to trace the outbreak back to the farm level, although that is the goal," David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's associate commissioner for foods, told reporters Thursday.

Tomatoes are making a comeback in Southern California and most of the nation, though the source of the salmonella outbreak that has sickened at least 383 people remains a mystery. McDonald's Corp. said Wednesday that it would reintroduce sliced tomatoes in its U.S.

Several farms in Florida and Mexico appear to have produced at least some of the tomatoes implicated in what is shaping up to be the country's largest tomato-borne salmonella outbreak, federal health officials said Friday. But the lengthy search for the source of the bacteria continues, said David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's associate commissioner for foods, in a conference call with reporters.

As the number of cases in an ongoing salmonella outbreak climbed past 800 Friday, federal health officials said that they might never find the cause -- and that tomatoes might not be the culprit after all. The news was greeted with resignation and a degree of anger from shoppers and growers who have seen millions of tomatoes taken off grocery shelves in the last month.

Federal health officials now blame raw jalapenos for some of the illnesses in the 3-month-old salmonella outbreak and Wednesday advised the elderly, infants and people with compromised immune systems to avoid them. Investigators still think tomatoes -- the original suspect in the outbreak -- have made people sick and are considering the possibility that the same rare strain of salmonella has contaminated both tomatoes and peppers.