FDA STILL has no idea where killer tomatoes come from? A suggestion:

[elehhhhna]

Check the invoices from the stores suppliers, then the suppliers invoices, etc.

Duh.

[Lifetimedem]

1. Common sense

is something Washington is not full of

[cynatnite]

2. Wouldn't it be nice if it was all so simple...

Agriculture industry isn't that simple. There is a process that commodities like tomatoes go through from the grower to the store shelf. It could have picked up the salmonella at any point along the way. It comes down to a process of elimination which can take time considering how large of an industry it is. It took a while for them to narrow down the salmonella outbreak in lettuce and spinach last year.

[Brigid]

3. Another suggestion:

How about funding the FDA properly so that it can do its job? That hasn't been the case for years.

[HereSince1628]

4. I am sure that the CDC has had state communicable disease epidemiologists collecting

that information.

The folks used to do this with are actually pretty damned good detectives, and in a multiple state outbreak like this one there are multiple agencies at Federal, State, County and in big cities, Community agencies committing their best folks to the problem.

There are multiple points for possible contamination and there are always possible confounders (spurious correlations) to sort through. The agencies aren't going to commit to any part of a solution until they have high confidence in it.

You know, the problem might not be the geogrpahic source of the tomatos, per se, but in some issue common to handling or shipping. Imagine how confusing it would be if it is contaminated packing cartons. Multiple geographic sources might use the same source of shipping materials and the geographic information would look contradictory.

Having been on the inside of Communicable Disease Epidemiology at the state level, I trust the integrity and effort of the Public Health folks working on this.

[NightWatcher]

5. Yesterday- florida safe. Today- florida source