Florida tomato update...not so fast

[NightWatcher]

From yesterday....

State: Feds Clear Florida's Tomatoes in Salmonella Scare
TALLAHASSEE, FL (AP) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has put Florida on its safe list for tomatoes. Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach said Tuesday night the agency hopes to identify the source of a nationwide salmonella outbreak linked to tomatoes "in the next few days."

He said it's safe for consumers to eat tomatoes grown in states such as Florida and California that investigators have determined are not responsible for the outbreak. But Florida Agriculture Department spokeswoman Liz Compton says a lot of damage has been done already economically to growers, grocers and restaurateurs.

http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/news-article.aspx?storyid=111232


From an hour ago....

FDA Targets Tomatoes From Florida, Mexico In Salmonella Outbreak
WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration is focusing on tomatoes grown in Florida and Mexico in its hunt for the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened 228 people in 23 states, the agency said Friday.

At the time of outbreak, which started April 10, "the vast majority" of tomatoes in the U.S. market came from Mexico and central and southern Florida, said David Acheson, the FDA's associate commissioner for foods. The tainted tomatoes, he said, "very likely come from those places." The FDA didn't report new cases of salmonella infections or expand the number of states reporting illnesses. On Thursday, it said salmonella poisoning might have contributed to the death of a Texas cancer patient.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121338367157672625.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Which is it people. One day later and a complete about face, wtf????

[Two Americas]

1. chaos and incompetence from the FDA

"Safe list" - what kind of bullshit is that? Find the source, trace the produce back to the packing house, and shut it down. That is routine and standard. What the FDA is fudging on is that this is most likely a contamination problem coming from Mexico, and has nothing to do with tomatoes and nothing to do with US farmers. It is absolutely absurd to go at it the other way. Find the bad actor - I strongly suspect imported tomatoes and that some big corporate player is being covered for here.

In any case, washing produce removes surface contamination and solves the problem, and fresh produce should always be washed. Your own kids could handle a tomato and cause Salmonella contamination depending upon how clean their hands are and what they had been touching. This is yet another fear-mongering campaign by the FDA to scare the public about fresh fruits and vegetables and to hurt small domestic producers.

Food safety is a function of the public agricultural infrastructure in the country of origin. The FDA, as has been the case throughout the Bush administration is going about this backward, playing politics and covering for corporate interests and putting the public at risk and doing serious damage to small domestic farmers in the process. There is nothing "wrong" with tomatoes, but surface contamination of produce is always a risk and always has been. All fresh produce should be washed. Has the FDA said that? The main risk comes from produce and produce packing facilities that are uninspected, and that means imported produce. Has the FDA said that? Farmers have been fighting for country of origin labeling for a long time, and it is included in the current farm bill. But corporate interests and their political appointee lackies in the FDA do not want the public to know that it is the origin of the produce and the standards in the country from which it is imported that is the problem. Safety inspection in Mexico consists of bribing the appropriate official to sign off on the safety certification, and US corporate food importers have plenty of money and motivation to do the bribing needed. Corporations are flooding the US market with imported produce, including most of the so-called "organic" produce on the shelves.

The FDA has been waging a war against fruits and vegetables and small fruit and vegetable producers. Is it a coincidence that management at the FDA is people from the pharmaceutical industry in a notorious and extreme example of a "revolving door" program of shuffling of managers by the Bush adminstration from right wing think tanks, to positions with drug companies, to positions at the FDA?

The USDA is the appropriate agency to be monitoring food safety for fruits and vegetables. Get the FDA out of food safety issues involving fresh produce, get the corporate lackies out of the regulatory agencies, get food off of the "free market" and regulate and monitor the speculators, traders, hoarders, cheaters and profiteers in the food supply system.

[kestrel91316]

2. Is it ok to eat FL tomatoes or NOT? They change their minds every 5 minutes.

No need to ask about Mexican tomatoes. I'll take a pass on them from here on out.

[lpbk2713]

3. I think the FDA wants to err on the side of caution.

There is a report of a man who died in Florida from salmonella complications. But ... they also say the tomatoes that he ate were consumed while he was recently in New York.

[MissB]

4. Epidemiology of a food-borne disease isn't an easy task.

State health agencies get info from local county health agencies. Slowly they put 2+2 together and figure out they have an outbreak. I think the incubation period for salmonella is 1 to 3 days, and then the person can be sick for something like 4 to 7 days. Only once a bunch of sick people start going to their doctors do the public health folks start hearing about a possibility of a food-borne illness. Then they (the public health folks, typically epidemiologists) have to talk to the sick people and figure out what the common item was that everyone consumed.

Now, if you add up the incubation period and the time that it takes for a typical person to go to their doctor after getting sick, you might begin to see that it takes awhile for the public health folks to track down the source of the illness.

Beyond that, it would've been perhaps more than a week since they ate the tomatoes. It could've come from one processor, but those tomatoes would've already been out in the system and probably mostly consumed. Tracking an illness more than a week after the fact is not an easy task. Even once they get the tomatoes to test, the tests take time to run. If the samples come up positive for salmonella, they probably have to look a little closer to see if it is the exact same strain of salmonella that sickened all the other people.

I understand why they're being cautious. It isn't easy to track the source in the first place, and then once you've found the culprit - in this case, a product that is shipped from more than one country through many different importers - it must be nearly impossible to find the exact source (tomato grower).

[SoCalDem]

5. Basically they don't have a CLUE

and are just hoping the whole thing just "goes away"

[lib2DaBone]

6. I would not suspect Florida....

because I have not seen human waste being used as fertlizer in Florida Tomatoe fields. I could easily suspect that Human waste is being used in Mexican Tomatoe fields. ( However, they did trace the Ecoli outbreak on the Spinich to Watsonville, California where human waste was present.) So who knows, life under Bush trudges on towards total destruction... pass the tomatoes.

[spanone]

7. bu$h* has spent 8 years gutting most of these agencies set up to protect us

FEMA, FAA, FDA,DOJ etc

[jazzjunkysue]

8. And we accuse China of poisoning us.

Salmonella comes from the water they use to irrigate. That water has runoff from waste-yup-animal and human waste.

We have a waste problem that never gets examined. We don't think we ever have to deal with the repurcussions of our capitalist greed.