The national outbreak of Salmonella Heidelberg infection traced to Cargill ground turkey is apparently over, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.
The seven months-long outbreak, which resulted in a massive recall — the largest-ever Class I food recall in the U.S. — poisoned 136 people in 34 states. A California man died from Salmonella infection after eating contaminated ground turkey and at least 37 people were hospitalized.
Because it is resistant to multiple common antibiotics, this strain of Salmonella may have been more difficult to treat and possibly increased the chance that its victims would require hospitalization.
The CDC, in its final report, said the outbreak of illnesses stretched from Feb. 27 and Sept. 13. Those who got sick from eating contaminated ground turkey ranged in age from younger than 1 to 90 years old. The median age was 23.
Texas reported 18 cases; Illinois 16; Michigan and Ohio 12 each; Pennsylvania 8; California and Missouri 7 each; Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Wisconsin 4 each; Arizona, Kansas, New York and South Dakota 3 each; Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Tennessee 2 each; and Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Utah and Vermont 1 each.
The Salmonella crisis came to light on July 29, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued a Friday public health alert urging caution in handling raw ground turkey and advising consumers to cook ground turkey thoroughly to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. No brand names were mentioned.
It wasn’t until Aug. 3 — after news that contaminated ground turkey had claimed the life of a Sacramento man — that Cargill announced a recall and began to get the tainted turkey off the market.
Later, FSIS officials acknowledged that samples of Cargill’s ground turkey, collected routinely from its Springdale, AR plant, had tested positive for the outbreak strain of harmful bacteria as early as March. They said they did not have enough epidemiological evidence to warrant a recall until July.
That lag time was termed a “troubling lapse” by food safety advocates critical of the way the outbreak investigation was handled. Salmonella is not considered an adulterant in meat, although consumer groups have petitioned USDA to classify four antibiotic-resistant strains as adulterants. Such a designation would require federal agencies to detect the bacteria’s presence and prevent distribution of any food contaminated by the resistant bugs. The meat industry opposes the proposal.
Cargill initially recalled 36 million pounds of potentially contaminated ground turkey, halted production in Springdale, cleaned its plant and then resumed processing turkey a few days later. It hired experts to critique its operations and said it now has “the most aggressive Salmonella monitoring program in the poultry industry.”
On Sept. 11, the company shut down production again and recalled another 185,000 pounds of ground turkey.
Lost production at the plant, which processes about 7 million pounds of turkey products weekly, cost Cargill about $2.4 million per week. The company laid off 130 of the plant’s 1,200 workers in early October, but by the end of the month had brought back 40 of those employees.
CDC Outbreak Map:
A New York student missed his first few days at college because a Salmonella infection from Turkish pine nuts put him in the hospital instead.
Sean McGuirk has now become the first to bring legal action against American Pistachio Commodity Corp, doing business as Sunrise Commodities in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, which has recalled more than 21,000 pounds of pine nuts it distributed in bulk to various food vendors and sold at Wegmans grocery stores and other retailers. Wegmans Food Markets has recalled 5,000 pounds of the pine nuts.
On Nov. 4, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to consumers not to eat Turkish pine nuts imported by Sunrise Commodities. To date, the pine nuts are responsible for at least 42 illnesses in five states.
The lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court for Western Washington.
McGuirk, who is represented by Rochester attorney Paul V. Nunes and Seattle attorney Bill Marler (publisher of Food Safety News), says in the complaint that his mother purchased the Turkish pine nuts from a local Wegman’s store on Aug. 24 and he ate some of them four days later in a pasta dish.
He became ill on Sept. 3, and his condition worsened, causing him to miss classes. He was admitted to the hospital on Sept. 9 and underwent treatment for 48 hours. Lab tests showed that he was infected with Salmonella that was a genetic match to the outbreak strain.
Although he’s been released from the hospital, McGuirk has yet to make a full recovery.
“While food companies need to ensure the safety of all the products they sell, producers and distributers should be especially vigilant when it comes to ready-to-eat foods such as pine nuts,” said Marler, McGuirk’s attorney. “I am hopeful that American Pistachio will address this issue directly and proactively by not only making sure that the victims of this outbreak are compensated for their medical expenses, but by reevaluating their food safety procedures for the future.”
Under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s soon-to-be-implemented policy on non-O157 E. coli, confirmed positives for O157 and the so-called “Big 6″ strains of non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) will be 5 to 10 times higher than currently for O157 alone, Dr. Mohammed Koohmaraie predicted before a recent meat industry conference.
According to the North American Meat Processors Association, which hosted the conference, this means a significantly higher percentage of meat products will have to be diverted to cooking, and the cost of ground beef will go up.
“Because the Big 6 non-O157 STECs are detected as a group of organisms (as opposed to one type of organism like O157), and because they lack unique characteristics, the first screening will find a large number of samples to be ‘potential positive,’ ” said Dr. Koohmaraie, CEO of the Meat Division at IEH Labs, according to this week’s NAMP newsletter.
Koohmaraie estimates a 4-10 percent positive range in beef trim. He said variation would occur due to the effectiveness of dressing procedures and interventions. “Regardless of how good a plant is, the number of potential positives will be substantially higher than for O157,” reported NAMP.
If positives go up, the value of trim/ground beef that tested positive will be driven down further, and “there will be a premium for trim that tested negative,” according to the industry group. “This will cause the price of ground beef to go up.”
NAMP further reported: “Koohmaraie has no doubt the list will grow to include other non-O157 STEC, so one day the industry will be dealing with more then the Big 6.”
The insurance company for San Antonio-based Sangar Fresh Cut Produce says its own fine print is enough to excuse it from paying a $1.1 million default judgment to the family of a man killed by Listeria-contaminated celery.
Hermilo Castellanos, 81, was one of five people who died in Listeriosis outbreak last fall where 10 people were infected in the Austin, San Antonio, and Hidalgo areas of Texas. Kenneth Sanquist Jr., who owned Sangar, failed to respond to the lawsuit by the Castellano family, and Texas District Judge Barbara Nellermoe ordered a $1.1 million judgment in favor of the plaintiff.
Sangar’s insurance carrier, however, says it should not have to pay the judgment because Sanquist did not notify them as required by the terms of the policy.
Nine of the 10 Texas listeriosis outbreak cases were tied through a DNA match to the celery produced by Sangar, which was shutdown on an emergency order last Oct 10 by the Texas Department of State Health Services.
At that time, Sangar had recalled all products produced at the facility and shipped to more than 300 retail, wholesale and institutional customers going back to Jan. 1, 2010.
Maryland Casualty says it did not know about the lawsuit or the default judgment until it was provided to them by the attorney for the Castellanos family.
David Babcock, an attorney with the food safety law firm of Marler Clark, (sponsor of Food Safety News) said the insurance company’s action was “frustrating.” He said no one wants to accept responsibility.
A new company with a new license has taken over the Sangar facility. Nino’s Produce and Processing Co. is doing business there now after extensive inspections, according to Texas officials.
Recently scientists have been exploring whether or not pathogens can enter fruits and vegetables through plant parts, and have found that bacteria can indeed be taken in through the roots. Now new research shows that the leaves of tomato plants are a possible point of entry for Salmonella.
A study from the University of Florida, released Wednesday by PloS ONE publications, revealed that after leaves of tomato plants were exposed to high concentrations of Salmonella, the bacteria traveled through the plant and contaminated some of the fruit.
Researchers found that 1.5 percent of tomatoes whose leaves had been dipped into a solution with a high concentration of Salmonella then tested positive for the bacteria.
However, these findings don’t mean that 1 or 2 out of every 100 tomatoes in the field will be contaminated if their leaves come into contact with Salmonella. The concentrations of Salmonella used for the study were much greater than what plants would normally be exposed to, says Ariena van Bruggen, the study’s lead author, a professor of plant pathology and member of UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.
This unusually high concentration of Salmonella was necessary, says van Bruggen, in order to ensure that if the bacteria did get through to the fruit, it would be detectable among the smaller sample size of a greenhouse full of tomatoes.
“If you use a normal Salmonella concentration that you would find in the field, you would have to test say 10,000 plants or so,” she explained to Food Safety News.
The take-home message, she says, is that leaf-to-tomato contamination “can happen, but the chance is low.”
“That should be stressed,” she notes, “so that we don’t create any panic.”
But the fact that such means of contamination is possible is a reminder that growers need to be careful to review safety plans, for factors such as the source of their irrigation water or wild animal encroachment, because given the quantities of tomatoes produced in America, some tomatoes in a field where thousands of leaves are exposed to Salmonella could become contaminated, notes van Bruggen.
”It’s just because we consume so many tomatoes, somebody could become ill at some point,” she says.
And even that small risk is reason for safety precautions. The tomato industry brings in an estimated $619 million per year, and damaged consumer confidence could have a devastating effect on producers.
In 2008 when a Salmonella outbreak was incorrectly linked to domestic tomatoes, consumers stopped buying fresh tomatoes, and growers lost an estimated $100 million. The study also came with a kernel of good news: contaminated seeds do not seem to contaminate the plants they produce.
“Somehow seed contamination doesn’t survive in the next generation,” says van Bruggen, who explained that her team planted contaminated seeds harvested from the plants that acquired Salmonella through their leaves and tested the fruits they produced, finding no Salmonella.
