"salmonella" news and stories

Melons are not having a good start to the season. A mass recall of 4,992 cartons of Del Monte cantaloupes was issued in seven western states last Tuesday due to potential Salmonella outbreak at their Asunicion Mita farm in Guatemala, according to the company's press release. But this isn't the first time melons have posed a health risk.

The Food and Drug Administration notes that between 1996 and 2008, 13 out of 83 infected types of fresh produce were melons, and 10 were cantaloupe. Ray Costa, a registered sanitarian and food safety education advocate, tries to explain why in Food Safety News.

Egg producers are having a tough month. Not only has the latest salmonella outbreak led to bad press and recalls for dozens of different egg brands, but there's also been increasingly strong opposition to battery cages, which are the standard across the industry. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) decries them; California has moved to ban them. Even the Dalai Lama has spoken out against the 67-square-inch cages in which many hens are destined to spend their lives.

Paul Shapiro, a senior director at HSUS's End Factory Farming campaign, told the Washington Post, "The cage-free movement is not only about providing a humane environment for animals. There is also a strong food-safety component as well." In fact, the HSUS makes the case that battery cages lead to unsanitary conditions, which in turn lead to a tainted food supply. The fact that 550 million tainted eggs involved in the last outbreak appear to have originated in battery cages adds fuel to that fire.

Egg producers are now pushing back a bit, though. United Egg Producers, the industry's top lobbying group, is speaking up about what it calls the myths and facts about battery cages, asserting that free-range hens are no healthier than caged, and that other industry practices, such as beak-trimming, are not as cruel as they sound.

In May, salmonella cases related to contaminated eggs began to mount across the country and continue to grow today. At the center of this outbreak, the United States Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) and the Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.), two overlapping yet disparately tasked entities, were responsible for the overseeing of this food system.

As of July 9, the U.S.D.A. and the F.D.A. began to jointly oversee egg manufacturers including food safety inspections, but prior to the outbreak, the two institutions monitored entirely different sectors of egg production. Before the new standards, the U.S.D.A. took responsibility for the inspection of chickens and their living conditions, whereas the F.D.A. surveyed chicken feed and the eggs produced. Somewhere between the two, something slipped through the cracks.

Aimed to prevent such large scale outbreaks, the F.D.A. and U.S.D.A. will now both oversee egg production, which will "prevent each year approximately 79,000 cases of foodborne illness and 30 deaths caused by consumption of eggs contaminated with the bacterium Salmonella Enteritidis," according to the U.S.D.A. If successful, this would be a nearly 60 percent reduction in egg-related salmonella illnesses.

In the wake of a recall by Iowa's Wright County Egg involving a dozen brands of eggs last week, California's NuCal Foods is expanding a recall of its eggs as more illnesses may be associated with the outbreak.

Los Angeles County health officials said at least 266 people in California have been infected with egg-related Salmonella. Seven cases were identified in Minnesota, Food Safety News reported.

The Centers for Disease Control said it had seen a four-fold increase in cases of Salmonella Enteritidis with the same "genetif fingerprint" or pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) pattern, reported to the agency through PulseNet, a national network of laboratories the CDD coordinates, Food Safety News reported.

Next time the waitress offers you chips and dip at your local Mexican joint, it may be wise to take a pass -- and not just for your waistline.

The Centers for Disease Control released a report that found that contaminated salsa or guacamole were responsible for nearly 1 in every 25 outbreaks of food-borne illness in restaurants from 1998 to 2008, MSNBC.com reported.

The rate nearly doubled over the previous decades, officials said.

"Fresh salsa and guacamole, especially those served in retail food establishments, may be important vehicles of food-borne infection," Magdalena Kendall, a researcher at Tennessee's Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education told MSNBC.com.

Individual ingredients in the tasty dips have also been linked to salmonella outbreaks including peppers, tomatoes and cilantro.