| ■ Salmonella Found at 2nd Mexican Farm | 2008.08.04 |
| The strain of salmonella that has been linked to more than 1,300 illnesses in the United States has been found on a second farm in Mexico, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. "We have a smoking gun, it appears," Lonnie King, the chief of the Centers for Disease Control's center for foodborne illnesses, told the AP. But health officials cautioned that the investigation wasn't over and that contamination of several different types of produce was still possible. The latest farm to have contamination, in this case tainted irrigation water and a contaminated serrano pepper, was identified in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, the AP reported. Previously, contamination of a sample of jalapeno peppers was identified at another Mexican farm in a different part of the country. Fresh tomatoes had been the suspected source of the nationwide outbreak that began in April. But two weeks ago, U.S. health officials cleared the current crop for consumers. And at the start of last week, they found the first tainted pepper. And by the end of last week, they had narrowed the source to crops in Mexico, not the United States. |