FDA fails to find source of tainted tomatoes
Posted: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:29 PM by Cynthia.Joyce@msnbc.com
By Robert Bazell, NBC News chief science correspondent
The government’s investigation of the outbreak of salmonella infections—probably from tomatoes—moved into even more difficult and confusing territory today.
The FDA and the CDC, the agencies responsible for the investigation, said that tainted tomatoes remain “the lead suspect,” and offered their recommendations on what kinds of tomatoes you should avoid and what is safe to eat. You can see those recommendations here
But in a conference call with reporters Tuesday, government investigators grew increasingly testy as more and more outside experts criticize their efforts.
"I just think they're really screwing this one up," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a professor at the University of Minnesota and Minnesota's former state epidemiologist, who has discovered the source of tomato contamination in other outbreaks.
Osterholm says the current investigation has been characterized by a lack of cooperation and communication among agencies, as well as some faulty methodologies—especially the failure to do "case control" studies as they look for the source of this rare salmonella strain.
In this investigation, FDA scientists are only looking for the source of contamination by trying to find the tomatoes eaten by people who got sick. In a case control study, investigators compare the dietary sources of the sick people with people who ate similar foods and did not get sick.
"I believe that the FDA's ability to find the smoking gun here is almost nil if they don't use this other procedure," Osterholm said.
FDA officials concede he could be right, and said this may be a lesson for the next outbreak.
The extent of the danger should not be underestimated. Close to 900 people have been sickened with diarrhea and fever, the hallmarks of salmonella infection, and were later shown by lab tests to have contracted the illness. Probably 30 times that many people got sick but never went to the doctor. So maybe 30,000 Americans have been sickened overall. In that same period, Americans ate an estimated three billion servings of tomatoes. So, for an individual, the danger is not great. But it is an embarrassment to the government not to find the source.
