Tomato growers take big hit in food scare
Like many mysteries, investigators had a difficult time tracking down the
culprit responsible for the food poisoning suffered by more than 1,400 people
last summer. The first suspect named was fresh tomatoes. Consumers
stampeded away from the fruit, including tomatoes that were regarded as
safe to eat, resulting in huge losses to the tomato industry. Leaders of tomato
cooperatives based in Florida and California say steps must be taken to
reduce the possibility of such calamities for agriculture in the future.
By Stephen A. Thompson
Assistant Editor
he first signs of trouble
appeared in mid April, when
people began coming down with
salmonella infections in New
Mexico and Texas. Of the more
than 1,400 people across the country who
eventually became sick from a strain of
bacterium known as Salmonella Saintpaul, at
least 273 people were hospitalized.
On June 7, the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pointed
the finger at contaminated tomatoes as the
possible culprit. In a press conference June 13,
the FDA, which is responsible for dealing with
threats to public health using information
provided by the CDC, mentioned certain
varieties of tomatoes grown in southern and
central Florida as possible vectors of the disease.
Although three days later the agency said that
tomatoes then available to consumers were not
from the same places suspected as sources of the
infection, the price of fresh tomatoes plummeted.
Huge numbers of the vegetables went unsold, and
some farmers had to plow their crops under. Losses
have been estimated at more than $100 million.
Meanwhile, after six weeks of investigation,
researchers found the bacterium responsible
for the infections: hot peppers grown in
Mexico.
Tomato grower reaction
Tomato farmers are angry at what they
call an unacceptably long time to identify
the real culprit. They point out that CDC
— which monitors outbreaks and works
with state health officials to identify disease
vectors, such as contaminated vegetables —
didn’t expand its investigation to include
other possible sources of infection until late
June.
Their cooperative in Florida, the Florida
Tomato Growers Exchange, is seeking
compensation for growers (federal
legislation has been proposed) and is urging
action to prevent the same thing from
happening again.
Officials of the CDC say that their initial
data did point to tomatoes as the culprit,
and that tomatoes may indeed have been
involved in the original outbreak. They add
that the first data implicating tomatoes was
reinforced by information gathered from later cases around
the country. That, says the CDC, plus the fact that two
distinct types of hot peppers turned out to be involved,
greatly complicated the investigation (see sidebar).
Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is a cooperative that
traces its roots back to co-ops established at the time of the
Capper-Volstead Act. The co-op represents 90 percent of the
tomatoes grown in the state.
Federal investigators should have consulted more with the
producers, who could have provided vital information much
more quickly, according to Reggie Brown, the co-op’s
executive vice president. “They came and talked to us in
general terms,” he says. “But they didn’t allow us to fully
participate in the investigation. We weren’t allowed to help as
much as we could have.” Partly as a result, he believes,
investigators wasted precious time following up false leads.
The Florida agriculture authorities have a similar
complaint. Agriculture Commissioner Charles H. Bronson
told a Congressional subcommittee hearing that he could not
get the information he was seeking from federal investigators.
“We can’t help if we don’t know what we’re looking for,” he
said.
FDA spokesperson Stephanie Kwisnek disagrees. “The
FDA worked closely with retailers, growers, distributors, as
well as state and local regulatory officials during
every step of the Salmonella Saintpaul
investigation,” she told Rural Cooperatives. The
FDA has testified that inconsistent record-keeping
by growers, shippers and distributors hampered
efforts to trace the source of vegetables during the
investigation.
Traceability a top issue
The ability to trace agriculture products
to their source is mandated by the Public
Health Security and Bioterrorism
Preparedness and Response Act of 2002.
Beginning with the grower, each link in the
chain of distribution to the consumer is
required to keep records of the previous
source of each shipment and its immediate
subsequent recipient: the so-called “one-up,
one-down” requirement.
In testimony before the House
Committee on Energy and Commerce’s
Subcommittee on Oversight and
Investigations, representatives of the tomato
industry asserted that tracing the origins of
tomatoes should have been a relatively easy
task.
Tracing the source of the contamination
should have taken minutes, not weeks, using
electronic recordkeeping, says Ed Beckman,
president of California Tomato Farmers, a
cooperative formed in 2006 to establish new
quality and safety standards for the state’s industry.
The cooperative recently carried out a demonstration of
traceability using electronically saved date-codes and
purchase orders on a shipment of tomatoes sold to a Subway
restaurant in Sacramento. Beckman says it took 35 minutes to
trace the tomatoes to the field in which they were grown.
Moreover, Beckman says, the Minnesota Department of
Health was able to determine that tomatoes were not the
source of the salmonella outbreak in only two weeks.
Brown wants procedures established that will bring
industry representatives into a food safety investigation on a
confidential basis. “We need to be able to do that at the drop
of a hat,” he says.
Despite the industry’s unhappiness with the way the
investigation was handled, Brown thinks too much blame has
been directed at FDA for the problems. “They’ve been
unfairly beaten up over this,” he says. “The problem was they
were given bad ‘epi,’ or epidemiological information. Their
hands were tied; with bad data, they couldn’t get a good
answer.”
Hot peppers came under scrutiny only after restaurant
salsa made with canned tomatoes — which are normally free
of bacteria — was identified as a possible vector of the
disease.
New health and quality standards
Ironically, the state of Florida recently instituted a
rigorous standard to prevent chemical or microbial
contamination of tomatoes. Florida’s Tomato Best Practices
Manual was published as a state regulation in November
2007, and took effect July 1, 2008, in the midst of the tomato
panic. The 14-page manual mandates conditions for soil
testing, irrigation, land use, pest control, cleanliness of
agricultural workers, fertilization, harvesting, washing and
sanitizing the fruit, sorting, packing and transportation.
The manual requires recording such variables as the
temperature of the water used to wash the tomatoes, the kind
and concentration of any chemicals in the wash water,
housekeeping and sanitation procedures and other factors.
The regulation calls for frequent random inspections by state
officials.
While Florida has gone the state-regulation route, farmers
in California have taken a different tack. California’s
regulatory and political climates are not conducive to
establishing state regulations on agricultural produce,
according to California Tomato Farmers, so the co-op was set
up two years ago to institute voluntary standards.
The co-op’s Fresh Standard is compatible with the Florida
Best Practices Manual, approved by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA), and calls for inspections carried out by
USDA officials. It also covers issues of social accountability
and sustainability.
A member of the cooperative who fails to meet safety
requirements loses membership and is no longer eligible to
use the Fresh Standard logo (see illustration, page 14) on his
product. California Tomato Farmers says it represents the
producers of 80 percent of the tomatoes grown in California.
Tim McCarthy, president of the Central California
Tomato Growers Cooperative, a tomato packer and shipper
in Merced, is skeptical about the need for government
benchmarks and the Fresh Standard. He believes that the
need to satisfy consumers’ concerns about the safety of the
food they buy is the biggest incentive producers and shippers
have to maintain top standards.
“Growers already have to meet stringent requirements for
food safety,” McCarthy says. “In this business, everybody has
standards you have to meet. State standards are usually just
watered-down versions of the ones our wholesale customers
demand.” Even so, he says of the Fresh Standard, “More
power to them.”
Sales drop hurts California too
While Florida tomato growers suffered huge losses,
McCarthy says that California growers weren’t, as a whole,
hurt badly by the tomato scare.
“The issue was perceived as a Florida and Mexico
problem,” he says. “California tomatoes were designated as
‘safe to eat.’” As a result, the demand for California tomatoes
actually rose. While tomato prices in his area are usually
about $5 a box, McCarthy says that during the height of the
scare in July, he was seeing “anywhere from $6 to $7 or $8.”
“There may be long-term damage to the tomato market,”
McCarthy says, “But for now we’re doing okay.”
Ed Beckman disagrees. “Right now, FOB prices to the
grower are running about $3 per box,” he says. “I’d hardly
say that California growers have not been impacted by this
outbreak.” He points to AC Nielson figures saying that retail
sales of fresh tomatoes are 20 to 40 percent below what they
were before the scare.
“Prices pre-Salmonella were $13 to $15 per box,”
Beckman says. “Right now [late August], a consumer is
paying $3.49 a pound for California tomatoes at two major
retailers — the same tomato that’s being sold by the grower
for about $3 for 25 pounds. These numbers raise any number
of questions about the impact on California growers and
consumer demand.”
In any case, “The fact is that this wasn’t a salmonella
outbreak from the United States. The salmonella came from
Mexico,” McCarthy says. “The real story is the need to
control imports at the border.” In fact, recent news reports
indicate that nine shipments of salmonella-contaminated
peppers had been stopped at the border over the previous 12
months.
Will establishment of tighter sanitary standards such as the
Florida Best Practices Manual and the California Fresh
Standard make a difference in a future infectious disease
investigation? The argument can be made that rigorous
standards would allow investigators to quickly eliminate from
their investigation produce grown and shipped under those
requirements.
However, the biggest benefit is likely to be increased
consumer confidence. Scientists looking for the source of a
virulent, possibly fatal disease, faced with the evidence
pointing in a certain direction, need to follow the clues
wherever they lead. Reggie Brown, among others, hopes the
system isn’t put to the test again anytime soon.
How the real culprit was found
The struggle to find the source of the salmonella outbreak
began in the middle of April, when people in New Mexico and
Texas began showing up in emergency rooms and doctors’ offices
suffering from nausea and vomiting. By the end of May, 19 people,
some of them on a Navajo Indian reservation, had come down with
the disease.
When salmonella bacteria was found in samples, county health
officials interviewed patients to learn what they had come in
contact with that might have carried the microbes.
At the same time, bacteria samples were sent to state labs,
which used DNA analysis to determine if they shared a genetic
“fingerprint,” indicating that they came from the same source. It
quickly became clear that patients in both Texas and New Mexico
were each infected with the same strain of bacteria, from a rare
variety known as Salmonella Saintpaul.
The next step was a case control study — another round of
interviews based on assumptions developed from the information
collected in the preliminary, or “hypothesis generating” questions.
In the preliminary interviews, only 5 of 19 patients had said they
had eaten peppers other than bell peppers, so no questions about
peppers were included in the case-control study.
The questionnaires were tailored to find factors held in
common by all the patients, especially types of food they had
eaten. Uninfected neighbors were also questioned, to help
eliminate common factors not involved in the outbreak.
Initial suspect
The results of the survey, collated in the beginning of June,
revealed that 88 percent of the patients had eaten tomatoes —
and that sick participants were more likely to have eaten tomatoes
than their healthy neighbors, only 64 percent of whom reported
eating them. “The big, strong signal we got was: tomatoes — and
they may sometimes have been lower-quality tomatoes used in
salsa,” says Dr. Robert Tauxe, the scientist helping to direct the
investigation for the CDC.
It was at that point, June 7, that the Food and Drug
Administration and people in the tomato industry were informed
that tomatoes were the likely source of the salmonella infections.
The FDA then began attempting to “trace-back” tomatoes eaten by
the patients to find the possible source of the bacteria.
By the middle of June, a large number of new salmonella cases
showing the same genetic “fingerprint” were beginning to show
up across the country. The new patients also reported eating
tomatoes at a higher rate than was statistically probable, says Dr.
Tauxe, and their answers still did not point to peppers.
Break in the case
The break came when the bacteria showed up in salsa made in
a restaurant using canned tomatoes. Canning normally kills the
salmonella bacillus and renders it harmless. While its tomatoes
were canned, the jalapeno peppers the restaurant used in its salsa
were fresh. Another, non-Mexican restaurant linked to salmonella
infections used fresh jalapenos as a garnish.
“It was an ‘a-ha!’ moment,” recalls Tauxe. “Those examples
told us that something other than tomatoes was causing at least
some of the infections.”
Meanwhile, attempts to trace suspect tomatoes had led
investigators to many different sources. “The tomato trace-backs
weren’t converging,” says Tauxe. “But the trace-backs of peppers
did — to the Mexican border crossing at McAllen, Texas.”
Samples of peppers taken by the FDA that had passed over the
border at McAllen grew salmonella bacteria when cultured. The
culprit, it seemed, had finally been found.
It turned out that not just jalapenos were implicated. Mexican
serrano peppers, often used by chefs instead of jalapenos, also
showed up as a suspected source of contamination. Moreover, the
farm to which the contaminated peppers were traced grew both
varieties of peppers — as well as tomatoes.
While peppers seem to be the main source of the outbreak,
Tauxe believes that tomatoes may still have been a factor,
especially in the earliest cases. “Remember,” he says, “the farm
grew all three items of produce.”
The involvement of more than one kind of produce complicated
the investigation, he says. “It was a lot of really intense detective
work by a lot of people that finally got us to the truth.”
By Stephen Thompson
