Blog Post

Yet another salmonella food poisoning outbreak threatens to tear apart the thin fabric holding the country’s premier food safety agency together. Yet again, the FDA is found wanting in its response to national food emergencies.

The confusion started on Monday when the FDA posted an advisory on its website advising grocery stores not to stock jalapeno peppers that were distributed by a distributor in Texas. Several grocery stores that did not purchase their jalapeno peppers from that particular distributor rightly chose not to have these products pulled from their shelves. However, the very next day the advisory was altered to say that all raw jalapeno peppers and serrano peppers, including products like salsa that contain these ingredients, were to be taken off shelves. That was 24 hours of misinformation when grocery stores continued to leave possibly tainted jalapeno peppers on the shelves, and customers continued to purchase them. The dangerous food confusion has been sorted out for now, and most of the top grocery stores had removed the offending peppers from their shelves by Tuesday.

However, the slowness in getting the right safety advisory out has sparked off yet another debate over the FDA’s powerlessness in enforcing recalls of tainted products, and its inability to form a cohesive and fast alert system. The FDA lacks the mandatory recall authority that would allow issuing recalls for tainted products. It can merely issue advisories, but its up to retailers to act on these. It is clear that this is a dangerous pattern of trends in the way that food safety systems in this country are being run, and at the rate that tainted food scandals are erupting, it’s time we took food safety with the seriousness it deserves.

The most recent salmonella food poisoning outbreak involved the rare Salmonella Saintpaul strain that kicked off in April this year. Since then, it has killed two people and sent thousands to the hospital sick with diarrhea and severe vomiting. Food safety regulators have struggled to find the source of the salmonella. In the beginning, tomatoes were the prime suspects, and as we had reported a while back, tomatoes by the hundreds of thousands had been yanked off produce store shelves. Since then, tomato hysteria has died down, and tomatoes are back to being staple produce again. The regulators have since then scrambled to find the original source of the strain, and have had little luck.

Even now, the connection between the food poisoning and the jalapeno peppers remains unconfirmed. The distribution plant in Texas that buys the peppers from Mexico and distributes them in Texas and Georgia is having its affairs investigated.

While the FDA regulations look for microscopic salmonella in a haystack of peppers, critics have been quick to point out that this slowness in responding to and tackling food emergencies is a potential disaster waiting to happen that will cost more lives in the years ahead. Unless measures are adopted now to give the FDA some better tools to track the food chain as it travels from the farm to our plates, as well as issue mandatory recalls, we can expect to have more such dangerous food episodes in the future.

The Reeves Law Group is a law firm with offices throughout California dedicated exclusively to the representation of personal injury victims, including victims of food poisoning. Please visit our website at trlglaw.com. If you desire a free consultation on a personal injury matter, please call us at (800) 644-8000 or email us.