Overview

We all know that the many health benefits to be gained through eating more fruits and vegetables. However, there have been an increasing number of cases of food-borne illnesses involving fresh produce. In recent years, we have seen cases involving:

• Hepatitis A in green onions
• E. coli in spinach and lettuce
• Shigella in parsley
• Cyclospora in raspberries.
• Salmonella in cantaloupe…and tomatoes.

There are approximately 1.4 million cases of Salmonella infections reported annually in the United States, with 95% of these cases believed to be food-borne. The symptoms of Salmonella include fever, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and vomiting, and they appear in most patients within 72 hours of infection. Severe cases of Salmonella occur mostly among infants and the elderly, along with those who suffer from immune deficiencies. In these cases, when the infection spreads beyond the intestines and permeates the body through the bloodstream, the results can be fatal. In such severe cases, antibiotic treatment can be highly effective, if the patient is diagnosed early enough.

The title of this article springs from the title of a 1978 movie that became a cult classic. Lately however, variations of the “killer tomato” them have been incorporated into the headlines of a number of articles in major news outlets and many more blog posts covering recent Salmonella outbreaks in the United States. The first case in the 2008 U.S.Salmonella outbreak was reported in New Mexico on April 23rd.  As of mid-July 2008, over one thousand cases of Salmonella ‘SaintPaul’ bacterial illnesses had been reported in 42 states and the District of Columbia, with more being reported in Canada and Mexico (the two largest export markets for U.S. tomato producers). The suspicion is that these foreign cases can be traced to the same point of origin and the thousand-plus cases in the United States, but the question remains as to what that origin exactly was? While fresh tomatoes were first identified as the culprit in this outbreak, federal health officials are less and less certain that this is the case. In fact in mid-July 2008, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expanded its inquiry into a number of fresh produce items, including jalapeno and serrano peppers, which may be the actual cause of illnesses. In fact, Howard Seltzer, who is the national education adviser for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, commented that it was highly unlikely that a “smoking gun” would be found to definitively trace the source of the contamination in this continuing outbreak. Ian Williams, who heads the CDC’s Outbreak Net Team remarked that: “People are very used to the sort of ‘CSI’ thing where you put it into a computer and out comes the answer. In reality, sometimes we don’t figure things out.”