Food safetySprouts blamed for U.S. Salmonella outbreak

After infecting more than 4,000 people across Europe and North America, sprouts have been blamed once more for a food-borne outbreak, this time in the United States.

On Tuesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that sprouts were the source of a Salmonella outbreak which has sickened more than twenty people across five states including Washington, Montana, and Idaho.

The patients vary widely in age ranging from twelve to seventy-seven years old, and so far three people have been reported hospitalized due to the severity of their symptoms.

Public health investigators have linked the outbreak to alfalfa and spicy sprouts from Evergreen Produce, a farm in Moyie, Idaho.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an advisory warning consumers to stay away from the sprouts.

Evergreen Produce owner Nadine Scharf has refused to recall her products arguing that there is no “concrete proof” that her sprouts were the cause of the outbreak.

Scharf is not the first to reject the urgings of public health investigators as food borne outbreaks are often difficult to trace and foods can be mistakenly identified resulting in severe financial losses for the farmers.

Investigators are capable of finding the specific pathogen that has infected patients, but it is more difficult to pinpoint the origin of it as authorities must rely on surveys and patients’ memories of what they ate. Raw produce like salads, salsas, or other mixed dishes are a particular challenge as the infected patients often cannot recall all of the ingredients.

In the deadly German E.coli outbreak, Spanish cucumbers were erroneously identified as the source of the outbreak which resulted in consumers across Europe avoiding Spanish produce all together and Russia went so far as to ban all produce imports from Europe.

Spanish fruit and vegetable exports lost as much as $290 million a week and are now demanding Germany pay reparations.

In its announcement on Tuesday, the CDC reiterated the FDA’s warning that Evergreen Produce’s potentially contaminated products were still in stores and consumers should be careful to avoid them.

Since 1996, sprouts have been the source of at least thirty food borne illness outbreaks in the United States.