The CDC and the FDA soon became involved. Why haven they figured out where the tainted tomatoes came from?
David Acheson, MD, FDA assistant commissioner for food protection, says tracing raw tomatoes back to their source isn’t as easy as tracing a can of tomatoes labeled with a bar code. “When someone gets sick, we ask them where they bought the tomatoes, and they say it was a local supermarket,” Acheson explained in a news conference. “We ask the supermarket where they got them, and they say it’s one of several suppliers. Each supplier tells us they get tomatoes from several distributors. The distributors say they came from several growers. So this multiplies out into a fan of information that has to be sorted through to see where the links cross over.” The CDC and FDA have been able to rule out certain tomato-growing regions. But they have not yet been able to identify the source of the current outbreak. “The critical question is, Where did these tomatoes come from? We are not quite there yet,” Acheson said. “We are getting very close, but today we do not know exactly where they did come
