What are the CDC and the FDA doing to track the outbreak?
On May 23, just before the start of the Memorial Day weekend, New Mexico health authorities first realized there was an outbreak. That’s when they discovered that a cluster of salmonella cases had been caused by a salmonella strain with an unusual genetic fingerprint. The CDC and the FDA soon became involved. Why haven’t 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
