More markets, restaurants pull tomatoes
— -- As the Food and Drug Administration scrambles to find the source of a 17-state outbreak of salmonellosis linked to raw tomatoes, stores and restaurants nationwide are pulling implicated varieties from shelves and menus.
The outbreak of the obscure salmonella saintpaul subtype first appeared in New Mexico and Texas on April 23. By this weekend, it had spread to 16 states, with at least 150 reported illnesses and 23 hospitalizations.
A 67-year-old cancer patient in Texas who health officials said was sickened by salmonella at a Mexican restaurant is believed to be the first death associated with the outbreak, the Associated Press reported. The death of Raul Rivera last week has been officially attributed to his cancer, but Houston health department spokeswoman Kathy Barton told the Houston Chronicle in Tuesday's editions that the salmonella strain was a contributing factor.
Rivera's wife said he was hospitalized after eating pico de gallo, a tomato-based condiment, in late May while celebrating good news about his cancer treatment.
The FDA is advising consumers not to eat any raw tomatoes except cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, tomatoes sold with the vine still attached and home-grown tomatoes.
That, in turn, led restaurants, food-service distributors and supermarkets to pull tomatoes off their menus and shelves, beginning Saturday, with the list growing longer by the hour.
Washing tomatoes can help, but it won't necessarily remove the salmonella bacteria, which sometimes gets inside the fruit.
"Tomatoes are just piling up in the storage rooms, they aren't shipping, people aren't selling them," says Amy Philpott of the United Fresh Produce Association in Washington, D.C. The unsold fruit will likely be sent to landfills, "especially the volumes that we could be looking at in this case."
