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All tomatoes okay to eat, say Federal officials

By April MacIntyre Jul 19, 2008, 21:56 GMT

The tomato growers of America would like you to please eat the tomatoes. All of them. EAT ME PLEASE Tomatoes with labels indicating their origin -ready for a checca, salsa, ragu or raw... EPA/Marijan Murat

EAT ME PLEASE Tomatoes with labels indicating their origin -ready for a checca, salsa, ragu or raw... EPA/Marijan MuratOfficials say all varieties of fresh tomatoes are safe to eat, lifting a six-week-old warning that had restaurants yanking them and wreaked havoc for growers and distributors.Officials with the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are still unsure what, exactly, caused the salmonella that set off the largest outbreak of foodborne illness in a decade. Some cases were traced back to jalapeño peppers from Mexico. Last week, they recommended that the elderly, infants and people with compromised immune systems avoid eating jalapeños as well as serrano chile peppers.The CDC reports that a total of 1,220 people in the United States and Canada have been sickened since by Salmonella saintpaul strain. While new reports of illness are still coming in, the number of cases appears to be dropping off, after peaking during the last few days of May and the first week of June, the CDC said.CDC Investigators are confident that all tomatoes associated with the warning -- fresh Roma, red plum and vineless red round tomatoes are free of the outbreak strain. The tomatoes are coming from farms that were not harvesting in April when the outbreak began, said David Acheson, a top FDA food safety official. The FDA and CDC officials have not absolved tomatoes as the potential cause of the outbreak and are considering the possibility that both tomatoes and jalapeños have spread Salmonella saintpaul. The FDA's decision to lift the tomato warning followed a week of lobbying by tomato growers in the United States and Mexico.By early July, the tomato market had collapsed in the US, and growers in northern Florida, South Carolina and other regions that were bringing tomatoes to market as the warning came down were devastated.Many tomato growers think tomatoes were never the cause of the outbreak and that the FDA and CDC made a mistake."The pace of the trace-back process has been frustratingly slow, and as a result the entire industry has suffered significantly for an outbreak it did not cause," Reggie Brown, executive vice president with the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, said in a released statement. source

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