Yet no bigger action was taken. Food and Drug Administration officials insisted as recently as last hebdomad that they were surprised by the outbreak because Mexican peppers had non been spotted as a problem before.
But an Associated Press analysis of FDA records plant that peppers and chilies were systematically the big top Mexican craw rejected by border inspectors for the last year.
Since January alone, 88 shipments of fresh and desiccated chilies were turned away. Ten pct were contaminated with salmonella. In the last year, 8% of the 158 intercepted shipments of refreshing and dried chilies had salmonella.
On Friday, Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's food safety headman, told reporters peppers were not a cause for concern ahead they were implicated in the salmonella outbreak.
"We have not typically seen problems with peppers," Acheson aforesaid. "Our importee sampling is typically focused on areas where we know we've got problems or we've seen problems in the past, which is wherefore we're straight off increasing our sampling for peppers."
On Monday, the FDA said Acheson's comment was in relation back to outbreaks or unwellness associated with Mexican peppers, not the rejection of pepper shipments at the borders. Calls to the FDA quest elaboration were not immediately returned.
Still, food-safety advocates question why the agency did not give more tending to the peppers existence stopped at the delimitation and why it took the nation's largest foodborne illness irruption for the agency to ratchet up its cover of companies known for shipping unsportsmanlike chilies.
"If the fact that they were showing up on job lists for a year doesn't get them bad, I don't know what does," said Ami Gadhia, policy counsel with Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. "If it's across the board, then that's a systemic trouble that FDA needs to be able to agilely respond to."
The agency ab initio suspected that fresh tomatoes had caused the outbreak. Then officials determined in mid-July that jalapenos could also be sickening people and finally traced implicated pepper shipments all the way endorse to two farms in Mexico.
The agency doesn't keep count of what percent of the nearly 491,200 metric tons of Mexican peppers imported last year were turned by at the U.S. molding. In cosmopolitan, the federal government inspects less than 1% of all foreign food entering the United States.
According to the Department of Agriculture, 84% of all fresh peppers eaten in the U.S. come from Mexico.
In the last year, the agency's information shows that dozens of cases were turned back up due to filth, illegal pesticides and in one case, something poisonous.
Bob Buchanan, a other senior science adviser at FDA, aforesaid part of the job may be that the agency sets its priorities for the food it considers to be high-risk years in advance.
Dried peppers and other imported spices were considered sufficiently risky to be mentioned on a 2006 FDA manual instructing inspectors on which high-risk foods deserved a more careful check.
The agency has farsighted considered salmonella to be a peril in dehydrated chilies, since foreign spicery traders oftentimes leave peppers to dry in the sun where they're vulnerable to contamination from birds and other animals, Buchanan said.
Inspectors power have looked over the odd box of novel Mexican chilies, but no one paid raw peppers much attention since they were not mentioned as a bad crop, he said.
"Somebody could have picked up a box and looked at peppers if they wanted to, just I'm not sure that would have been a high precedence," Buchanan aforementioned. "It would require a big saltation to think that salmonella in dried peppers could be related to to problems in fresh chilies."
Since the salmonella outbreak began in April, 1,423 multitude have fallen ill and the bring on industry has lost more than than $200 million as consumers have shied away from buying fresh produce.
Federal investigators are now focussing their probe on sweet hot peppers from Mexico � jalapenos and serranos � just still mistrust that corrupt tomatoes were initially involved.
This month, the agency put a twelve Mexican growers or distributors on its "import qui vive" list for tougher border screening.
On Friday, Acheson aforesaid the delegacy had stepped up testing of certain Mexican develop and uncovered more cases of salmonella contamination � just not the same strain that caused this particular eruption � in jalapenos, basil of Caesarea and cilantro.
In July, vI separate shipments of clean jalapenos and serranos were stopped after inspectors found they were contaminated with salmonella, FDA data shows.
One crate detained on July 29 came from Agricola Zaragoza, a Mexican packinghouse that handled produce from two farms where chilies linked to the eruption were traced.
"If so many of the peppers we eat in the U.S. come in from Mexico, you'd think we would want to pay more attention," aforementioned Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety, which kit and boodle with industry to improve growing and packing practices. "Something isn't working."
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