The FDA is warning consumers not to eat alfalfa sprouts or spicy sprouts from plastic bags labeled “Evergreen Produce” or “Evergreen Produce Inc.” The sprouts are possibly linked to 20 reported cases, including one hospitalization, of Salmonella Enteritidis in Idaho, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota and Washington State.
The possibly contaminated alfalfa sprouts and spicy
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Sprouts are a food item that have been associated with outbreaks of foodborne disease on multiple occasions in the past decade, including a major Salmonella saintpaul outbreak between February and April of 2009. In the 2009 outbreak, the CDC counted 235 confirmed outbreak victims, and likely thousands more people across the country were sickened.
From February through May of 2009, the CDC counted 235 confirmed victims of a Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak linked to alfalfa sprouts. Here is the distribution of confirmed cases in the outbreak:
Nebraska was the hardest hit state by far, with 111 confirmed illnesses, many of whom consumed alfalfa sprouts on sandwiches from Jimmy John’s
I recently received this comment to a recent post that I called …:
"You need to buy your seeds organically grown. This will almost ensure that there will be a lesser chance of bacterial problems.
Before you begin sprouting you should rinse your seeds very well with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide. The hydrogen peroxide
Here is a copy of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the CDC addressing the recent sprout outbreak. We have been reporting on this for weeks now (maybe months), since cases were first report in Nebraska in February. Please take a look at this report; it provides a good summary of the anatomy of
There can only be two reasons why anybody in the country would be eating alfalfa sprouts right now: one, they have not seen any of the hundreds of news reports, blog posts, or FDA/CDC reports on the several large outbreaks or recalls that have happened already in 2009; or two, they just don’t care about
There is plenty of information out there on (1) what sprout and seed companies should be doing to reduce or eliminate the risk that they sell contaminated food to customers, and (2) what sprout sellers should be doing now, in the context of the Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak linked to sprouts/sprout seeds. With absolutely no effort
Press accounts, as well as those from the CDC, addressing the number of sick people in the ongoing Salmonella sprouts outbreak are a little misleading if you don’t know what is actually being said. The reality of these outbreaks (whether E. coli O157, Salmonella, or anything else) is that the number of people who are actually ill, as opposed to the number who have a stool sample that tests positive, is much bigger than the reports would indicate.
In fact, one of the leading studies on the subject suggests (and this is obviously not a bright line rule) that the number of actual victims in a given outbreak, as opposed to merely those with positive stool samples, is as much as 38 times the number of stool sample confirmed individuals. I hope that makes sense. Paul Mead et al, explain it much more clearly in their article, which I will post in a few minutes (technical difficulties).
Continue Reading The Scope of the Recent Salmonella Sprouts Outbreak
Sprouts have gotten a bad rap recently, and I suspect that the sprout market will have that much-maligned feeling for many months to come. In this day and age, with all the channels of communication available to health departments (federal and state) around the country, and all the detective work that we do here at
The Salmonella-sprouts outbreak that we formerly reported was linked to illnesses in Michigan has grown. Health officials from multiple states (Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia) report at least 31 confirmed illnesses, which means that the number of actual illnesses in the outbreak is probably over one hundred. The FDA is