First tomatos, then jalapenos, and now maybe cilantro. What on earth are fresh salsa lovers to do?

A California company has issued a voluntary recall on packaged cilantro, some of which was distributed in New Mexico. NewStar Fresh Foods of Salinas, CA, was distributed under the names NewStar, Ready Set Serve and Cross Valley Farms. The Cilantro hasn’t been linked to illnesses, but the bacteria was detected in routine testing conducted by the Michigan Department of Agriculture.

Four months into the national salmonella outbreak and over 1,300 sick people later, three CDC teams are now in New Mexico trying to track down the culprit. The process is painstaking, what one official calls "applied public health" involving detailed interviews and detective work. As a Sci-Tech Today article, Tracking Down the Salmonella Source, says:

Spending two days with two of the investigators dispels any television-inspired, wrapped-up-in-an-hour CSI notion of their work.

Elizabeth Russo, 32, and Kanyin Liane Ong, 28, arrived in Albuquerque two weeks ago, one of three CDC teams sent to New Mexico to interview people who have become sick in the past few weeks. Their mission is to gather data to answer a troubling question: Why did the first surveys done of salmonella patients in New Mexico point so strongly to tomatoes when later cases seemed to implicate jalapeños?

 

The Sci-Tech article is quite interesting, using as a case study the work of Russo and Ong in Albuquerque and Espanola to describe how such investigations proceed. About halfway through the article, you realize–yes, it’s painstaking. As an aside, the description offered here also sounds a lot like how some long, hot days go doing door-to-door canvassing.