Now it's the jalapeños and salsa

For those of you who left snarky comments to my salmonella post, you should know that FDA is massing for a frontal assault on jalapeños and salsa.

Give it time.  Sooner or later, FDA will find something you do care about.

Comments

[DSK]

I was in Atlanta this last weekend, and was talking to my dad about this whole thing. He had recently been talking to a friend in the CDC; that person had pretty much said all the same things you said - a lot of it is just connecting dots that normally aren't connected. But the one "interesting" thing (as mentioned in the article you link) is that a lot of the cases are some particular salmonella strain that they don't usually see.

[M1EK]

I could snark about food-miles and different regulatory systems, since there's now rumblings that this came from our neighbors to the south. But instead, I want to re-emphasize how evil raw tomatoes are. They may not give you salmonella of the physical sort, but they will definitely give you the salmonella of the soul.

[AC]

M1EK, if you libeled beef with the same reckless abandon that you do tomatoes, they'd put you on trial in Amarillo.

DSK, I haven't figured out why the rarity of the strain matters. The papers occasionally report that the St. Paul strain is especially "virulent," but its mortality rate seems pretty low (just 1 in 1,000, and that 1 was some poor person with pancreatic cancer).

If it's not much worse than some of the more common strains, then why create a scare?

The St. Paul strain may be evidence of a widespread contamination from a single source. But we presumably have widespread contaminations all the time; they just can't be traced back to the source because the strains are too common. We tolerate this risk (or some of us do, anyway). Unless the St. Paul strain is a lot worse than common strains, the feds should have treated this as an interesting research opportunity rather than overreact the way they did.