Foodborne Disease

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed yesterday to delay by another 2 months a long-planned ban on the use of certain cattle materials in any animal feed, a measure designed to prevent the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. The ban would take effect Jun 26 instead of Apr 27.

Editor's note: This story was revised on Apr 9 to correct details about recalled pistachios.

(CIDRAP News) –Federal and state investigators have detected Salmonella at a California company at the center of a national pistachio recall, as state health departments search for any illness related to the contamination findings.

(CIDRAP News) – Public health officials in four states are investigating a Salmonella outbreak associated with spices made by a California company that has so far sickened 42 people, 33 of them in California.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today warned consumers to avoid eating pistachios after a California producer recalled 1 million pounds of its product because of tests by a food company that showed contamination with four different Salmonella strains.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal inspectors who conducted a survey to identify gaps in the nation's food traceability system told a House subcommittee yesterday that they managed to trace only 5 of 40 products through the full production and distribution chain and that some food facilities didn't know they needed to keep source contact information.

Mar 26, 2009

(CIDRAP News) – A public health policy group today urged the government to put one person in charge of all food safety efforts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a first step toward preventing the kinds of foodborne disease outbreaks that have plagued the nation in recent years.

(CIDRAP News) – Members of Congress today grilled executives of three food companies about what role producers have in ensuring that their ingredients are safe, after revealing that Nestle did its own audits of Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) facilities in 2002 and 2006 and rejected the company as one of its suppliers.

(CIDRAP News) – Salmonella infections have been killing more wild birds than usual in the US Southeast this winter, but the increase does not seem related to the nationwide human disease outbreak tied to tainted peanut products, according to federal wildlife scientists.

(CIDRAP News) – The case count in the nationwide Salmonella outbreak tied to peanut products has climbed to 691, signaling continued slowing of the outbreak, but a trickle of additional cases is likely to continue for months, federal health officials said today.