Jaltemba Sol

Mexico criticizes U.S. salmonella findings

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MEXICO CITY (AP) Mexican agriculture officials said Thursday that U.S. colleagues hunting for the source of a salmonella outbreak are rushing to a conclusion about finding the strain at a Mexican pepper farm.

The salmonella sample that one U.S. official called "a smoking gun" was taken from a water tank that had not been used for more than two months to irrigate crops, said the director of Mexico's Farm Food Quality Service, Enrique Sanchez.

Sanchez told a news conference on Thursday that the tank held rain water and suggested that roaming cattle or other factors could have recently contaminated the tank with the same strain of salmonella that has sickened 1,300 people in the United States since June.

On Wednesday, Dr. David Acheson, the food safety chief for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, described the finding of the salmonella strain at a farm in the northern state of Nuevo Leon as a key breakthrough in the case.

"We have a smoking gun, it appears," said Dr. Lonnie King, who directs the center for food-borne illnesses at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sanchez said the U.S. officials "totally lacked scientific evidence" to make those statements and said they had broken a confidentiality agreement by announcing findings before their investigation is complete.

"We're eating this same produce in Mexico and we haven't had any problems," Sanchez said.

He suggested the FDA officials had confused the source of the samples because the tainted water was found on a farm in the Tamaulipas state municipality of Hidalgo not in Nuevo Leon as the FDA reported.

Miguel Angel Toscano of Mexico's Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks said Mexican investigators also took samples from the soil, water and vegetables the FDA had tested and found salmonella in some of the samples taken in Tamaulipas. But he said more tests need to be done to determine the strain.

Previously, the FDA had traced a contaminated jalapeno pepper to another farm in Tamaulipas. Both farms shipped through a packing facility in Nuevo Leon, raising the possibility that contamination could have occurred there.

The FDA has advised consumers to avoid raw serrano peppers from Mexico, in addition to raw jalapeno peppers from Mexico, and any foods that contain them.

Sanchez said Mexico produces 2.4 million tons of peppers per year and only 12,000 tons of fresh peppers are exported to the U.S. Another 267,000 tons of canned or bottled peppers are also sent to the U.S. each year, he said.

He said pepper exports hadn't stopped but that U.S. authorities were taking samples from the shipments at the border and holding them up for up to week until test results are ready.

Sanchez said officials have not yet determined the scale of the impact on the industry caused by the warning against eating Mexican jalapeno and serrano peppers.