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Mexican peppers posed problem long before outbreak

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-19 09:19

"If the fact that they were showing up on problem lists for a year doesn't make them high-risk, I don't know what does," said Ami Gadhia, policy counsel with Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. "If it's across the board, then that's a systemic problem that FDA needs to be able to nimbly respond to."

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The agency initially suspected that fresh tomatoes had caused the outbreak. Then officials determined in mid-July that jalapenos could also be sickening people and eventually traced implicated pepper shipments all the way back to two farms in Mexico.

The agency doesn't keep count of what percentage of the nearly 491,200 metric tons of Mexican peppers imported last year were turned away at the US border. In general, the federal government inspects less than 1 percent of all foreign food entering the country.

According to the Department of Agriculture, 84 percent of all fresh peppers eaten in the US come from Mexico.

In the last year, the agency's data shows that dozens of cases were turned back due to filth, illegal pesticides and in one case, something poisonous.

Bob Buchanan, a former senior science adviser at FDA, said part of the problem may be that the agency sets its priorities for the food it considers to be high-risk years in advance.

Dried peppers and other imported spices were considered sufficiently risky to be mentioned on a 2006 FDA manual instructing inspectors on which high-risk foods deserved a more careful check.

The agency has long considered salmonella to be a risk in dried chilies, since foreign spice traders often leave peppers to dry in the sun where they're vulnerable to contamination from birds and other animals, Buchanan said.

Inspectors might have looked over the odd box of fresh Mexican chilies, but no one paid raw peppers much attention since they were not mentioned as a high-risk crop, he said.

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