| | |  Health & Beauty | August 2008 
Mexico's Peppers On FDA's Hit List All Year
 Associated Press
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| | Jalapeno Chile Pepper (Dave Buresh/Denver Post) | | |
Fresno, Calif. — Federal inspectors at U.S. border crossings repeatedly turned back filthy, disease-ridden shipments of peppers from Mexico in the months before a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,400 people was finally traced to Mexican chiles. Yet no larger action was taken.
Food and Drug Administration officials insisted as recently as last week they were surprised by the outbreak because Mexican peppers hadn't been a problem before.
But an analysis of FDA records found that peppers and chiles were consistently the top Mexican crop rejected by border inspectors for the last year.
Since January, 88 shipments of fresh and dried chiles have been turned away. Ten percent were contaminated with salmonella. In the last year, 8 percent of the 158 intercepted shipments of fresh and dried chiles had salmonella.
"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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