In case you haven’t been keeping up with what isn’t safe to eat, the latest news on the Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak is that people should still avoid round, roma and plum tomatoes, as well as avoiding serrano and jalapeño peppers, cilantro, and most recently added to the list, fresh basil. Please note, that while people across the country continue to acquire Salmonella Saintpaul from somewhere, no actual produce or any product whatsoever has actually tested positive for the bacteria.
Yes, it’s true. The list of implicated foods gets longer and longer, more and more people are getting sick, and they haven’t found a trace of anything to explain it, or, for that matter, any proof whatsoever that the things on their list have been involved in making people sick. The only thing they have to go on is the reporting of the ill on what they had eaten before getting ill. That’s some pretty thin evidence, considering they are talking to people about 2-3 weeks after the meals they want to know about. I don’t know about anyone else, but they could ask me what was on my plate last night, and I could tell them, but a couple of weeks from now, I am not going to remember every ingredient I used, if I even remember the meal at all. I already couldn’t tell anyone what we ate last week. Not specifically anyway, and there’d be huge gaps in my memory of exactly what ingredients were used and what day we ate what on. I can’t imagine many other peoples’ memories about what they ate is that much better than mine.
While all the focus has been on produce, for which they still can’t find a shred of hard evidence to implicate it, I have to wonder if they have considered the meat products these people have been eating with the currently implicated produce. Meat can have salmonella crawling all over it too, and though cooking the meat effectively solves that problem, not thoroughly washing one’s hands between handling meat and chopping vegetables, or using the same cutting board and/or knife with thoroughly washing them first, can be a recipe for disaster … or illness. By “thoroughly washing” I don’t mean just running water over hands or tools either. I mean the application of actual soap and cleaning under the fingernails and scrubbing of tools. I know I use good kitchen practices in this regard, but I would be more than willing to bet that a great many households are not as careful about cross-contamination as I am. So, I have been thinking about what meat products the people getting sick had been eating, and whether or not anyone is even considering that as a source, or … did they just jump on the most obvious connection — tomatoes — and are now just trying to come up with any produce they can find to fit the bill, since they seem convinced it is fresh produce causing it. I keep hearing the words “we assume” too often from official spokespeople, and assuming anything in science leads to bad science. If they assume it’s vegetables, they may overlook the real cause.
I’d also be willing to bet that as this goes on longer and more people get sick even more fresh produce will end up on the suspicion list, and that they will continue to not find any produce that is actually infected with Salmonella Saintpaul. It’s just a hunch, but it seriously seems to me the people looking for the cause of the outbreak are really grasping at straws.
Personally, I consider every edible in my local grocery store to potentially be something carrying Salmonella Saintpaul. The people investigating this outbreak have provided no hard proof it is any of the things on their ever-growing list, and therefore, that means it could technically be anything at all. It could even be canned foods. I know store-bought canned foods isn’t the first thing on anyone’s list when thinking about Salmonella, but the difference between the correct temperature and too low a temperature isn’t as large as people might imagine. It could be in the meat, and people are cross-contaminating at home. It could be any produce at all, maybe that onion they forgot they put in the salsa†. I’m not trying to put the fear of food into anyone, but it is something to consider. Not everything is being tested, and of the things they are extensively testing, they haven’t found a single microbe of Salmonella. All they have to go on are the memories of ill human beings about things they ate a couple of weeks before becoming ill. It really could, at this point, be anything.
The hunt for Salmonella Saintpaul goes on, and we remain none the wiser at to the cause of the outbreak. I wouldn’t be nervous about it all, seeing as 90% of the food we eat doesn’t come from a grocery store, but Texas currently has 449 cases, many of them recent. Texas has been hit hard, and I finally found a county-by-county list of cases. It’s interesting for anyone living in Texas. Austin has the highest number of cases with 34. That’s not a large number, but it’s larger than the rest of the state, so something to think about.
Anyway, it just seems weird that no clue at all has been found yet. Everyone is clueless and grasping at straws, assuming things and rumor-mongering, and the news media is running with the fear factor. Gets my brain to thinking and exploring possibilities. However this all ends, if there ever is an end and they find the source, I believe it will be a surprising conclusion not actually involving any of the things currently on the list of possible suspects. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens, while trying to guess what foodstuffs aren’t going to make us sick.
Footnotes- † No one has mentioned onions yet, and why not? I don’t know anyone who puts together tomatoes, jalapeños, and cilantro and doesn’t add onion. [↩]