Don’t Eat Peanut Butter Products!

FDA and CDC Advise Against Peanut Butter Products Pending Salmonella Outbreak Investigation

The FDA and CDC Saturday recommended consumers not eat products containing peanut butter (including candy, cereal, cookies, crackers, and ice cream) until it could be established whether those products are responsible for the ongoing salmonella outbreak, which has so far sickened some 474 people in 43 states and may have contributed to 6 deaths.

The outbreak of Salmonella typhimurium is blamed on Peanut butter.  Peanut butter and products containing peanut paste made by the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) at a processing plant in Blakely, Ga., have already been recalled.

About a quarter of the known cases required  hospitalizations and the infections may have contributed to six deaths, according to Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the Centers’ division of Foodborne, Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases.

The reported sicknesses began in September, but have since grown in numbers with more than 20 cases reported on January 16. The very young, elderly and immunocompromised are most at risk.

“In terms of food products which contain peanut butter, but have not yet been recalled, we urge consumers to postpone eating these products until information becomes available about whether that product may be affected,” FDA said.

Kellogg announced it was voluntarily recalling some of its Austin and Keebler brand peanut butter sandwich crackers, as well as snack-size Famous Amos Peanut Butter Cookies and Keebler Soft Batch Homestyle Peanut Butter Cookies.

Eating food contaminated with Salmonella can result in abdominal cramping, diarrhea, and fever. Most people infected with Salmonella develop the symptoms 12 to 72 hours after infection. The illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days, and most people recover with treatment. However, in some persons, the diarrhea may be so severe that the patient needs to be hospitalized. For more information on Salmonella bacteria, please visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Website at http://www.cdc.gov.

Peanut Corporation of America is a family-owned and operated business since 1976 based in Lynchburg, VA and operating facilities in Blakely, GA, Suffolk, VA and Plainview, TX.

Related Links:

• Peanut Corporation of America Announces Voluntary Nationwide Recall of Peanut Butter
• STATEMENT: Peanut Corporation of America

China Food Import Alert

Tainted beans from China sicken three in Japan

Frozen green imports had high level of insecticide

(Kyodo News) An extremely high concentration of insecticide has been detected in frozen green beans imported from China, causing a woman in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji and two other people in Chiba Prefecture to fall ill, reports said Wednesday.

The 56-year-old woman bought the beans Saturday and ate some of them Sunday, the Hachioji health department said. She started vomiting from the foul taste and smell and later experienced numbness in her mouth and more nausea.

The city of Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture, said later Wednesday that two people experienced numbness of the tongue after eating beans from a package with the same lot number as the one in the Hachioji case. Police seized the remaining beans from the Kashiwa incident and were conducting checks.

The Hachioji health department said it detected 6,900 parts per million of the organophosphate insecticide dichlorvos in the beans, which is 34,500 times the government standard for imports.

A bag of green beans similar to the one that contained an extremely high level of insecticide dichlorvos. Photo:  Tokyo Metropolitan Government handout.

At that concentration, which the ministry said is nearly equal to an undiluted solution of the insecticide, eating just 0.07 gram of the beans could be enough to trigger acute symptoms in a 60-kg person, it said.

The beans were manufactured by Yantai Beihai Foodstuff Co. in Shandong Province and imported by Tokyo-based Nichirei Foods Inc. for sale under the Ingen brand.

Prime Minister Taro Aso told reporters Wednesday that Tokyo will ask Beijing to work to improve the safety of exported food products from China. “(Food) products from China have caused problems in many places (for about a year),” he said.

This is not Yantai Beihai’s first tainted product. The ministry said it also detected unacceptable levels of the insecticide chlorpyrifos in another frozen bean product made by the company in 2002 that was exported to Japan. Although the concentration was 0.15 ppm, a level that shouldn’t cause immediate health problems in humans, the product had to be destroyed, it said.

A total of 265 tons of the frozen green beans have been imported in the past year. The government is warning consumers not to eat them and asking distributors to halt sales of the product until it can confirm what made the consumers sick. Quarantine offices nationwide have been ordered to halt import procedures for all food products from the Chinese company.

Frozen “gyoza” (dumplings) from China tainted with the agrochemical methamidophos sickened three families earlier this year in Chiba and Hyogo prefectures. It was later revealed that gyoza made by the same Chinese firm, containing the same pesticide, caused a food poisoning outbreak in China over the summer that Beijing authorities initially urged Japan not to report. Copyright Kyodo News

Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has revealed that high concentrations of dichlorvos have been detected in foods imported from China on 14 different occasions since 2000. The contaminated products included  matsutake mushrooms, nonglutinous rice, vegetables, corn, frozen strawberries, dumplings and and herbal medicines.