This summer the salmonella outbreak could fall as the national food supply of the biggest unsolved mystery.

Instead of a smoking gun, the only clue is a single Jalapeño pepper tainted with the rare strain of salmonella found in Saint Paul a Texas distribution center produce.

The difficulty in finding answers to a complicated and the nation’s longest-running food-borne illness cases, the spotlight on the beleaguered Food and Drug Administration, and the system for the protection of U.S. food supply.

Tomatoes, the initial suspicions have been excluded from the survey but not free. Now, federal inspectors have fingered Jalapeño peppers from Mexico as a potential source of contamination. But the route is always cold, and it is always difficult to find sufficient evidence to isolate the source of an outbreak that has sickened 1,294 people since April.

Critics say that is evidence of a system that is broken and desperately need a revision.

‘’The bottom line is this does not work,’’said Carl Nielsen, a 28-year veteran of the FDA and former director of import inspections. “ There must be radical changes.'’

‘’This is not a matter of throwing a few million dollars on the problem and a tomatogate would not happen,’’said Nielsen, now works as a consultant.

During this salmonella outbreak may be getting more scrutiny by the public than most, the questions are not new. At the core of the problem is a decentralized system for tracking food-borne diseases, requires the coordination of several agencies, including the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state health departments.

In addition, a variety of challenges, such as lack of recall authority, funding deficits and not enough regulatory control on foreign agricultural practices.

Together they add up to a recipe for disaster.

‘’We must move forward with much needed modernization of our national legislation on food safety,’’said U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam, a central Florida Republican, is co-sponsoring new legislation on food safety. “ These laws have not really changed since the Eisenhower administration.'’

But in today’s global economy, foods from all over the world and shipped cross-country travel thousands of kilometres from the farm to your table.

Industry experts and Congress leaders agreed that there must be a uniform standard for consumer warnings.

Now, seven weeks after the FDA warned consumers to stop eating certain types of tomatoes, the investigation focuses on Jalapeño peppers grown in Mexico. It may have been salsa or a set, consumers sick.

‘TRACE BACK’ process

‘’One of the advantages of a trace-back system that actually works is that they have helped to show it was not tomatoes,’’said Bill Marler, a Seattle lawyer who specializes in the field of food safety litigation.

The trace-back process begins with epidemiologists, the consumer must rely on the details remember what they eat and when they got sick. But if items such as tomatoes or peppers - ingredients in many foods - into question, memories are often faulty.

However, this is the kind of evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used to a scientific conclusion and zero to the cause of food-borne diseases. Subsequently, the FDA job to identify the source. The process has worked in recent years with salmonella outbreaks associated with spinach and peanut butter, and FDA officials thought it would be this time too.

‘’The science showed a clear association with tomatoes,'’Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s associate commissioner for food, told the Miami Herald. “ We have a choice. They sit on and we try to hunt down a tomato with a positive sample or informing consumers of what we know? It is an approach that has also recently. There was no reason to believe this time would be different. But clearly it was not the sole answer.'’

Dr. Michael Easter Holm, an epidemiologist has served as a consultant federal government, said a part of the problem with this study lies in the fact that an early, the FDA do not trace-back studies in a control group of people who had not become ill . This could have helped rule out some food.

‘’You have to right to these things,’’said Easter Holm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “ The question is: Was the data are sufficient to target tomatoes? That is going too need to be very careful examination.'’

The longer the outbreak continues, with no definitive answers, the more consumers continue sick. Recent cases have been reported 10th July and the outbreak may not be over. However, the CDC said a little more than a week ago that the number of new diseases to be declining.

Do not know, what is safe to eat, consumers were staying away from tomatoes. The turnover of around and Roma tomatoes, the type originally implicated by the FDA, fell nearly 50 percent in June, according to data from the Perishables Group of 15,000 supermarkets nationwide. Overall, tomatoes sales 17 percent.

FLORIDA TOMATO

These kinds of statistics have taken a toll on Florida tomato growers. They call for changes in the trace-back system and are demanding compensation for damages from the Congress, could close to $ 100 million.

‘’The government was solely responsible for the damage caused to the industry,’’said Tony DiMare of DiMare Farms, whose activities in Florida and the country from its base in Homestead. “ You have verpfuschte the investigation in a way bad, as bad as any investigation ever carried out. They must be held accountable. They not only failed to protect the consumer public, it ruined an industry.'’

U.S. Rep. Tim Mahoney file a bill seeking to compensate for tomato growers and packers in Florida and throughout the country. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, Florida and North Democratic Rep. Allen Boyd, are on the powerful House Appropriations Committee are also supporting the effort.

There are also two House hearings set for Wednesday and Thursday to review the issues of fresh produce trace back and dealing with the recent outbreak of salmonella.

Wasserman Schultz and Boyd also have an amendment to an agricultural spending bill, directly to the FDA study the trace-back programme for the recent outbreak and on the basis of examination of samples in all sizes of tomatoes in Florida, California and Mexico.

‘’Is it clear that more work needs to be done to ensure greater accountability from our federal agencies for food safety,'’Boyd said.

Acheson concedes that this outbreak is the komplizierteste”'’ein he ever worked. ‘’It is very unusual for an outbreak to a fresh element to produce, go to this length of time,'’he said.

Typically, by the time the FDA identifies a fresh outbreak produce the crop cycle is winding down and report diseases stop on their own.

Among other topics, the complexity of this investigation are:

• Tomatoes are not sold with a bar code, such as a bag with spinach, which would allow easier to trace back.

• tomatoes from different farms are mixed together in repackaging houses, in order to meet size and color requirements for a particular buyer, so it is difficult to determine their origin.

• tomatoes not long in the consumer at home, so there is no left back and test it to someone sick.

Acheson also said that sorting through paper sales and sales records nearly every stage of the food chain was demanding.

‘’It is not justifiable to say that the FDA has dropped the ball,’’said Acheson. “ There are problems with the system. The way the system is set up now, it is very lengthy and arduous. What you need is to move away from paper and into the electronic age. You have to build a system in which a piece to the next.'’

Sure, the technology already exists. In many cases, all it would be a bar-code stickers could be a tomato or another, caught by the farm to the table. The companies are also marketing kiosks will be in a grocery store, where a consumer could scan A tomato and find out that they were picked on 1 March, the hypothetical Joe’s farm in Immokalee.

Critics of the trace-back system, said the policy has received on the way to enforce the rules already in the books and more stringent provisions.

The Bioterrorism Act of 2002 requires someone along the food supply chain, where both a product is purchased and where it goes on. Many believe that the FDA has not used its authority under the law to produce quicker and more decisive responses.

‘’You have an agency, which reluctantly come hard on people, when they should, and [the] does not have the means,’’said Joseph Mendelson, Legal Director of the Center for Food Safety in Washington, DC “” It is a combination of inadequate resources and incredibly bad execution.'’

Protection Plan

In November last year, the FDA unveiled a Food Protection Plan designed to identify potential risks to food safety and take action before they impact the consumer. But only recently has Congress been asked to finance the plan.

Acheson argued that his agency does not have the authority to mandate an effective tracing system. ‘’The industry has a responsibility to produce a safe product and set up a system like this into force,'’he said. “ The question has always been one of cost vs. benefit. It may be if the industry deals with the cost of this outbreak, it is possible that some must be reconsidered.'’

While the problems with tomatoes have the most attention, it is not the only case in which the FDA’s difficulties in determining the cause of a salmonella outbreak has taken a tribute to the companies produce.

Farm in Honduras

Another recent study focuses on a Honduran farm, Agropecuaria Montelibano. After the FDA announced in March that they suspected that a salmonella outbreak in the western United States was in connection with the operation of the cantaloupes, the United States closed its borders to the product and the business of Honduran society, Grupo Agrolibano, crashed .

Four months later, the FDA has yet to prove that the salmonella was established on the farm. If the import ban is not lifted soon, Agrolibano executives say they can go out of business.

The fear is also in the Florida tomato growers. Although Florida’s tomato growing season is over, breeders want the cloud away, so that they prepare for the harvest. Tomato plants are already growing in greenhouses, and seedlings will be planted next month.

‘’I suspect that people should be fairly conservative,’’said Reggie Brown, Executive Vice President of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange. “ You’re not going to want to plant any more than you can afford the risk.'’

Industry experts say that the way food-borne illnesses are treated in the future will determine the future of agriculture in the United States.

‘’If we are not a better handling, we have a bankrupt sector,’’said Jim Prevor, editor of the product and business magazine writer in the industry blog perishablepunditcom.