Is It Safe to Buy Romaine Again
A man shops for vegetables beside romaine lettuce for sale at a supermarket in Los Angeles. Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
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Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images
A homo shops for vegetables abreast romaine lettuce for sale at a supermarket in Los Angeles.
Frederic J. Chocolate-brown/AFP/Getty Images
If y'all've avoided romaine lettuce considering of the Due east. coli outbreak, yous can offset buying information technology again.
Subsequently weeks of warnings from the Centers for Affliction Command and Prevention to toss out romaine grown in the Yuma, Ariz., region, the CDC says there are no longer any greens coming from this region.
The romaine that'southward for sale now in restaurants and supermarkets nationwide is coming from California's Salinas Valley.
In late March, officials at the state health department in New Jersey detected an increase in E. coli illnesses. When they interviewed people who had become ill, many said they had eaten chopped romaine salads. Laura Gieraltowski, who heads up the CDC's foodborne outbreak response team, says New Jersey was quick to share this information.
"When they reached out to CDC, we looked into our surveillance arrangement and saw that we had Due east.coli illnesses with the aforementioned DNA fingerprint from other states," she says. And they had similar reports from people in other states who said they had eaten romaine before getting sick."
At that betoken, the Food and Drug Assistants began a trace back and determined that the contaminated lettuce was grown in the Yuma region. But investigators could not blast down an exact source.
"Unfortunately, they weren't able to get it dorsum to a single supplier, or distribution center, or a single farm. That'due south why we kept our messaging broad," Gieraltowski says.
The CDC's announcement in mid-Apr to avoid romaine from Yuma brought chaos to Taylor Farms, a large salad producer with operations in both Arizona and Salinas Valley, Calif.
"It blindsided us, and immediately a number of customers called," says Drew McDonald, vice president of quality and food condom. He says his visitor took activeness right away. "Immediately, we stopped all shipment of romaine coming out of the desert."
McDonald says the industry was right in the centre of its seasonal transition: The harvest flavor was winding down in Arizona — the last shipments of romaine from the region were harvested April sixteen, and so that lettuce is now well beyond its 21-twenty-four hour period shelf life.
The week the CDC issued its warning, Taylor Farms had only begun to harvest and ship out greens grown in its California fields. These greens have not been linked to any contamination. But people were confused: How were they supposed to know where their greens were coming from?
"Information technology was easier, in many cases, for our customers just to terminate [ownership] romaine," McDonald says. After talking to his customers — who buy greens for bondage and institutions — he was able to reassure them, he says.
After a big foodborne affliction outbreak linked to baby spinach dorsum in 2006, the leafy greens manufacture put in place a number of procedures to foreclose contagion. "Prevention became the major focus afterward that outbreak," says Michele Jay-Russell, a nutrient safety researcher at the University of California, Davis.
"They set up intensive testing protocols to monitor water quality," Jay-Russell says. The manufacture also agreed on standardized setbacks — or buffers — to separate growing fields from livestock operations, which can be a source of Eastward.coli contamination. "You want a safe altitude from where y'all're growing fresh produce and where you have concentrations of animals, like on a feedlot or dairy," she says.
As a result of these protocols, the rubber record has improved. "The reality is [when] you're growing produce exterior, you can't make information technology entirely sterile, and so there's always some level of risk," Jay-Russell says. But the protocols in place help reduce the risk.
"The corporeality of food safe attention [in the leafy greens industry] over the concluding 10 years is remarkable," McDonald says. "It's our singular focus."
Investigators nevertheless don't know what happened in the Yuma region. Their investigation continues. It's possible that runoff from a livestock operation contaminated a h2o supply, but that's just i theory.
The CDC's Gieraltowski says the source can be hard to smash downward. "There's and then many points in the distribution chain that leafy greens go through," she says. From the subcontract to processors to shippers, "there's a lot of dissimilar places for contamination to occur."
But now that lettuce grown in the Yuma region is likely no longer existence sold in supermarkets or served in restaurants, Gieraltowski says, "We hope people tin enjoy their romaine lettuce over again."
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/05/22/613254356/cdc-gives-the-all-clear-to-start-eating-romaine-lettuce-again
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