WASHINGTON
It was a hot lead for detectives on a cold case. People suddenly were getting salmonella at a Minnesota restaurant more than 1,000 miles from the center of the nation's outbreak.
Not my tomatoes, protested the manager. He had switched his supply to government-cleared fresh tomatoes and even canned ones. But a lot of his menu items had a raw jalapeno garnish sprinkled on top, and that turned out to be a critical clue.
On July 3, Minnesota e-mailed the feds. After tracing credit-card receipts -- to find what the restaurant's healthy customers did not eat -- there was good evidence that the jalapenos were sickening people. Also, officials had a diagram tracing the pepper shipments back to three farms in Mexico.
One of those farms shipped peppers through the same large warehouse in McAllen, Texas, where Food and Drug Administration inspectors weeks later would find a single contaminated Mexican-grown pepper.
How could Minnesota pinpoint hot peppers just days after discovering a cluster of sick residents, when federal investigators had spent weeks fruitlessly chasing tomatoes?
To be fair, "there was already some doubt about tomatoes causing this whole outbreak," said Kirk Smith, the foodborne-disease chief at the Minnesota Department of Health.
Federal investigators say that Minnesota's information came just as they were getting hints from two Texas restaurant clusters that jalapenos might be in play. "Ours was the first that pointed specifically to jalapenos as an ingredient, not just the salsa," Smith said.
It is too soon to know if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention improperly attributed the outbreak to tomatoes in early June.
At the FDA, food-safety chief Dr. David Acheson said that the system should be reviewed to see if it can be improved. "Did every part of this system work from one end to the other?" he asked. "I'm not saying it didn't, but I think one has to question that."
Regardless, the way Minnesota unraveled its own cases -- speedily comparing the sick and the well and then tracking food suppliers -- offers lessons for a public-health system grappling with how to handle increasingly complex outbreaks from tainted produce.
"We have got to put the appropriate perspective on this outbreak as to what went right and what went wrong so the kind of changes that are going to further foodborne disease (prevention) can be made," said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Minnesota and a frequent adviser to the government.
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