The sticky-fingered salmonella culprit is ...

peanut butter! (See background from last week's post.)

Lots, lots more here, from a lawyer who's so into this. He's busy calling out the CDC and FDA for not doing a recall yet.

It's baaaaaaack!

After raising its ugly head this summer our old pal salmonella is back in the news. As of Wednesday, January 7, 2009, 388 persons infected with the outbreak strains of Salmonella Typhimurium have been reported from 42 states," sez the CDC. Apparently the most common source for this kind of infection is cheese, milk and eggs, so venture your guess now. Gouda? Free-range chicken eggs? Cottage cheese? Chocolate milk? Be prepared for several culprits to be fingered all at once before someone confesses.

What's up with the big S these days?

Everyone -- and by that I mean no one -- has been clamoring to get an update on the summer's hottest trend, salmonella-getting. Since the smoking gun turned out to be a blazin' serrano pepper from Mexico, I suspect you've turned the page on this news item, eh? Still, there's more interesting stuff:

• Mexico sez: hey, we don't got no -- sorry, skipping the offensive stereotypical retort here -- we've found no salmonella (and the U.S. responds, "did too!")
• Wal-Mart is taking the claim that some guy got salmonella from their peppers "very seriously" -- and as the Consumerist points out, this is what "companies use over and over again to appear contrite without actually saying or doing anything." Stay tuned on this one.
• This guy (director of the Paleobiotics Lab) says "our sick, leaky guts" should share the blame.
• Oh, great, let's just irradiate everything to oblivion, just in case, to be safe you know.

And finally, it's nice to see that someone took my Law and Order meme literally:

"Holding a tomato in one hand and a jalapeño in the other, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight and investigations subcommittee, pressed the FDA on whether the tomato was still a "vegetable of interest" or had been cleared. "

Vegetable of interest -- heh.

P.S. Still no salmonella outbreak at the Durham Farmer's Market. I'm just saying.

And now the culprit turns to ....

Still following that salmonella story? To recap, it was tomatoes, then maybe jalapenos, and now it could be serrano peppers ('cause nobody can tell them apart, sez the CDC) and maybe cilantro. But a number of pesky infected people are saying that they didn't eat salsa or anything containing jalapenos. CDC food safety chief Dr. Robert Tauxe told The Associated Press that they "are quite sure that neither tomatoes nor jalapenos explain the entire outbreak at this point. ... We're presuming that both of them have caused illness."Added FDA food safety chief Dr. David Acheson: "It's just been a spectacularly complicated and prolonged outbreak." And a spokeswoman adds that for every documented case there could be 30-40 undocumented. Sheesh.

No, what we really meant was

I feel like I'm halfway through a "Law and Order: Criminal Intent" episode. Remember how in the opening segments we were led to believe that tomatoes were the culprits behind the Great Salmonella Thing of 2008? Now -- a few commercial breaks later -- we've abandoned that line of thinking (no doubt after some erudite observations from Goren and wisecracks from Eames) and now the focus is on jalapeños. Oh I see. It's always easy to attack those south of the border as suspects, eh? No doubt the tomato growers will be serving some papers for their defamation lawsuit soon.

And now to wait for the end of the show when the real killer is found: tortilla chips? Sour cream? Black beans? Cilantro? I can hardly wait.