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Officials Trace Salmonella Illness to PCA's Texas Plant

By PritzkerLaw

Health officials in Colorado say they have traced the Salmonella illnesses of six people to the Plainview, Texas, processing plant of Peanut Corporation of America (PCA).

If the finding holds up, it would widen the scope of the PCA peanut butter Salmonella investigation, which has centered for the past six weeks on the company's plant in Blakely, Georgia. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced weeks ago that peanut butter and peanut paste produced at the Georgia plant was the sole source for the outbreak, which has sickened more than 639 people and claimed nine lives since the first illnesses cropped up in early September.

But in recent days, Texas health inspectors discovered unsafe conditions at the plant in Plainview and ordered a recall of all peanut products ever produced there. Virginia-based PCA has shut down the plant, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and went out of business.

Alicia Cronquist, epidemiologist for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, told the Portland Oregonian newspaper that six of 16 people in Colorado who were found to be sickened with the outbreak strain of Salmonella ate peanut butter ground in a self-serve machine at Vitamin Cottage, a natural foods chain based in Lakewood, Colorado. The peanut ingredients came from the Texas plant.

Cronquist told the newspaper that the six illnesses occurred from mid-December to mid-January. One of those sickened was hospitalized.

PCA's bankruptcy won't stop a federal criminal investigation of the company, nor will it derail lawsuits, including a wrongful death complaint filed in Hennepin County District Court in Minneapolis on behalf of the family of Shirley Mae Almer, 72. National food safety law firm PritzkerOlsen Attorneys represents the Almer family and the family of a second Minnesota woman who died with the outbreak strain of Salmonella after eating contaminated peanut butter made at the Georgia plant.

Full post as published by Food Poisoning Law Blog on February 14, 2009 (boomark / email).