Rare Salmonella in Peanut Butter

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
The source of a dangerous salmonella outbreak took six months to track down in part because the culprit — peanut butter — took health officials by surprise.
The outbreak has sickened at least 290 people in 39 states since August. It took until this week to identify the source because peanut butter has only once before been linked to the life-threatening disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.

ON DEADLINE: Information from the FDA, ConAgra

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Wednesday night that jars of Peter Pan and Wal-Mart's Great Value brand peanut butter beginning with the product code "2111" on the lid of the jar could be contaminated with the strain Salmonella Tennessee.

This variety of salmonella is so rare that the CDC normally sees only about 100 cases a year, says Robert Tauxe, chief of the CDC's Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch.

Symptoms include fever, diarrhea and abdominal cramps. In people with weakened immune systems and very young children, salmonella can invade the bloodstream and cause life-threatening infections.

The affected jars were from a single ConAgra Foods plant in Georgia, which FDA officials began investigating Wednesday. Great Value peanut butter made by other manufacturers is not affected, the FDA says. Consumers should discard any of this peanut butter purchased since May, the FDA says.

"Nature's been throwing us curve balls," says Tauxe. "We've had seven major product outbreaks in the last five months, and three have been in brand-new foods — botulism in carrot juice, E. coli in spinach, and now this."

When epidemiologists began getting reports of a growing number of cases in August, they took notice. But conducting normal case control studies — asking infected people what they had been eating — wasn't providing any clues, says Tauxe. Finally, people in the most-affected states began taking extensive, 300-question surveys.

That turned up peanut butter. "As our teams were talking to the people, they'd ask if they could donate that jar to the health department," says Tauxe. "By this Monday, there was an accumulation of half-eaten peanut butter jars in state health labs around the country." Those samples are being cultured now, he says.

There has been only one known outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter — in South Australia in 1996. Subsequent studies showed that because peanut butter is so thick and oily, heat pasteurization didn't kill the bacteria.

ConAgra has stopped production of peanut butter until the cause of contamination can be identified and eliminated. Consumers who have questions should contact the company at 866-344-6970.

For a full refund, consumers should send the product lid, their name and mailing address to ConAgra Foods, P.O. Box 3768, Omaha, NE 68103.

Those who have recently eaten the targeted peanut butter and become ill should contact their doctor immediately and report the illness to state or local health authorities, the FDA says.