WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
The U.S. Food and Drug
Administration has found a jalapeno pepper contaminated with a
strain of salmonella that has sickened more than 1,200 people,
officials said on Monday.

The pepper, which showed up at a south Texas distribution
facility, originated in Mexico but could have been contaminated
in a variety of places, the FDA said.

“FDA has found a genetically matched Salmonella saintpaul
isolate from a distribution center called Agricola Zaragosa in
McAllen, Texas,” Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for
foods at the FDA, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

The FDA said no one should eat or serve uncooked jalapeno
or serrano peppers, which have a similar appearance, anywhere
in the United States.

The outbreak of the salmonella strain, known as Salmonella
stpaul, has now made 1,251 people sick and put 229 into
hospitals, said Dr. Robert Tauxe of the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.

Two elderly men died of unrelated conditions while infected
with the strain, the CDC added.

Last Thursday, U.S. regulators lifted a warning on tomatoes
not because tomatoes have been cleared from suspicion, but
because any that could have been contaminated would have
spoiled and been discarded by that time.

The last reported case of Salmonella stpaul was on July 4,
Tauxe said, but the outbreak is considered to be ongoing.

The FDA said inspectors were in Mexico searching for a
possible source of the contamination. It is not clear whether
the small McAllen, Texas facility could be the source of the
entire outbreak, which has sickened people in 43 states,
Washington D.C. and Canada.

MEXICO TO INVESTIGATE

“This is primarily just a distribution point. Our
understanding is they may do some sorting of the products
there,” said Steve Solomon, deputy director of the Office of
Regional Operations at FDA.

Mexican agriculture ministry spokesman Marco Antonio
Sifuentes said Mexico was opening an investigation into the
case. Mexico maintains the strain of bacteria that sickened
people in the United States has never been found in Mexico.

The Texas firm also distributes tomatillos, a small, green,
husked tomato-like fruit.

Acheson said the facility was targeted for testing after
the FDA traced one cluster of illness. “We are working back
from a population of patients who got sick in a single
geographic area that ate in a single place,” he said.

“We asked where peppers linked to that cluster came from.”

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who chairs the
Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Foresty Committee, said the
FDA needs better techniques for tracing food to its source.

“This is far too long for an outbreak to spread unresolved
and it is unacceptable for public health, farmers and the food
and produce industry,” Harkin said in a statement.

Acheson said the investigation of this outbreak is the most
complex he has ever worked on.

Food safety experts say it has been especially difficult
because people had trouble recalling what they had eaten before
they became ill, and the products indicated, such as fresh
tomatoes and peppers, had all been discarded by the time
inspectors could follow up.

Salmonella poisoning, which causes diarrhea, fever and
abdominal cramps is very common, with 40,000 cases and 400
deaths each year in the United States alone.

(With additional reporting by Mica Rosenberg in Mexico
City)