June 11, 2008
 
WASHINGTON — Federal health officials said Tuesday that they hoped to announce soon the source of a salmonella outbreak associated with raw tomatoes that has sickened at least 167 people in 17 states and led restaurants and grocery stores to remove some types of raw tomatoes from their menus and shelves. 
 
“We are getting closer to identifying the source or sources,” Julie Zawisza, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, said late Tuesday.
 
 
The agency warned consumers over the weekend to avoid certain raw red plum, red Roma and red round tomatoes and products containing them. Cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes and those sold with the vine still attached are not associated with the outbreak, officials said. 
 
But health experts said that the many problems that have caused food recalls in recent years, including those involving peanut butter, cantaloupe and spinach, were likely to worsen.
 
 
Since 1990, there have been 13 multistate outbreaks of salmonella poisoning related to tomatoes, which are particularly susceptible to contamination, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
 
No one knows whether food has gotten more dangerous or whether the growing number of outbreaks results from better surveillance, said Dr. Patricia Griffin, the chief of the disease centers’ enteric disease epidemiology branch. Both may be true, Dr. Griffin said. 
 
Fresh produce increasingly comes from far-away states and even far-away countries, Dr. Griffin said, which is why contaminations increasingly crop up across the country. 
 
And federal authorities have yet to create a stronger set of rules and enforcement procedures. Many parties — food-safety advocates, food producers, Congressional Republicans and Democrats and even some within the F.D.A. — have said such rules are essential to make food safer. 
 
In November the food and drug agency released a “food protection plan,” but the Bush administration did not ask for the money to finance parts of it until Monday night. The health and human services secretary, Michael O. Leavitt, said on Monday that he would amend the administration’s budget request by asking for an additional $275 million for next year, $125 million of which would go to food protection. 
 
At a news conference, Mr. Leavitt said he “would like to once again strongly urge Congress to act quickly to enhance the safety of food and medical products,” comments that angered some in Congress, including Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania. 
 
Mr. Specter said that administration delays in seeking money for food protection efforts at the food and drug agency amounted to “criminal negligence.” 
 
“The failure to have these inspections is subjecting people to bodily injury and death,” said Mr. Specter, who sent a letter to Mr. Leavitt on Tuesday insisting that the additional money for the F.D.A. should be included in a supplemental request this year, not in next year’s budget. 
 
Food-safety advocates criticized what they said was the government’s inaction in preventing outbreaks of food poisoning. 
 
“How many times does this have to happen before F.D.A. gets serious about food safety?” asked Sarah Klein, a staff lawyer at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
 
The disease control agency has confirmed 167 salmonella cases in the current outbreak. But Dr. Griffin said the agency estimated that only 1 in 38 cases were ever reported to the authorities, so the problem was likely to be greater. 
 
Tomatoes grown in the following states, territories and countries have not been associated with the current outbreak: Arkansas, California, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Belgium, Canada, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Israel, the Netherlands and Puerto Rico.