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PrintATLANTA — Government scientists struggled Thursday to pinpoint the source of the first U.S. salmonella outbreak linked to peanut butter.
Nearly 300 people in 39 states including Missouri have fallen ill since August, and federal health investigators said they strongly suspect Peter Pan peanut butter and certain batches of Wal-Mart’s Great Value house brand — both manufactured by ConAgra Foods Inc.
Shoppers across the country were warned to throw out jars with a product code on the lid beginning with “2111,” which denotes the plant where it was made.
Both Gerbes and Schnucks in Columbia have taken the suspect jars off their shelves.
“We’ve put signs up telling customers to bring (the suspect jars) in and get a refund,” said Rachel Schemit, a customer service representative at Gerbes. As of Thursday evening, seven jars had been returned.
The peanut butter at Columbia Public Schools is safe, said Pat Brooks, director of nutrition services at the district. The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches offered at the schools are prepackaged by Smucker’s, which is not among the brands thought to contain the germ.
How the dangerous germ got into the peanut butter was a mystery. But because peanuts are usually heated to high, germ-killing temperatures during the manufacturing process, government and industry officials said the contamination may have been caused by dirty jars or equipment.
The suspect peanut butter was produced by ConAgra at its only peanut butter plant, in Sylvester, Ga., federal investigators said.
ConAgra said it is not clear how many jars are affected by the recall. But the plant is the sole producer of the nationally distributed Peter Pan brand, and the recall covers all peanut butter produced by the plant from May 2006 until now.
“We’re talking a lot of jars of peanut butter,” said David Acheson, chief medical officer of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
FDA inspectors visited the now shut-down plant Wednesday and Thursday to try to pinpoint where the contamination could have happened.
The highest number of cases were reported in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri. About 20 percent of all the ill were hospitalized, and there were no deaths, the CDC said.
About 85 percent of the infected people said they ate peanut butter, and about a quarter of them ate it at least once a day, said Mike Lynch, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Salmonella sickens about 40,000 people a year in the U.S. and kills about 600. It can cause diarrhea, fever, dehydration, abdominal pain and vomiting.
But most cases of salmonella poisoning are caused by undercooked eggs and chicken. The only known salmonella outbreak in peanut butter — in Australia during the mid-1990s — was blamed on unsanitary plant conditions.
ConAgra spokesman Chris Kircher said the company randomly tests 60 to 80 jars of peanut butter that come off its Sylvester plant’s line each day for salmonella and other germs. He said the plant was shut down as a precaution for further investigation.
Salmonella commonly originates in the feces of birds and animals and could be introduced at a multitude of stages in the peanut butter-making process. But many safeguards are in place.
While rodents and birds commonly get into peanut storage bins, germs are killed when raw peanuts are roasted. When making peanut butter, the nuts are again heated — above the salmonella-killing temperature of 165 degrees — as they are ground into a paste and mixed with other ingredients before being squirted into jars and quickly sealed.
Experts say the point in the process where salmonella could be introduced and survive would be as the product cools down, is placed in the jars and then sealed. At most plants, those steps take just minutes.
Acheson speculated a small, on-again, off-again source of contamination caused the outbreak, which would explain the relatively small number of illness.
Missourian reporter Adam Hickey contributed to this report.
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