Minn. health sleuths helped crack case of tainted eggs

Work done by Health Department sleuths in Minnesota was critical to finding the source of a salmonella outbreak that has led to one of the biggest egg recalls in recent history -- an outbreak that started just before a new set of federal egg safety standards was implemented.

Hundreds of people, including seven in Minnesota, have been sickened with salmonella traced to eggs produced at Wright County Egg in Galt, Iowa. The firm has recalled 380 million eggs -- about 32 million dozen-egg cartons -- sold under a variety of brands in a number of states. Major Twin Cities supermarkets say they don't carry the recalled eggs.

The Minnesota Department of Health on Monday said it had linked Wright County Egg to seven cases of salmonella at two restaurants, Muffuletta in St. Paul and Kingdom Buffet in Rochester. One of the seven people was hospitalized for a short time, but recovered.

Public health authorities in Minnesota, California and Colorado were "crucial" to tracing the national outbreak to Wright County Egg, said Christopher Braden, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control's foodborne diseases division, in a conference call Thursday.

Minnesota's health department has a national reputation for tracking foodborne illness. In 2009, the department was the first to identify King Nut brand peanut butter as the source of a salmonella outbreak that sickened 400 people in 42 states. In July 2008, Minnesota health investigators traced a major salmonella outbreak -- one that had stumped federal health officials for two months -- to jalapeno peppers.

The Health Department's sophisticated laboratory and its "Team Diarrhea" group of researchers are often credited for its success. "Team Diarrhea" is a group of University of Minnesota public health graduate students who do the battery of interviews of sick people needed to track down the source of an outbreak.

The Wright County Egg recall began Friday and initially involved 228 million eggs, but it was expanded Wednesday to 380 million. The outbreak connected to the recall is believed to have sickened 266 people in California and 28 in Colorado. Clusters of cases have also been reported in several other states. Braden said he expects illnesses linked to the recalled eggs to grow.

Still, federal health officials couldn't put a firm number on how many people have gotten sick from eggs connected to the recall. That's because the particular strain involved, salmonella enteritidis, is tougher to decipher than other strains.

Salmonella enteritidis is the most common form of salmonella, which itself is the most common form of food poisoning. A long-awaited new set of federal rules aimed at reducing the incidence of salmonella in eggs went into effect in July. The rules include testing chickens for salmonella enteritidis and establishing rodent and pest control measures to prevent the spread of bacteria.

Federal health officials told reporters Thursday they believed the new rules, years in the making, might have headed off the outbreak linked to Wright County Egg.

"There are measures that would have been in place that could have prevented this," said Sherri McGarry of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Nutrition told reporters in a conference call Thursday. Asked if the FDA had inspected Wright County Egg, McGarry said that prior to the new egg rules the agency had "no jurisdiction" to do so.

Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest, said regulatory jurisdiction over the egg industry has long been scrambled between numerous government agencies. That's resulted in big delays in addressing salmonella hazards, she said.