Last night I wrote that FDA’s outbreak table still said 212 cases and “Not Yet Identified” while CDC had already named Sinaloa and Coast Citrus Distributors and counted 345 sick in 27 states. This morning the agency moved. Reference #1395 on the outbreak table now reads “Jalapeño Peppers.” The case-count cell no longer says 212 — it points to a new outbreak advisory. The recall column that was blank last night now points there too. Credit where it is due. That is three of the four things I asked for before breakfast.
The fourth is the one that matters, and it did not happen.
Read what FDA published and then read it again. The agency conducted a traceback from where sick people ate, and a common grower of jalapeños in Sinaloa that supplies Coast Citrus Distributors was identified as the likely source. FDA then recommended that Coast Citrus recall the product. Coast Citrus agreed and is contacting its customers. And then this sentence, which I do not think has gotten the attention it deserves: the firm is no longer importing from the common grower.
Think about what has to be true for FDA to write that down. You cannot stop importing from a farm you cannot identify. You cannot tell a distributor to stop buying from a grower without telling the distributor which grower. Somebody at that agency has the name, the address and the shipping records, has used them to shut off the pipeline, and has published a sentence confirming all of it — while declining to type the name. This is not a case of an investigation that has not gotten there yet. It got there. The name is being withheld as a choice.
FDA’s own explanation of its practice is that it will not name a specific product until there is enough evidence to implicate it. There is enough evidence. The agency implicated the product this morning, in its own advisory, on its own letterhead, and recommended a recall on the strength of it. Whatever the threshold was, it has been cleared.
Here is what else is new since last night, and it is worth pausing on. FDA reports that Chipotle switched its jalapeño supplier for affected stores beginning July 20, and that QDOBA stopped using jalapeños on July 28. Those are federal dates now, not press reports. The public first heard about any of this on August 4, when Bloomberg reported the Minnesota illnesses. Two national chains identified a contaminated ingredient and pulled it out of their supply chains sixteen days and eight days, respectively, before the rest of the country was told there was anything to worry about. FDA now says it does not consider Chipotle or QDOBA an ongoing risk, and on the facts as published that is probably right. But the people who ate at every other restaurant that bought from the same distributor during those sixteen days were not told anything by anybody.
Which brings me to the recall, such as it is. FDA recommended it, Coast Citrus agreed to it, and it covers the remaining implicated product. There is still no recall notice anywhere with a firm name, lot codes, ship dates, brand names or a consignee list. Nothing on FDA’s recall page. Nothing from the company. Reuters asked Coast Citrus for comment yesterday and got nothing. A distributor privately telephoning the customers it chooses to telephone is not a public recall, and a restaurant that bought Sinaloa jalapeños through a broker two links down the chain has no way to know whether the phone should have rung.
FDA also says Coast Citrus does not appear to supply jalapeños directly to grocery stores, that it is still working to determine the full distribution, and that more recalls may follow. Translated: nobody yet knows where all of this product went. That is the second thing that ought to be published today, right after the grower’s name.
The numbers have not changed — 345 sick, 27 states, 36 hospitalized, onsets from June 19 to July 20, and two isolates carrying resistance that treating physicians should know about. The last onset in that table is more than two weeks old, and it takes three to four weeks to tie a new case to an outbreak, so 345 is a floor and everyone involved knows it.
I have spent a lot of years arguing that naming names is the whole ballgame in an outbreak, and this week gave us the clearest split screen I have seen. In the Cyclospora outbreak, FDA named Taco Bell in the first sentence of its first advisory — a change from fifteen years ago I applauded and still do. In this one, the same agency named the product, the distributor, the country, the growing state and two restaurant chains, and then stopped one link short of the farm that grew the peppers.
A grower in Sinaloa put thirty-six people in American hospitals. FDA knows who it is. Coast Citrus knows who it is. The buyers who bought around that farm for the last month deserve to know, the growers in Sinaloa who did nothing wrong and are about to eat the reputational hit for the whole state deserve to know, and the 345 people counted so far deserve to know. It is one sentence. Type it.