Mexican peppers posed problem before outbreak

FRESNO, Calif. — Federal inspectors at U.S. border crossings repeatedly turned back filthy, disease-ridden shipments of peppers from Mexico months before a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,400 people was finally traced to Mexican chilies — yet no larger action was taken.

Food and Drug Administration officials insisted as recently as last week that they were surprised by the outbreak because Mexican peppers had not been spotted as a problem before.

But an Associated Press analysis of FDA records found that peppers and chilies were consistently the top Mexican crop rejected by border inspectors for the last year.

Since January alone, 88 shipments of fresh and dried chilies were turned away. Ten percent were contaminated with salmonella. In the last year, 8 percent of the 158 intercepted shipments of fresh and dried chilies had salmonella.

On Friday, Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s food safety chief, told reporters peppers were not a cause for concern before they were implicated in the salmonella outbreak. On Monday, the FDA said Acheson’s comment was in relation to outbreaks or illness associated with Mexican peppers, not the rejection of pepper shipments at the borders.

The agency initially suspected that fresh tomatoes had caused the salmonella outbreak. Then officials determined in mid-July that jalapenos could also be sickening people and eventually traced implicated pepper shipments to two farms in Mexico. Federal investigators are now focusing their probe on fresh hot peppers from Mexico — jalapenos and serranos.

Dried peppers and other imported spices were considered sufficiently risky to be mentioned on a 2006 FDA manual instructing inspectors on which high-risk foods deserved a more careful check.

Inspectors might have looked over the odd box of fresh Mexican chilies, but no one paid raw peppers much attention since they were not mentioned as a high-risk crop, said Bob Buchanan, a former senior science adviser at the FDA.