The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have announced that the raw tuna called Nakaochi Scrape that is associated with the recent Salmonella Bareilly outbreak in the U.S. was imported from India.
Public health officials have identified seven clusters around grocery stores or restaurants where two or more sickened people (who are not related) ate. Those clusters are in Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island, Texas, and Wisconsin.
In fact, in four of the seven clusters that the CDC has identified, facilities bought the raw Nakaochi Scrape tuna from Moon Marine USA, which imported it from a single tuna processing facility in India.
To date, 141 people have been sickened and 21 of those people hospitalized in the outbreak that began on January 28, 2012. Officials do not know if all of the tuna has been recalled or if some is still at restaurants and grocery stores, since the tuna went through several distributors and was broken down into smaller, unlabeled lots along the way.
Food Poisoning Bulletin asked Dr. David Love, Project Director for Public Health and Sustainable Aquaculture Project at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future if the longer supply chain may have contributed to the contamination.
He said, “Certainly, distribution aided in spreading this contaminated ground tuna product across the U.S. Whether the supply chain contributed to the contamination is a question of time and temperature abuses in transport and distribution that could allow Salmonella to grow and multiply. From what I have read on the FDA and CDC websites, I cannot draw any conclusions about whether the longer supply chains increased the levels of contamination.”
