the peanut butter recall list has grown...

[acroyear]

As one can see here.

Worst part about it: the company actually continued to keep the production lines open and shipped product AFTER a first round of FDA tests showed the contamination.  Without doing any cleaning, a second batch just happened to have come up negative (probably within a statistical possibility) so they just kept on shipping.

Peanut plant problem forces fresh recall - Yahoo! News:

Salmonella had been found previously at least 12 times in products made at the plant, but production lines were never cleaned after internal tests indicated contamination, FDA inspectors said in a report. Products that initially tested positive were retested. When the company got a negative reading, it shipped the products out.

That happened as recently as September. A month later, health officials started picking up signals of the salmonella outbreak.

[...obligatory and not very helpful or sincere denial by company spokesman went here...]

Michael Rogers, a senior FDA investigator, said it's possible for salmonella to hide in small pockets of a large batch of peanut butter. That means the same batch can yield both positive and negative results, he said. The products should have been discarded after they first tested positive.

This is the very reason why a plant is totally closed and cleaned when foot-n-mouth or e-coli show up in hamburger. It only takes 1 contaminated beast to infect the grinder that hits others, but then when all of the product is effectively put back into the same "pile" before being weighed, packaged, and shipped, that contaminated section can both contaminate many others AND still leave others untouched and "clean".

'bout the only good thing about this one is it shows corporate malfeasance is still alive and well and "Made in the U.S.A.".  We can't blame China for this one, and we have to own up to the fact that ALL corporations can be lazy bums (that will harm the customer) if given the chance.

(I do have an "on the other hand" post later today, though, on how the reaction to the lead paint in toys from china is greatly overblown and harming small businesses and one-of-a-kind craftsmen, and may also really harm the antiques market.)

Comments

[cozit.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the update! (I keep forgetting to keep up with it)

Y'know... it makes me wonder though. Wonder what exactly was wrong with the Skippy (no connection to the contaminated plant apparently) I tossed last week... opened a pocket of oil in it... and it *reeked* from a distance... couldn't even smell the peanut of it after that, just the stench. Tossed fast!

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

Meat grinding plants are supposed to clean their grinders thoroughly twice a day. Which is one reason that when we have a recall of hamburger it is a relatively limited amount because the codes on the burger tell which plant and which time-slot it came from. This is of course pretty cool in some ways and rather disturbing in others.

[piraterogue.livejournal.com]

The sick part is the company had internal tests hit positive at least 5 times that they still shipped out. They are looking into Criminal charges for the people who were in charge. Anything from criminal endangerment to negligent homicide.