The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is issuing a public health alert due to illnesses from Salmonella Newport associated with fresh ground beef products contaminated with multi-drug resistant Salmonella that may have been ground and sold at Safeway supermarkets in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada and New Mexico between Sept. 19 and Nov. 5, 2007.
This public health alert was initiated after epidemiological investigations and a case control study conducted by the California Department of Public Health, Arizona Department of Health Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, determined that there is an association between the fresh ground beef products and 38 illnesses reported in Arizona (16), California (18), Idaho (1) and Nevada (3). The illnesses were linked through the epidemiological investigation by their rare PFGE pattern found in PulseNet, a database maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.