Health Department could have prevented salmonella outbreak

Victoria’s health department could have prevented an outbreak of salmonella poisoning from eating lettuce, as the number of suspected cases, nationally, rose to 144 today.

While 108 Victorian people were identified suffering from salmonella anatum, the same bacteria identified in lettuce last week, only nine cases were confirmed linked to consumption of the lettuce product. They were joined by one confirmed case in NSW.

But there were also serious doubts about how many people identified suffering from the bacteria, could blame the lettuce from Tripod Farmers.

Victoria’s health department spokesperson, Bram Alexander, told Stock & Land the health department also ignored a batch of Tripod Farmers lettuce identified with the bacteria on January 21.

Tripod Farmers confirmed they were notified on January 22 that a sample from a batch of product tested positive to salmonella anatum.

“There was one earlier positive test of the product detected on January 21, but the product was out of date,” Mr Alexander said.

He said action was not taken because no one would have consumed the product past its use-by date and there had been no noticeable spike in salmonella diagnoses as far as the health department was concerned.

“Lettuce has a relatively short shelf life, so that in itself did not raise the temperature,” he said.

“The temperature was raised last Wednesday, when there was a spike in cases reported.

“From food histories taken from some people and testing, there were some definite genotyping links to salmonella anatum in those people and the bacterium identified at Tripod Farmers’ processing plant.”

Victoria’s Health Department and Tripod Farmers’ have been working to identify where the bacterium originated. Those tests were ongoing and encompassed the lettuce product, the processing plant at Bacchus Marsh, soil from its four farms across Victoria – Bacchus Marsh, Maffra and Mildura – and employees, many of whom were from overseas.

All bagged lettuce processed by Tripod Farmers was recalled for product with a use-by date up to and including February 14.

Coles and Woolworths refused to stock lettuce product from Tripod Farmers until the ongoing investigation was completed.

But the Federal Health Department was already casting doubts about the authenticity of some of the cases.

People with salmonella anatum were identified in Western Australia, where Tripod Farmers does not send product. A spokesperson for the Federal Department of Health said it would take time for medical histories to be taken from all the people identified nationally with salmonella anatum; and there were likely to be many who were not linked to Tripod Farmers’ lettuce.

Mr Alexander agreed the epidemiology would take time to reconstruct and that some people’s diagnoses would not be linked to Tripod Farmers’ lettuce.

In the meantime, Tripod Farmers continued to cooperate with Victoria’s Health Department and were conducting their own independent tests on each production run and across all their systems. The processing plant was cleared to continue working, by the health department, within 24 hours of the product recall.

Tripod Farmers’ managing director Frank Ruffo snr said the company detected the salmonella anatum bacteria through its normal testing procedures; where each batch of product was tested.

The entire processing plant underwent sterile cleaning, additional to its daily cleaning regime.

“We immediately recalled the entire production batches. Unfortunately, because the supermarkets are no longer taking the product, we’ve had to suspend part of the farming and processing operations,” he said.

Ausveg wanted to assure consumers their safety was paramount.

"The number one priority of the industry is the safety of the consumer. Salad leaf products on the supermarket shelf are safe," said spokesperson Shaun Lindhe.

Other salad vegetable growers closed ranks.

"There's many other lettuce producers in Australia and we don't want people to stop eating lettuce and baby leaf vegetables just because of one isolated incident in one producer," said Bulmer Farms’ Andrew Bulmer.

"That one producer doesn't control the lettuce market in Australia."

Mr Bulmer said he and other growers he knew were still selling the same quantity of product across Australia.

Jurisdictional numbers for Victorian’s Acting Chief Health Officer, Dr Roscoe Taylor –