FDA thinks Walmart could have a solution to romaine lettuce recalls



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By Maggie Fox

Twice this year, federal health officials warned Americans not to eat romaine lettuce and asked stores to throw away all their provisions.

It was not because all the country's romaine lettuce was contaminated. This was because there was no good way to quickly determine where the contaminated lettuce was coming from. When people started dying from E. coli infections last spring, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided that the safest bet was simply to tell people to stop eat it.

It took weeks to reduce the spring epidemic to Yuma, Arizona. It took several days to trace this fall's epidemic in central California. In the best case, as soon as someone got sick, it would have been possible to determine what he was eating and where he was coming from, in order to be able to close a farm, a processor or a distributor. in particular.

Instead, it takes days to even detect an epidemic, more days to ask people what they ate recently to try to find a food that all patients had in common, and sometimes several weeks to find a common source for this food.

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