Peanut butter recall,The large-scale recall for Trader Joe's-brand Valencia peanut butter, announced Saturday, now applies to nut butter sold under 14 different brand names at stores around the country, including almond butter and peanut butter with flaxseed sold under Target's in-store brand Archer Farms. So far, only the Trader Joe's peanut butter has been linked to salmonella illnesses. But butters from all the named brands were made on the same line of a factory owned by Portales, N.M.-based nut butter maker Sunland Inc., so the company opted to pull all the possibly affected products from shelves. Sunland spokeswoman Katalin Coburn described the move as "a huge and possibly overkill step" in a conversation with The Huffington Post, but she also noted that the salmonella strain found in the Trader Joe's peanut butter had been identified as "particularly cunning" and hard to detect by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Coburn pointed to the fact that Sunland's food safety testing procedures had failed to detect any salmonella before it sickened at least 29 people in 18 states as evidence of the elusiveness of the strain. "None of the peanut butter that has been shipped has been tested positive, which makes it so darn frustrating," she said. Sunland has not yet been able to identify the source of the salmonella contamination, Coburn said, but added that the company is working closely with the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration to do so. Neither Trader Joe's nor Target responded to a request for comment from The Huffington Post. Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety, said that peanut butter has traditionally been an extremely unlikely vector for salmonella outbreaks, noting that only four such outbreaks (including the one in process) have been linked to the spread in history. Peanuts, he explained, are roasted before being ground into butter, virtually guaranteeing that any salmonella that might have been picked up on the farm is killed. "If you roast properly, then that should take care of the problem of the nuts being contaminated by the salmonella in the field," Doyle said. That means any salmonella that makes it into peanut butter is more likely the result of an inadequate cooking process or contamination after roasting, according to Doyle. He said that it was impossible, without visiting the Sunland plant, to say which might have led to the current recall. Doyle added that peanut butter does make a good vessel for salmonella if it is introduced at some stage of manufacture. Although there's not enough water in peanut butter to allow salmonella to grow, individual bacteria can live for months, or even years, trapped in the peanut oil. Then, once an unwitting victim eats the salmonella-infected spread, the salmonella can grow in the small intestine, potentially causing disease. "Very small numbers of salmonella can produce illness in these fatty products," Doyle said. In other words, although the Trader Joe's peanut butter is the only one linked to any illness, it's probably wise to discard any product on the list of recalled nut butters. It's not yet clear how much peanut butter is affected by the recall or how much the recall will ultimately cost Sunland.

source: huffingtonpost