Chicago - Alfalfa sprouts, used as a garnish on everything from salads to hamburgers, sickened an estimated 20,000 people in the United States in two salmonella outbreaks in 1995, researchers reported.
Consumers “should consider this danger when deciding whether to eat alfalfa sprouts,” said the researchers led by Dr. Chris Van Beneden, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Although new methods to prevent salmonella poisoning are being tried, the researchers said they may not be adequate. Their work was reported in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
Salmonella is a strain of bacteria found in animal feces. It generally causes nausea but can be fatal in older people, infants and those with weak immune systems.
Tainted alfalfa sprout seeds caused a 1995 outbreak in the Northwest and another one that same year from Georgia to Vermont, the researchers said. They said the same seeds sickened an undetermined number of people in Denmark.
Although only about 700 salmonella cases were reported, the researchers estimated more than 20,000 people in the United States alone were sickened since only a fraction of cases are usually reported. No one died.
The seeds were traced to a seed broker in the Netherlands. The researchers suspect the seeds were tainted either in the field by animal feces or wastewater, or by an infected worker at a seed-packaging plant.
Alfalfa sprouts were first implicated as a source of illness in 1973, but their image as a health food may have spared them the scrutiny given more widely recognized sources for salmonella like meat, chicken and eggs.
“Because it was a health food, it wasn't as highly suspicious,” Van Beneden said. Also, sprouts were not as popular 25 years ago as they are now.
The head of the International Sprout Growers Association acknowledged the salmonella scare has hurt the industry but said the findings predate new methods for safeguarding seeds.
“The old techniques just didn't work, but the new ones will,” said association president Nancy Snider, who owns a sprout farm in Maryland.
The outbreaks forced a number of growers out of business. Since then, Snider said, some growers have begun using a chlorination process approved last fall by the Environmental Protection Agency to decontaminate seeds.
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