Oregon Public Broadcasting

The list of recalled peanut-related food products grows daily, with the blame being placed squarely on contaminated food produced by the Peanut Corporation of America. 

Public health officials say the first-known infection from the Salmonella Typhimurium outbreak was in Oregon back in September.  But at the time, public health officials didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with.

Now Oregon has the first confirmed case of a dog that has contracted salmonella from infected peanut butter pet treats.

The credit for tracking these cases goes to the Oregon Health Division.

Dr. William Keene is an epidemiologist with the Health Division.  He says outbreak investigations can be challenging to solve quickly.

“It’s an intellectual puzzle as well as a public health problem,” says Keene.

The first diagnosed case in an outbreak doesn’t stand out, says Keene.  It takes at least one more matching illness for public health officials to investigate a possible outbreak.

Keene says this is because the health department gets a steady stream of lab results about certain illnesses, but generally they’re isolated cases of unrelated illnesses

“We have people here that try to keep an eye on that.  So we’ll say, ‘Look, we got two matches or look, we got a 12th case.’  In this context, if we see this pattern pop-up, we’re going to assume it to be part of the peanut butter cluster and then we’ll start interviewing that person,” says Keene.

These interviews generally start with the county health departments and are based on certain diseases that doctors and medical labs are required to report to public health officials.

“The system is that if you live in, you know, Springfield, the Lane County nurse will give you a call basically the same day or the day after the lab turns it out.  The doctor gets notified and the health department basically gets notified the same day,” says Keene.

This is all part of network of government activities designed to protect public health.

The county health departments use a generic questionnaire for sick people to help narrow down the cause of their illness.  At the same time, the state verifies the lab results and does another more specific questionnaire that may be targeted at specific foods someone has eaten.

State public health officials will also upload their lab results to a national database to share with health officials in other states.

“Basically we can say, look, out case here matches two cases in Ohio and a guy in Florida,” says Keene.  “If the outbreaks get more and more states involved and more and more cases involved, the CDC also gets involved.”

Which is exactly what happened in the current outbreak—though it did take time.

Public health officials identified an Oregon woman with Salmonella Typhimurium in September, the first case in the current outbreak.

But the national investigation didn’t start for several months after that.  So by the time health officials started investigating possible causes, the woman in the original case didn’t remember all the food she had eaten months prior.  

“We don’t necessarily start off asking that level of detail because we have hundreds of foods that are possible.  We can’t get all the detail about all of them, so it takes time,” says Keene.

Keene emphasizes that in this current salmonella outbreak, Oregon officials didn’t figure out the cause on their own.  But they were part of the national effort to find the cause.

“We do our one or two interviews and we throw them into the pot with everybody else and then we look at the results collectively,” says Keene.

This work on public health extends to animals in the state too, says Public Health Veternarian Emilio DeBest.

"There's a great relationship between the veternarians and the public health department," says DeBest.

That relationship helped find an Oregon dog that was sick with salmonella after eating dog treats on the recall list.

DeBest says he emailed vets around the state to let them know pets could get salmonella from contaminated peanut butter treats.

"I update all veterinarians throughout the state about not only veterinary issues but also public health issues.  So anything that has to do with what we call zoonotic diseases, which is anything which is transmitted from animals to humans.  It's something that I keep them informed about," says DeBest. 

The state is currently testing samples from more than a dozen dogs that may have contracted salmonella from peanut butter products.  Salmonella in a dog can be transfered to humans, and not all infected dogs show signs of illness. 

Hundreds of people nationwide have been sickened in the current outbreak, and nine deaths are blamed on the outbreak.

More than 1500 food products have been recalled.  Health officials recommend you do not eat any peanut butter product unless you are certain it is safe to consume.

A complete list of recalled products can be found on the FDA website .