In the most recent update from the United States Center for Disease Control, the Salmonella outbreak linked to pork products that occured this summer is now apparently "over."
Laboratory and investigation results show that the salmonella strain identified originally came from Kapowsin Meats from Graham, Washington. CDC figures that this is the most likely source of the outbreak.
Kapowsin recalled over 116,000 pounds of whole meat on August 13 until 27. The latter date finished with an additional 523,000 plus pounds of whole hogs and pork related product.
Consumers were advised that if they have on-hand the company's pork barbecue and related products then they should dispose of the meat product especially if the said products were purchased from retailers and distributors from Oregon, Washington and Alaska.
Consumers should diligently check their freezers for the recalled products, and should not cook or eat them. Retailers and restaurants should take the product off inventory and shelves.
From the pork product related outbreak, 192 people coming from five different states, with majority of reports coming from Washington, were reported to be infected with Salmonella Infantis (4) and Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- (188). Zero deaths were reported while 30 were hospitalized. These illnesses started on April 25 until September 25 of this year.
CDC assigned National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System to conduct resistance tests. They found that the 10 isolates they collected were multi-drug resistant. This means the salmonella strains in question are anti-biotic resistant. PulseNet, a system that is used to identify illnesses in the outbreak, identified six DNA strains from their database. They reported that the strains are rare but were found to be closely genetically related to the clinical isolates from Washington.
There have been multiple reports of salmonella this year and has been one of the major causes of American illnesses.
In the latest announcement this week the final report ran "This outbreak appears to be over", as posted in CDC's index.
