It takes science…
The scare forced stores and restaurants to pull tomatoes from shelves and menus until the source was found. It was the newest worrisome food scare.
But it could have been a lot worse if a red flag hadn’t been raised early in the outbreak last month by a public health nurse with good instincts in one of the nation’s poorest, most remote regions.
Indeed, health officials say that because the first cluster of patients surfaced on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, where they are served by a small, close-knit medical community, federal investigators were able to quickly identify the contaminated foods and take steps to contain the outbreak the past two weeks.
After being the first to recognize the signs of an emerging outbreak, the federal Indian Health Service staff played a key role in the search for the tainted food. “It was 21st-century molecular epidemiology and old-fashioned boot leather,” says John Redd, the infectious disease branch chief with the Indian Health Service in Albuquerque. “You’ve got to get out from behind your desk and hit the road sometimes.”
Â
