Salmonella Saintpaul: National media & local dailies pick up on Minnesota angle
If you're a faithful City Pages reader, you learned about Minnesota's role is solving the nationwide Salmonella epidemic on our website Tuesday or in print Wednesday. In a Reporter's Notebook published on our site yesterday, I wrote about how I stumbled onto the story in the first place. Now the story has gone national.
Both dailies front paged the story today. The Strib gets cheeky and calls the story 'Team Diarrhea' helped state crack salmonella case. The Pioneer Press plays it straight--and uses the Associated Press wire story--here:
WASHINGTON -- It was a hot lead for detectives on a cold case. People suddenly were getting salmonella at a Minnesota restaurant more than 1,000 miles from the center of the nation's outbreak.
Not my tomatoes, protested the manager. He'd switched his supply to government-cleared fresh tomatoes and even canned ones. But a lot of his menu items had a raw jalapeno garnish sprinkled on top, and that turned out to be a critical clue in the two-month salmonella mystery.
You can also find the AP story in USA Today and the Washington Post. Another follow-up on the story appear in the Wall Street Journal.
Here's the scandal at the heart of the story laid bare:
How could Minnesota pinpoint hot peppers just days after discovering a cluster of sick residents, when federal investigators had spent weeks fruitlessly chasing tomatoes?
Well, here's what one knowledgable anonymous source told me when I was reporting the original story:
"When this thing completely unfolds, I'll say off the record there has been a fricking disaster. CDC is obviously gonna be held accountable."
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