WASHINGTON, June 13 (UPI) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is launching a multi-year initiative to reduce the number of tomato-related illnesses in the United States.
"Produce is an important part of a healthy diet and FDA wants to improve its safety by better understanding the causes of food-borne illness and by promoting more effective methods of safe food production, delivery, and preparation," said Robert Brackett, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
The initiative will begin during this year's summer growing season in Virginia and in Florida this fall.
During the past decade, the consumption of fresh and fresh-cut tomatoes has been linked to 12 outbreaks of food-borne illness in the United States. Those outbreaks included 1,840 confirmed cases of illnesses traced to products from Florida and the eastern shore of Virginia. But FDA officials said tomato-associated outbreaks also have been traced to tomatoes grown in California, Georgia, Ohio and South Carolina.
The effort will include identifying practices or conditions that potentially lead to product contamination, and evaluating the need for additional produce safety research, education and outreach.
