"The mantra is: You have to be fast and right. You can never be fast enough, and you always have to be right," says Ian Williams, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's outbreak response branch.
"In 2008, the tomato industry took a major financial hit when the Food and Drug Administration and CDC linked their crop to a salmonella outbreak. Later, tests instead found the outbreak bacteria in hot peppers, prompting an angry industry backlash.
Government food-safety experts say they are in a tough spot when it comes to publicly fingering a product or company in an outbreak such as the one currently linked to a half-billion eggs distributed across the USA.
Although two states had identified Wright County Egg during the last week in July as a supplier to restaurants involved in eight separate illness clusters, it took the FDA about 10 additional days to inform the company it was a prime suspect. A recall wasn't announced until Aug. 13.
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