WKU News

From CNN.com, 1/14/09, Original Article

The company that produced the peanut butter linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak said late Tuesday that it was voluntarily recalling all products made in its Blakely, Georgia, plant.

The Peanut Corporation of America, a peanut processing company, made the peanut butter sold by King Nut company.

Health officials in Minnesota have said that salmonella they linked to an open container of King Nut peanut butter was the same strain of bacteria responsible for the apparently ongoing outbreak, which has infected at least 425 people in 43 states.

However, the King Nut product is unlikely to be responsible for the entire outbreak, since it distributes its peanut butter only to food service companies in just seven states: Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, Arizona, Idaho and New Hampshire.

So, the Peanut Corporation of America said it was voluntarily recalling all peanut butter produced in its Blakely plant "out of an abundance of caution." Some of it is distributed to another company.

"We deeply regret that this has happened," company president Stewart Parnell said. Over the past few days, Food and Drug Administration inspectors visited the Blakely plant, where they took hundreds of samples for testing, Parnell said.

The salmonella outbreak has been spreading across much of the country since September.

Salmonella enterica serotype Typhimurium played a role in the deaths of an elderly person from southwestern Virginia and an adult from northern Virginia. The third death was a nursing home resident in her 70s in Minnesota. All three of the patients who died had underlying illnesses that could have contributed to their deaths, state officials said.