A Salmonella outbreak has been linked to hazelnuts sold at the farm stand at Schmidt Farm and Nursery in McMinnville, Oregon. Officials at the Oregon Health Authority Public Health Division and the Oregon Department of Agriculture announced that laboratory and epidemiologic analyses traced the outbreak to those nuts. Tests on nuts that were purchased at the farm identified the outbreak strain of Salmonella bacteria.
Dr. Paul Cieslak, medical director of the Public Health Division’s Acute and Communicable Disease Prevention Section said in a statement, “People who have hazelnuts from the farm stand at Schmidt Farm and Nursery should toss them out right away.” The Farm sells only a small portion of its hazelnuts at the farm stand. Most of the nuts are sold through wholesalers.
And those wholesalers and distributors use kill steps on the nuts before they are sold to consumers, according to Stephanie Page, the agriculture department’s director of food safety and animal services. She said, “Wholesalers have steps in place to kill any Salmonella on the hazelnuts they handle before the nuts reach consumers. To date, we have no indication there were any issues with this part of the process. The concern in this case is with hazelnuts bought at the farm stand.”
Five people have been sickened with a specific strain of Salmonella Typhimurium in this particular outbreak. They got sick between October 15 and December 13, 2016. In interviews, three of the five patients said they bought hazelnuts from the Schmidt Farm and Nursery stand. The fourth patient ate hazelnuts from an unlabeled bag of partially shelled nuts. The fifth case was linked to the other four cases after testing positive for the outbreak strain of Salmonella. None of the patients were hospitalized. All have since recovered.
The symptoms of a Salmonella infection include nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea that may be bloody, fever, chills, and headache. These symptoms usually appear six to seventy-two hours after exposure to the bacteria. Most people recover without a doctor’s care, but some can become so ill they must be hospitalized. And even those who recover completely may have long term complications from this illness, including reactive arthritis and high blood pressure.
