ATLANTA AP – Food regulators didn’t consider salmonella a threat to most peanut products before they traced an outbreak to a peanut butter plant in Georgia two years ago. Officials in the nation’s top peanut-producing state promptly began checking for the bacteria during routine inspections, and everything went fine for about a year.
Then this month, investigators zeroed in on another Georgia plant while probing a second bout of salmonella that began in the fall and has sickened some 500 people in 43 states, and may have contributed to at least eight deaths.
