Texas health officials on Thursday ordered the recall of peanut products from a plant operated by the company at the center of a national salmonella outbreak, days after tests indicated the likely presence of the bacteria there.
All products originating from the Peanut Corp of America plant in Plainview were recalled regardless of production date.
“The order was issued after dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers were discovered yesterday in a crawl space above a production area during an in-depth Department of State Health Services inspection,” the agency said in a statement.
“The inspection also found that the plant’s air handling system was not completely sealed and was pulling debris from the infested crawl space into production areas of the plant, resulting in the adulteration of exposed food products,” the statement said.
The recalls from the plant, which operated unlicensed and uninspected for nearly four years, are the latest bad news for the company being investigated in connection with an outbreak that has sickened 600 people and may have caused at least nine deaths.
More than 2,000 possibly contaminated consumer products have already been recalled in one in one of the largest product recalls ever.
Federal investigators last month identified a Georgia peanut processing plant operated by Peanut Corp as the source of the salmonella outbreak.
The federal government has opened a criminal investigation into the company, and its president, Stewart Parnell, repeatedly refused to answer questions on Wednesday before the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee, which is seeking ways to prevent another outbreak.
The committee had subpoenaed him for questioning about the outbreak.
The salmonella outbreak traced to the company’s plant in Blakely, Georgia, has scared Americans away from a household food and brought the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under intense scrutiny.
Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat, said he had been alarmed to hear about the conditions at the second plant.
“More alarming is the concern that there could be hundreds or even thousands of food processing facilities operating in this country that have never been inspected by the FDA, just as this plant has been doing since March 2005,” Stupak said in a statement.
The FDA has asked Congress for more powers and more resources to inspect food facilities.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to