Another salmonella outbreak is being reported but Iowa health officials say it doesn’t appear to be anything to worry about. Health officials in Oklahoma are tracking 15 new cases of salmonella and say there are D.N.A. links to recent cases in both Iowa and Nebraska.
Patty Quinlisk, Iowa’s chief epidemiologist, says there’s no cause for concern. “We’ve had two cases,” Dr. Quinlisk says. “We investigated both already. There’s no link for the two of them to each other. There’s no obvious exposure to any particular food products nor does there appear to be any link to people who are getting sick in other parts of the country, including Oklahoma.”
Based on their testing and follow-ups, Quinlisk says she’s convinced the Iowa cases are not related to the others. Quinlisk says, “We’re not asking anyone to do anything nor do we see any potential risk to Iowans, though we will continue to watch this and other strains of diseases like salmonella.
” While there may be a DNA “fingerprint” match between the Iowa and Oklahoma strains of salmonella, Quinlisk says that doesn’t mean these people all ate the same type of food or ate in the same restaurant.
“We do a follow-up,” Quinlisk says. “We go in and we interview the people and say, what have you been doing? What have you been eating? Have you been traveling? There’s no exposure link. There’s nothing that our people have been doing that’s anything similar to the cases in Oklahoma, in fact they’re not even in the same age groups, same kind of living situations or anything like that. They’re very different.”
A salmonella outbreak last month involved more than 16-hundred illnesses nationwide and the recall of more than a half-billion eggs that were linked to two large-scale egg production facilities in northern Iowa’s Wright County.