Maybe Wal-Mart done it?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Colorado health officials said they had found a Salmonella-tainted jalapeno in the home of someone sickened in a recent outbreak of the food poisoning — a vital clue in tracking down the source of the illness.

The pepper carried bacteria with the same unusual strain of Salmonella saintpaul that has made 1,307 people sick in the United States, the state health department said.

“The pepper was purchased at a local Wal-Mart, likely on June 24, and the individual became ill on July 4. This is the first pepper linked directly to an ill person in this outbreak,” the health department said in a statement posted on its Web site this week.

So… one of the 400,000 people in the U.S. who have salmonella infections every year in the United States (apparently not one of the 400 who die from it) bought a jalepeno at Wal-Mart. Let’s see. Assuming the offending jalepeno did come from Mexico, and the infection was missed by one of the fidosanitario checks within Mexico, and not caught by the United States Department of Agriculture when it crossed the border, and then got to a warehouse and sat around, then was loaded on a truck and shipped to Colorado, where it also sat around for a time… then went into a bin at Walmart where it sat for who knows how long, before it was bought by a consumer who waited two weeks to eat the thing… it was the dirty mescans done the deed!