Strawberry Problem

Strawberry Problems. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

A very frustration and dangerous situation has caused major problems for one Oregon strawberry producer. Dr. Paul Cieslak, manager of the Oregon Public Health Division's communicable diseases section says E coli found on the berries has caused one death and over a dozen illnesses.

CIESLAK: We administer what we call our shotgun questionaire to all our patients. We call it that because we ask about just basically every food item we can think of as well as some non-food exposures that might give you this infection and the one thing that kept coming up was strawberries and in particular strawberries that were purchased, not from supermarkets, but from roadside stands.

Jaquith strawberry farm near Newberg, Oregon has been fully cooperating with health officials to trace the E coli bacteria.

CIESLAK: We had our investigators spending a lot of time on the farm and they didn’t come up with any untoward practices. It all looked like good farming practices as far as we could tell. There were no cattle or sheep or goats around the area. There were deer seen there. Of course deer are all over the place.

The farm ceased production on July 29th and shelf life is relatively short but Cieslak has a caution.

CIESLAK: People go to the farmers stand and buy a mess of strawberries and freeze a lot of them or have made freezer jam with them and there being no kill step E coli 0157 can be preserved in the freezer indefinitely. So we want people to take the frozen product out of their freezer if it came from one of these places and dump it.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.