Even as the list of peanut products linked to a national salmonella scare continued to expand, and the number of strains of bacteria associated with the outbreak climbed to four, federal health officials winding up an investigation said they may well have dodged a bullet.
“You could say that,” said Dr. Peter Gerner-Smidt, chief of the Enteric Diseases Laboratory Response Branch for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The salmonella strain that has sickened more than 500 people and contributed to eight deaths does not appear to be resistant to frontline antibiotics, state and federal health officials said. That means people infected by the Salmonella Typhimurium bacteria — including more than 280 children younger than 16 and 108 people hospitalized — could be successfully treated if they needed it.
But a worrisome rise over time in multidrug-resistant salmonella means the next outbreak in a common food such as peanut butter could be worse, infection experts said.
Nearly a quarter of certain Salmonella Typhimurium bacteria are resistant to at least five of the most widely used antibiotics, according to the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS). As many as 30,000 additional salmonella infections, 300 hospitalizations and 10 deaths a year may be attributed to resistant strains, according to the World Health Organization.
“This is kind of an alert,” said Dr. Stuart B. Levy, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine and president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics. “We’re lucky this time.”